Loudly Shy...

Heard a man say yesterday, “I am loudly shy...”  He was a rough and tumble character that you could just tell life had been hard to.  Heavy drinking probably didn’t help much.  He was talking about his traumas in this life and was describing himself as someone who is "loudly shy"...I knew immediately what he meant!  I, too, am loudly shy.  Although I don’t think I had a name for until the moment he said it.

I am shy.  I know, I know, none of you reading this will agree or see it.  But I am.  People terrify me.  But instead of being withdrawn and silent, I learned that you can fling yourself out there into the world and throw around this very large personality (which I totally do have) and this overcompensates or masks the shyness I feel all the time.

Sometimes, when at gatherings, the anxiety I feel about speaking and being spoken to is so acute, I fear I may run screaming from the room.  As a child, on my way to school, I would think of some event that was going to happen or could happen, and the thought of having to endure it, made my physically ill.  My mom used to get so mad at my stomach aches, but they were real, but driven by my delicate emotional nature that I covered up and over with a lot of bravado and big talk, from a very early age.

I am not sure why I believed that how I felt needed to be a secret from everyone else.  I kept my emotions on tight lock down, like an oath I took.  I was diligent in my requirement that I could feel however I wanted, but you would never, ever know. 

I know why I developed this trait.  I know exactly why, it was the safest thing I could do at the time.  But it, like many other maladaptive things I learned or decided in childhood, long outlived its true usefulness.

I have always been this random combination of fearlessness, underscored with abject fear and terror.  I guess what I mean is that I am really ok, doing all the things most of the time, until that innate shyness gets activated then I hightail it out of there, fast.  I learned early though that you can’t just run away, that makes it worse, so I developed this high energy persona to take over and make it all seem ok, to me and everyone else.  In short, I became loudly shy.

I guess I still am a lot of the time.  Yet another thing to inventory...fuck, the list seems to be never-ending.  Again, still.

I am heading to this big convention in Vancouver.  And I know my loudly shy persona will reign supreme!  She will take over and make it seem like I am the biggest extrovert in town.  But in reality, at least some of the time, I will be walking scared to death of everything.

I guess I am grateful for this loudly shy thing.  It pushes me to do things I would not do otherwise.  She is like some sort of flinger.  Just flings me out there into the world, into society, into relationships that I honestly do not actually possess the bandwidth for...if you watch me in most relationships, this will become abundantly clear.  I have a lot of words and actions, but they are all used to keep you from getting too close. Close is threatening.  So therefore all the noise which keeps you just close enough but not too close to make me panic.

At this point in my life, I am not trying to eradicate the flinger person from my personality.  She is just there and is gonna do what she is gonna do.  But I am trying to notice her more, what drives her to fling me out there into situations I feel inept and unprepared for.  And is there some other behavior, other than being loudly shy, that is masking perhaps a truer nature? 

At this point, I have no idea.  Truly.  All the many versions of me are just things jangled knot of delusion, trauma, life experience, recovery, salvation and present.  In short, I am complicated.  I am mercurial.  I can change on a dime.  Do you know how many things I was invited to in this life that I walked up to the door of the event and turned around and went home?  I had an entire semester of early college where I would walk all the way to the classroom and then just before I could open the door, I would run back to my dorm room and hibernate all day in my bed.  (Yes, that was the semester I got a 2.125).

I am not sure learning to swim by being thrown in the deep end is the most effective way to learn.  But I know that that is how, in fact, I learned to swim.  My dad told the lifeguards not to help me, and then proceeded to throw me into the deep end.  I flailed a bit and I am sure drank a fair amount of pool water.  I can still remember exactly what the pool looked like.  But after a few dramatic flails, I did in fact swim.  And in so doing, I confirmed in my development this idea that when you are coming up against your own limits, just fling yourself out there.  And all will be well.

I supposed I could have just as easily learned that I hated the pool, water, my father and swimming.  But I didn’t, I learned that sometimes in this life, if you want to go farther and you are in your own way, someone needs to just launch you out there.  And if no one else knows you are in your own way, then you have to do it to yourself.

So I have been loudly shy forever.  And I don’t see that really changing.  Sometimes it feels like a huge burden.  And other times it just seems like any other day and I cannot imagine being any other way...

Again, still...