Shy
by Christie Chapman
My mom tells me a story from my childhood. It’s one I’ve never heard before.
“We were at a birthday party. I think it was Chuck E. Cheese. You must have been in about first grade. After pizza, the other kids ran off to play. You stayed at the table and kept eating, slice after slice, sitting alone. Some of the parents joked, ‘Wow, she must be hungry!’ But I knew what you were doing.”
She doesn’t say the part we both know in our bones: I continued to eat pizza because I was too shy to join the other girls.
I’m 47 and the story still plays out at every party. Now, instead of pizza, it’s alcohol.
* * *
She told me the pizza story because I’d been talking about how my eight-year-old daughter has no friends.
“Bestie” is a word my daughter loves. She thinks it sounds cool to have a bestie. She wants one.
One day, after the start of third grade, my daughter told me that her best friend also knows about the “warrior cats,” the feuding felines in her favorite graphic-novel series, “Warriors.”
The words “best friend” stood out to me as if in a glitter font.
“Oh! Who’s your best friend?”
“I won’t tell you.” She smiled impishly.
I asked her again, on different days, trying not to reveal how excited I was for this news or how eager I was to learn about her new friend. After a few more evasions, I realized there was no best friend. My daughter had made her up.
As a way of getting around the lie, she said: “You know about warrior cats! You’re my best friend.”
A statement I never thought would break my heart.
* * *
“Shy” was the word that defined me, from the first day I cried in kindergarten through high-school class periods spent hiding in restroom stalls. In tenth-grade English, when the teacher asked us to “choose your own group” to work with for a project, I walked out of the room. I went to my locker and pretended to turn the dial. (Like pretending to be hungry enough for more pizza.) My teacher dispatched another student to find me and bring me back.
“Shy” is the reason my first boyfriend, the love of my young life, broke up with me—I wouldn’t talk. I did at first, but the more I liked him, the quieter I got, the more afraid I became of saying the wrong thing. After he’d dumped me for the third and final time, in ninth grade, a quote from him got back to me: “Talking to her is like talking to a brick wall.” (A sweeter quote, from a phone call earlier on, during which I hadn’t said much: “Well, it was nice listening to you breathe.”)
We didn’t have the term “social anxiety” then. This was the ‘90s. It simply wasn’t around. If you were shy, it was your fault. It was a personal failing. The prescription was: “Just talk more.” Possibly paired with something about picturing the audience in their underwear. (This was also an era in which a depressed person might earnestly be told: “Just cheer up! Your life’s not so bad.”)
It would be years before I’d see the first commercial for a pill that purported to cure people like me: A cartoon blob, blushing and trembling among a bunch of relaxed and well-adjusted cartoon blobs. An expert’s voice cut in to explain how the drug worked and its side effects. Cue the science imagery, neurotransmitters on a roller coaster, bringing chemicals to places in the brain that need them, blocking other chemicals from being absorbed. The finale gave us an update on the formerly shy blob, presumably now medicated. It fit in with all the other blobs now. It looked happy.
* * *
At a bookstore recently I saw a tote bag that said: “All My Friends Are Fictional.” It was printed in a flowery script, not a gloomy one. I joked to my husband: “That isn’t the flex they think it is.” But who am I to say?
You could have a fictional best friend who knows about warrior cats.
* * *
I was in college the first time I heard someone say being shy was a good way to be.
It was freshman year, and my church-going cousin, who was also my roommate, had dragged me along with her to hang out with folks from a Christian youth group. One of the men, a group leader, was from England. His sister had come to visit with her two daughters, who flitted around like tiny blond fairies. We were at someone’s apartment to watch “James and the Giant Peach.” The video store had been getting rid of its giant cardboard promotional display for the movie, which someone had set up near the TV. I remember these details—the fairies, the giant peach—because I associate them with this woman, the fairies’ mother. The others had been picking on me—in their good-natured, church-y way—for being quiet. (“Gosh, Christie, shut up over there!”) The fairies' mother told me: “Don’t listen to them. There are too many loud people in this world.”
