If I had to name one feeling that I associate with my shyness, it wouldn’t be fear or timidity, but uncertainty. Being shy manifests itself for me as an uncertainty with social codes, a sense that I have failed to grasp some invisible thread that holds communal life together. I cannot dial a new phone number without having written down, like a call-center worker with a corporate script, what I am going to say when the other person picks up. I keep a notebook of things to say to people in case I run out of small talk, although it never stops me from running out. At parties I no longer look intently at bookshelves, but have cultivated a cryptic smile that I hope suggests I am unfazed about being left standing on my own.
For shy people, thinking of something to say is hard enough. But even harder for us to master is the wordless language of gestures and expressions. We find laughter, the placating music made by no animal but Homo sapiens, impossible to fake. And I am sure I am not the only shy person who has looked on nervously as, in recent years, hugging has shifted from a marginal pursuit into a constant of social life.
Hugging feels to me like an odd mix of the natural and artful: natural because bodily contact is the first language we learn as babies, and artful because hugging has to be silently synchronized with the other person — unlike a handshake, which can be first offered and then accepted. Even now, the best hug I can manage is a bear-paw hold with my arms hanging limply down my huggee’s back. Hugging me is like trying to cuddle a scarecrow.
Taking a scholarly interest in shyness helped assuage the self-preoccupation that comes with it. What I learned is that shyness is a common state, with many faces. The shy imagine themselves to be surrounded by virtuosos of sociability, all doing word-perfect routines while they alone fluff their lines. But I have come to see that everyone struggles with these unwritten social rules — even if some of us are the class dunces, learning them more slow-wittedly than most.
Unlike related conditions, like shame or embarrassment, shyness is so internalized, so ungiving of physiological or neurological evidence.
Some basic form of shyness seems to be cross-cultural and transhistorical. Allusions to it appear in our most ancient texts. “A bashful man will make a sorry beggar,” Penelope says in Homer’s Odyssey. But shyness is, perhaps fittingly, a buried subject with an untold history. This isn’t just for the obvious reason that it leaves little data behind for historians to consult, its sufferers being naturally loath to speak or write about it. As a condition, too, it is hard to pin down: mundane, chronic, slippery.
There is no vast medical or psychoanalytical literature on shyness, because, unlike related conditions, like shame or embarrassment, it is so internalized, so ungiving of physiological or neurological evidence. Its elusiveness lends itself well to the form of writing with which I feel most at home: the essay, with its melding of personal voice and eclectic scholarship. The scholar of shyness must be part memoirist, part cultural historian, part anthropologist.
In a growing subfield of zoology, the study of animal personality, a key concept is the “shy-bold continuum.” Life for most animals is a trade-off between eating and being eaten, and between looking for a mate and fleeing from danger. Members of the same species manage these trade-offs in different ways. At one end they are aggressive and risk-taking; at the other they are fearful and risk-averse. An evolutionary biologist might claim that human shyness is a similarly adaptive trait, evolving out of the same percentage game of boldness and timidity played by our ancestors.
I am not so sure. Human shyness is surely unique in one key aspect: We are uniquely gifted, and burdened, with self-consciousness. We are meaning-making animals, compelled to reflect on and make stories out of our lives. Our feelings of shyness are intimately tied up with the ways we think and talk about shyness and the connotations we attach to it. Shyness is a longing for connection with others, which foils that longing through the self-fulfilling cycles of metathought at which humans excel.
Charles Darwin called shyness “this odd state of mind” because it had no clear evolutionary benefit. Instead it seemed to him to be an unplanned byproduct of the complexity of human consciousness, of our acquiring the ability to imagine how we might be imagined by other minds, but without ever being able to find this out decisively.
Shyness has proved to be a tenacious part of myself, one that I cannot simply cast off as if I were giving up smoking or cutting down on carbs.
Self-help books talk of shyness as something to be “busted” or “conquered.” The growing number of shyness institutes in the United States and Britain seek to alleviate the symptoms of sufferers at “social-fitness classes.” Psychiatrists increasingly see shyness as a medical condition: social phobia or social-anxiety disorder. But this pathologizing of shyness ignores both its commonness and its complexity.
The psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues that modern ways of treating mental illness, such as drugs and cognitive behavioral therapy, have replaced the nuanced exploration of the human psyche with “a fixed idea of mental hygiene.” Depression, for instance, is now understood and diagnosed by its uniform symptoms — low mood, dull vocal tone, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite — rather than its manifold causes. For Leader, this is like saying that everyone with the symptoms of a fever has the same illness. He thinks that shyness, just like depression, needs to be thought of more subtly, as “the symptom of an underlying clinical category to be discovered.”
All kinds of thoughts and feelings make up the intricate jigsaw puzzle of shyness, and they run the gamut from mild discomfort to debilitating dread. But taken as a whole, they are simply part of the human condition of being a social animal with a mind that is isolated from other minds. Shyness has certainly proved to be a tenacious part of myself, one that I cannot simply cast off as if I were giving up smoking or cutting down on carbs. My best plan, I have realized, is Zen acceptance. I now know, as the software developers say, that my shyness is a feature, not a bug. Shyness feeds on itself, so if I stop berating myself over it, the symptoms abate, and I can pay more attention to the world and to others.
Oddly, my shyness vanishes in performance, for I have a curious ability to lecture nervelessly in front of large groups — and just as well, given that this is part of my job description. I have long since given up trying to make sense of the inconsistency. Shyness is weirdly situational, and searching for reason and method in the way it comes and goes, like the weather, would be like looking for intelligent design in an accident of evolution.
Rather like chronic back pain — another evolutionary accident, the fault of our apelike ancestors who, a few million years ago, decided to stand erect and walk on two legs — shyness ebbs and flows and afflicts us without warning. The shy learn to redirect their frustrated social impulses into unlikely areas, becoming as fearless in some contexts as they are timid in others. What my study of shyness has taught me is something I really should have known already: Human behavior is endlessly rich and strange.
Joe Moran is a professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, in England. His book Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness is published by Yale University Press.
