i would like to one day write a treatise on shyness and the different forms that it takes, because i dont believe that shyness is the same in everyone--although those who dont understand shyness like to think that it is, just as they like to think they understand what it means to be shy--or even that shyness is an adequate term. i think shyness is a rather meaningless term, a cover term for any variety of traits.
what ive always been interested in is whether or not shyness is a personality type--whether a person is just shy by nature. i, myself, was a very shy child (but not always. give me a platform on which to express my opinion, put me in a room with an adult i didnt like, and i would tell you whats what) and i couldnt answer then whether it was just my personality or whether it was something that was affecting my personality. i do have traits that seem to go hand in hand with a shy personality: for example, i am by nature a gentle person. i dont mean gentle in a psychological sense--because let's face it, im kind of a jerk--but in a physical sense. i shut doors and cupboards very quietly (unless im angry in which case everything gets slammed). i am also, or used to be to a much greater degree, very sensitive to sensory data. noises, smells--even something as innocuous as the smell of toast-- would often leave me with a feeling like being drowned. this is not unlike how i felt in certain social situations as well (not all, as i was very sensitive to the dynamics of a situation and some social situations i would feel very much at ease in): like i was being drowned, or suffocated. to me, personalities of others seem to have a very physical space--i dont know if you would call that some weird kind of synesthesia or what, but, for me, they definitely have space, they take on shapes. and oftentimes i would feel like they took on too much space or that i couldnt wedge the shape of my personality into the space their personalities were taking up. in situations like this i had a constant sense of being jostled, like there was never enough time or space in which to say what i wanted to say--and when i would say something it usually wasnt what i really meant, but something made to fit what i felt to be the constraints of the situation, and the end result of that was that i ended up feeling very cheap, and would thus be more wary next time of saying anything (other people might be able to brush something like that off, but when something annoys me--even if it's something as harmless as a spot of pasta sauce someone didnt clean off of a kitchen floor--the annoyances nestles itself into my brain and stays with me all day). i found that it was far easier, and less unpleasant, to remove myself from the situation--my grandma always accuses me of not being present in the moment, as it is--and just be an entity that observes. but when you do that, you set up a threshold between being an entity that observes, and being someone present in the moment, and so talking becomes an even more daunting, incomprehensible task. i may not be timid of people, but i am timid of crossing thresholds.
but there's another thing too: i never felt like i had a personality as a child. other people just know what to say in certain situations, and because i didnt, i thought i didnt have a personality (realizing that this was a problem i set out to construct one, in the most unnatural way possible. i kept notebooks of things characters from books that i liked said, to give me something to say. this only worked of course when i found myself in the situations mirroring the situations in those books. more often than not, i was finding myself in completely different situations and thus always without anything to say). i think the problem, if you could call it that, was one of discernment, rather than lack of personality. children, by nature, seem to mimic and absorb the personalities of their friends and those around them. this is not something i ever did: i would've been too conscious of doing it, and would've, again, felt cheap (any false representation of myself leaves me feeling cheap, you see. my sister, who is the opposite of me, has no qualms about taking on the personalities of those around her. and i notice in social situations how her voice and personality changes and all i want to do is gape at her in disgust and ask how she can not feel like a whore). also, i knew full well that no one around me was worth mimicking. sometimes i notice now, however, that when i watch a movie, afterwards i will adopt some of the traits of a character in it: a mannerism, or a way of saying something. this is a kind of mimicry of which i approve, and i think this habit of mine has gone a long way to combating my "shyness" (which is very minimal now): absorbing the personality of someone else seems to bolster my sense of being "present in the moment." and maybe that was what was lacking in the first place, which produced my "shyness": my refusal to want to fit in with the people around me by taking on their personalities. if so, that is something that i am proud of.
so there's that to explain my "shyness". i dont think ultimately shyness is who i am, but rather the result of a certain number of personality traits i have; traits which may not necessarily produce shyness, but which did in me at the time, or rather produced in me the semblance of shyness (and not being able to understand this at the time, i existed in a blank space, full of convoluted abstractions, and it was a bit like living in a surreal film). but people who encountered me just saw "shy", which always greatly offended me, because in a lot of peoples minds, shyness means being scared of people or intimidated, and i have never been that.