I’d never been told that before. The thought that being shy could ever be viewed, by anyone, as not merely acceptable but preferable to the world of go-getter extroverts that had derided me all my life, in their smug certainty that they were the enlightened and correct ones...
I wish I knew this woman’s name. I would send her a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers. Night-blooming jasmine, evening primrose, nocturnum orchid—flowers that open under the soft light of the moon, while everyone else is sleeping.
* * *
Sometimes my shyness feels like a beast, a heavy, sweating pelt on my back, its hot breath on the side of my neck; a creature separate from me, one I could wrestle off if I were strong enough. And sometimes it feels intrinsic, braided into my DNA, baked into each of my cells. Fated.
I’ve never tried to fight the beast with medication. I don’t have a good reason for this. Unlike people who worry that antidepressants will extinguish their spark, I never feared losing myself to a pill’s effects. Losing—transforming—myself was precisely what I wanted to happen. I think it’s mostly that I got used to moving through the world as a shy person, like how a person with a limp might get used to its rhythm, how much swing to give a hip to make the leg rise enough to walk, how much pressure the leg can take before you have to switch over.
I tried to push through my shyness sometimes, especially during the years I worked as a journalist—even winning statewide awards—when my job forced me to talk to strangers about unpleasant things. My editors required at least three quoted sources per story; that was the rule, and my integrity and loyalty to my newsroom colleagues was such that I was never tempted to fudge any of these.
Mostly, later in life, I used alcohol. I was 27 the first time I got drunk: Harrah’s casino in New Orleans, Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” playing, sashaying my hips to it; this was also the first time I danced. That night I felt that I’d found the magical un-shying elixir I’d longed for all my life. A liquid “undo” button for my defining flaw, which was also my defining trait. (A dark thought has occurred to me more than once: “What if I’d discovered this elixir in high school? Who would I have been?”)
When I was drunk, I was somehow both not myself—and more myself. I danced, I laughed, I hugged people. I was the life of the party. I was the “me” that was possible if I hadn’t been shy.
(“What if I’d discovered this in high school—would he have loved me?”)
* * *
“But ‘Drunk Christie’ is ‘Fun Christie’!” a friend once said, when I told him I was trying to cut back on drinking. He hosted parties where people got naked in the hot tub. Bookmarked on his phone was a page of photos in which I had modeled nude. While drunk, of course.
At these parties, at those photo shoots—“shy” was a word that required quotation marks around it, performed in ironic pantomime. (As in: I was the “shy” girl using a streetlamp for a stripper pole while traipsing down L Street for post-club crepes.)
Some people only ever saw me drunk. They didn’t believe I was shy.
* * *
When I was growing up, my mom would peer out our front windows to see if the neighbor ladies were outside. They were always in pairs, or groups, usually walking some kind of froufrou dog. If the coast was clear, my mom would go out and get the mail or water her flowerbed. Only then.
Early in elementary school I wanted to join Brownies. My mom didn’t have her driver’s license, and was too shy to ask any of the other moms to drive me home from meetings. I also wanted to do ballet. By the time my mom got her license and signed me up for ballet, years later, I was over it.
* * *
Will my daughter inherit this from me?
Tenth-grade P.E., same class as my (by then ex-) boyfriend. I was so nervous around him, around everyone, that I dug the crescent moon of my thumbnail into the weird rubbery gym floor, then into my own leg, my own skin, directing the self-hatred inward, a corrosive energy looping in on itself, like some faulty machine.
The feeling of walking through life in a dunce cap. The feeling of walking through life behind a thick sheet of shatterproof glass.
Later, physical and verbal cruelty from boyfriends, one who told me I was ugly and stupid, a guy I was deeply in love with who fucked me for a year but would not acknowledge me to his friends, a rapid-fire series of demoralizing one-night stands. My self-esteem was so low I felt this was what I deserved.
Later, too many nights going blackout-drunk.
Please, don’t let her inherit this from me.
* * *
But sometimes you meet angels.
The fairies’ mother. Others—I had best friends, and more often than not, they were also shy. We bonded over this.
