Shyness has a bad reputation. Society, through the media, often reminds us that to cease to be shy is a form of self-improvement.
A famous example is that of Olivia Newton-John at the end of ‘Grease’, changing from a mild-mannered bookworm to a leather-clad alpha-female. Comedian Bob Mortimer’s memoir ‘And Away’ is the triumphant story of overcoming his own shyness and ends with a series of tips on how to bring shy people out of themselves.
However, being a quiet type has improved in status over the past decade. One turning point was the publication of ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking’ by former Wall Street lawyer Susan Cain.
Shyness and introversion are two very different things. But growing up in a world that looked down on people who dislike parties, avoid conflict, and think most ‘banter’ is as funny as childhood leukemia loaded me with a sense of inferiority that has informed every major decision I made through my twenties and thirties.
The first phase of adult life was university, and I intended for it to be a time when I met the world and reinvented myself. In the end, the opposite happened.
I Hate That Mirror It Makes Me Feel So Worthless
It is common knowledge that, for many people, school days are the worst of their lives. Yet this overlooks the fact that the toxic things about school, from unaccountable power to arbitrary cruelty, to snobbish exclusivity, are also ubiquitous in the adult world.
The pettiest person I have ever met was a university housemate who I’ll refer to as Lily. While chirpily friendly to some people, she made it abundantly clear that she didn’t care for me, seizing the slightest provocation, or even no provocation at all, to call me names. She watched a lot of crap TV and modelled her personality on the characters she saw in Californian media. She had ‘attitude’ in the American sense of the word (aaadditood) – she was rude.
Lily was kind of a feminist trailblazer in that she was living proof that one could be female and still exude Small Dick Energy. Everything she said, from her Vicky Pollard-style petulant outbursts to her interminable stories, could be summarised in three words: “Look at me.”
I could never tell anybody at home what was going on with Lily, or how depressed I felt about university life. Lily was much more their type of person than I was, talkative, gregarious, and fond of long conversations, particularly ones that were about absolutely nothing and went absolutely nowhere.
How could I deal with her? I could never argue with her point-for-point because she never had a point. I couldn’t get angry, because getting angry wasn’t ‘positive’, and I had been told all my life that positive thinking was always the right approach, especially for the young. For the same reason, getting upset would be even worse.
I took an option that was even more trite than thinking positively, “being the bigger person.” That meant never calling her out and never confronting her. The downside of this was, I internalized the lack of self-worth that came from tolerating this behaviour. Tolerance is generally a good thing, but excessive tolerance was what caused me to get into so many toxic friendships in later years.
Even so, Lily was only a small part of the problem. I was often reminded that it wasn’t a very prestigious university, and that I didn’t have a girlfriend, and all the ‘successful’ men I encountered through the media were strikingly different to me, more muscular, more sociable, more smiley. The whole experience was like being bukkaked with reminders of my own inferiority.
Gazing at the Literary Sky
There was still much to be positive about. This was the year of the BBC Big Read campaign, when writing and writers were respected. Most of all, there were some authors of Top 100 books who were under 30 when they wrote their much-loved masterpieces. These included Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Douglas Adams.
This meant that in theory, I could be writing masterpieces in the near future. In early 2004 I did a module on the romantics and came across John Keats. His work itself was over my head, but the fact that he died when he was 25 and still made an impact that has lasted centuries was heartening.
I did two modules on screenwriting, and my thesis on creative writing, as well as applying for post-graduate degrees in creative writing, and was able to bottle up the sadness and convert it into crap poetry.
My grades were consistently disappointing, but I was secretly bathing in the fountain of culture, and if I maintained my work-rate, I could surely be churning out masterpieces by the time I was twenty-five.
My only real regret was that I didn’t make more friends with classmates. The lively discussions in lectures and seminars showed that I could have been having fascinating conversations with stimulating people, but this inferiority complex had loaded me with what is now called social anxiety.
Real confidence means just about the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’.
Since the expansion of the higher education system in the 1990s and 00s was mostly a glorified stimulus package, I was sad but not surprised when I graduated and was told by every adult authority figure with a grin and a smirk that my degree was worthless.
I subsequently did a summer job in America selling door-to-door, which I worked at like a maniac for 80 hours a week but ended up failing badly. I then did a master’s degree at Sussex University which I thoroughly enjoyed but rendered me even more unemployable, because of the esoteric nature of the fiction and non-fiction that I wrote.
Since the world didn’t want what I had to offer, I needed to change what it was that I was offering. The first job opportunity I was offered was in China, a country and a language that appealed to my inner megalomaniac, with its ancient wisdom in the form of Lao Tzu and Confucius and its contemporary relevance with the Beijing Olympics and its status as factory of the world.
My actual job, teaching English to children, was another dog and pony show that I was lousy at. However, learning the language enabled me to escape and use my creative writing for projects that were more ambitious than anything I could have dreamed of while at university. My main regret is that I haven’t built up a bigger following.
Over the two decades since I was at uni, the distinction between the internet and the offline world has dissolved. But some things haven’t changed. Any scroll through Twitter or TikTok shows that chatty, vacuous, opinionated people get far more attention than knowledgeable, detail-orientated quiet types.
In August 2004, The Times published an opinion piece by Libby Purves, expressing trepidation about A-Level results day, and assuring kids my age that “it’s you that counts, not the label,” and concluding that in such a confusing world, real confidence for youngsters would require just about the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’.
I’m still a hugely under-confident person, but now am experienced enough to see through most high-status types. For all the progress I made, I am still very much an outsider. Then again, desperately wanting to be an insider only ever comes across as Small Dick Energy.