Posted 9:58 PM by hx

Shy shy girl
Shy Girl
Yeah, Yeah
Standing with the wallflowers
Wishing you would've stayed at home
You kick yourself for coming
When you're standing there all alone
- "Shy Girl", O-Town

no, i've never heard this song. i just did a random search for the words "shy girl" to see what would pop up, and voila :)

i was a very shy child. i was terrified of speaking to strangers, especially if they were adults. whenever i was asked to speak to one, i would burst into tears. when i grew older, i learned to suppress the shyness with a stoic face. unfortunately, i have the sort of face that looks somewhat serious if i'm not smiling. when people get to know me better, they usually tell me something like, "i thought you were really proud/arrogant/aloof/serious when i first saw you!" When actually i was petrified with shyness! :)

i've improved a little bit since i was a child - i guess the world doesn't give you a choice, not if you want to get anything done :) i've learned to hide it and force myself to go on regardless, particularly when i have no choice, such as in work-related matters. sometimes i can fake it so well that people - like my colleagues - apparently don't believe me when i say i'm shy :) certainly i'm not as bad as i used to be, and i don't think i was ever *very* bad (in the sense of having panic attacks or needing medication or something), but i do definitely have a certain level of self-inhibition around people i don't know.

i'm still uncomfortable in crowds, and hate mingling at parties. i can never think of small talk; i'm more comfortable finding a quiet corner to sit and observe people from. i'd rather talk one on one to individual people i find interesting than open my mouth in a big group, unless they're all people i already know and am comfortable with. like most introverts, i can get quite talkative - nay, noisy! - in the company of close friends, but in a group of people i don't know, i'm very quiet until/unless i get warmed up.

the odd thing is that i did at one point learn how to be more sociable and outgoing. when i was a teenager i decided that i would reprogram myself, just to see if it could be done. i found that it *could* be done, and fairly easily too, but in the end i decided that it was pointless. empty socializing didn't interest me. it felt more and more like a waste of time and energy, a pointless pursuit when life was too short as it was.

i realized that in the end, what i really wanted was a real direct honest connection with the few people who truly interested me, on a non-superficial level. superficial interaction has always failed to hold my interest. maybe that's why i always prefer talking to a person one on one, deeply, for hours on end, rather than joking about with a bunch of people i hardly know. which is not to say i don't joke about! life would be quite sad without humor :) i'm just talking about specific situations.

i used to really envy my best friend, who is a very warm and open person and makes friends very easily. come to think of it, most of my friends are like that. i suppose they'd have to be, to end up being friends with me! :) after all this time, however, i'm just now coming to understand that i am the way i am, and some things about me probably will not change as much as other things. some aspects of me, maybe i don't want to change, or shouldn't change, for various reasons. i'll probably never make friends or socialize as easily as they do, not least because i seem to operate on a different wavelength from most of the rest of the world. most people don't get me, and i don't get most people.

it's taken me a long time to come to terms with this, maybe because we're raised to want to please people, to want people to like us and to think we're nice. (why can't we all just get along? :) i'm just now starting to understand that i can't, and never will, be able to please everyone, or have everyone like me. it's such a simple concept, and one that everyone knows the theory of intuitively... but it's taken so long for me to understand the reality of it in my gut, and not just in my head.

a small thing... but it's a good first step on this long journey, and one i must complete if i'm to continue in my quest for self-growth. you'd think i'd have figured this out sooner, but hey... better late than never, right? :)