My husband. He was working in Iraq at the time we reconnected on Facebook (we’d had mutual friends in high school, but never hung out), so we got to know each other online. We joke now about how quiet I used to be on phone calls with him. After twelve years of marriage, and five years of partly long-distance dating before that, plus the gamut of bodily discussions that must be had when trying for/after having a baby—I’m an absolute motormouth around him. I’ll realize how long I’ve been talking, then laugh and say: “OK, I’m done now.”
Sometimes you just have to find the right person, and then you never want to shut up.
* * *
Recently I started going to events for writers—readings, book launches, workshops. Places where people talk about writing and share writing. It’s the one topic I can really nerd out about, the one I’m most passionate about. This was new for me. In true shy-person form, I’d always lived my writing life alone, in a metaphorical hermit hut.
At first, I pre-gamed just as I had before any club night or party in the days before my daughter was born. I drank on the Uber ride over, from a thermos I pretended was a water bottle. At these readings, confined to my seat, no DJ or dancefloor to help me metabolize the alcohol—I was only half there. My focus fuzzed. I slurred banal responses to the few saintly souls who engaged with me.
After a few of these bombs, I saw how much better I’d be at these events without alcohol. I went to a reading sober, and was able to listen and absorb. I remembered things afterward. I was better company, a better literary citizen. I talked to people—I was a pinball of neurotic energy, but I participated in conversations, and sometimes even felt a connection. Last time, an organizer invited me to read my work, and I said yes, I’d love to do that. She put me down for their spring session.
It was never that I didn’t want to talk to people.
The moth of my spirit would fly at the glass and hit it hard, seeing stars, and fly at it again. Tink, tink, tink.
* * *
I have a long history of writing to transcend my shyness.
After my ninth-grade boyfriend—the one who compared me to a brick wall—dumped me the first time, I wrote him a note about staying friends. To this day it’s some of my best work. It was sincere, it was mature, it was funny. It worked in a reference to “Wayne’s World” (again: this was the ‘90s). I gave the note to him at the end of the school day. As soon as I got home, he called to ask me out again.
A couple years later I was writing for the high-school newspaper. With a generous amount of laissez-faire leeway from my journalism teacher, I wrote a satirical love-advice column, penned in the voice of my comically swaggering alter ego. It was a hit. Students I barely knew complimented me in the halls. Many of my fans had never heard me speak. People looked at me with surprise, and respect. (I even heard, through a friend of a friend, that my ex liked the column.)
My words did that.
* * *
So can other things.
My daughter is an artist. This took my husband and me by surprise—for the first years of her life, she was reluctant to grasp any writing or drawing utensil. I fretted over this. I talked to her teachers about bringing in an occupational therapist.
It turns out she was just a late bloomer in this way. She started reading graphic novels (warrior cats and others), then making her own. In second grade, my daughter’s teacher gave her permission to start an in-class Drawing Club. My daughter thought out step-by-step “lesson plans”; she created a club logo. At the end of the school year, the signatures in her yearbook were all about her being an artist: “You are good at drawing.” “Thank you for letting me be in Drawing Club.” “You are artistic.”
Art gave her confidence. It gave her an identity in the eyes of the other kids. It let them know who she was.
* * *
I still drink, especially before and during social gatherings. Just not as often at the literary ones.
My daughter still doesn’t have a bestie.
But I have my writing, and she has her art.
A fierce warrior cat, drawn step-by-step. A brick wall rendered feeble and crumbling and eminently scalable by describing it that way in a story, in this story.
All those pizza slices, chewed to mush and swallowed when my belly was already full—here in my writing, I can hold them up for one shining symbolic moment before I obliterate them. Wring them for all their greasy worth onto the page. Share my words with you.
Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, VA. A three-time participant of the George Washington University English Department's Jenny McKean Moore Community Workshops, for creative nonfiction and fiction, her work has been published by The Lascaux Review, the Good Men Project, Washington Writers' Publishing House, Ghost Parachute, The Argyle, and Blood+Honey, and was nominated for the Best Microfiction anthology.