You’re such a shy boy

You know you should be mine

…All my crushes are about you

                        Adalita, Magic Dirt

                       

“Nooooo”, I found myself silently crying as I hurtled towards the final chapters of the book. I always do this with a great read: lament the inevitable end, the closure of the relationship that has developed between the words and ideas of the author and my own musings/projections. Such was the experience I had in reading Sian Prior’s memoir “Shy”.

Deeply personal, it reveals both a soft belly of vulnerability, with poignant insights into her internal world, as well as a tenacity to understand the complex phenomenon that is shyness/social anxiety through years of personal research. Vulnerability + tenacity = strength. Gives hope. Tick. Perhaps unusually, Prior is not out to proselytise about this or that strategy, therapy, remedy, etc. for “managing” the distress experienced by sufferers. It’s no self-help book. It’s an exposition. What a relief.

In some ways, it’s more a story of love and loss, which is hardly surprising given that social anxiety ultimately expresses fears about intimacy. About the pain of avoiding intimacy with others, about longing for connection, about the anticipatory grief of being seen as flawed by others, about the terror of annihilation of the self that has accompanied past experiences of being humiliated, rejected or abandoned. Mindfulness-based therapist, Steve Flowers, writes that “The experience of shyness involves being exquisitely sensitive to interpersonal peril and seeking to protect yourself from the pain inherent in relationships”. He cites research showing that problematic shyness has core components of private self-consciousness, shame, self-blame and resentment (Henderson, Zimbardo & Carducci, 2001).

Dispelling the popular myth that shyness is akin to introversion, Prior describes herself as a “shy extrovert”, as being locked in a conflict between competing desires to be “seen” and acknowledged versus hidden and safe. This becomes acutely manifest in instances where she is exposed to public attention when out with her (former) famous partner (and yes, we all know who Tom is) and encounters bevies of admirers – his admirers. On the one hand, she is someone, she is half of something; on the other, she is invisible, not even the other, as the gaze settles on him. Perhaps even more painfully, how others see her doesn’t square with how she experiences herself. A dinner companion describes her as sphinx-like, when, engulfed by self-consciousness, a sort of private hell, Prior is doing all she can to prevent herself from melting under the table.

Early on in the book, she tentatively wonders about the connection between her struggle with shyness and the sudden death of her father in a tragic drowning accident. I don’t know where exactly she sees herself on a continuum between being shy and socially anxious in a problematic sense (termed social anxiety disorder or social phobia) and it’s not for me to judge, but if it’s one thing I am certain of, people with social anxiety have been hurt, sometimes over and over again. Shyness is a normal personality trait and up to 50% of individuals apparently describe themselves thus. Whilst it may share some overlapping features with social anxiety, like fear of being negatively evaluated or judged by other people, with associated safety or protective behaviours like wariness or avoidance of certain social or interpersonal interactions, it doesn’t cause the level of distress and disruption to functioning that social anxiety does.

My own hunch is that shyness tips over into social anxiety (and I note that those struggling with social anxiety do not always present with a backstory of shyness) when other factors are present: family breakup or upheaval, an experience of bullying or ostracism, low self-esteem, a disappointment that turns to depression. Signe Dayhoff, social psychologist, recovered social anxiety sufferer and author of Diagonally-Parked in a Parallel Universe: Working Through Social Anxiety, refers to these factors as traumatic conditioning episodes or experiences. From my perspective, early loss of a parental figure who, after all, ran (perhaps heroically, perhaps recklessly) away from his wife and children into the “clutching water” to retrieve two young violinists from the surf (at least, that’s how Prior tries to reconstruct it for herself), no doubt would prime a child for a fearful response to the world and/or intimacy.

I think Prior gets closer to a personal truth when, later in the book, she writes of her suspicion that, as a wee babe of just three months when her father died, she drank in her mother’s grief and trauma at the breast. Family therapists have long described this as the transgenerational transmission of trauma. We don’t just inherit eye colour or IQ, but the emotional baggage of those who have gone before us and, very often, characteristic ways of responding to life’s inevitable difficulties and blows. In a symbiotic and somehow beautiful twist, Prior’s mother is hospitalised for acute migraines following the breakup with Tom. Prior writes, “Has my liquid terror somehow leaked into my mother’s brain and poisoned it”? Her mother’s antennae sensed that her daughter was in deep trouble, that the stakes in her relationship with Tom were high enough that his betrayal of her was in some way a repetition of her original abandonment. Mothers are clever. As are daughters.

Other things I loved about the book:

• Prior’s understanding of the ghost of self. She tries to capture herself in her image in the mirror, by reconstructing a consistent story of her shyness and perceived deficiencies, but then, phoof, she’s gone. A childhood friend is surprised by her admission of shyness and remembers only the “cool”, competent girl. Tom decides he wants more variety in his life, but what roles had she failed to fulfill? There are so many versions of herself. Shy Sian. Professional Sian. “I contain multitudes. I am a one-woman variety show”.
• Her description of liquefying, which I think is that experience of annihilation, her sense of herself slipping away, after her breakup with Tom, and the (temporary) relief that swimming brings “Through some strange alchemy of reverse deliquescence”, where her body feels solid again.
• Her recognition of the addictive nature of anxiety highs, despite the havoc that anxiety has otherwise wreaked on her body, notably her gut, as she has pushed herself off a million small, but scary cliffs, landing victorious.

Still, I am left wondering why Prior, as far as I know, has never chosen to pursue therapy, especially since her mother, Margot, is a psychologist. I wondered the same thing when I read the 2011 feature on Judy Davis in the GoodWeekend (cited by Prior), where, it was reported, she continues to berate herself for her shyness, despite her public successes. Davis said:

 I still haven’t mastered theatre-dressing-room chat, and on film sets I always eat lunch alone, hidden in my trailer. There’s nothing quite as terrifying as joining the film crew and everyone else at the trestle tables in the lunchroom. I would expend 80 per cent of my energy for that day on trying to cope with the social stress of one hour at the lunch tables, feeling awkward and gawky. So I decided decades ago I’d never take on that challenge.

Fascinating. I suspect in the end that Prior, like Davis, has learned to accept her own shyness, even if grudgingly, or at least to accommodate it as just one part of herself. Maybe, like Davis, she learned early on to harness the raw energy of it, transforming it into art, into performance, performing because of it and not in spite of it. I am also left thinking about an idea of Thomas Moore that a completely sanitised, well-adjusted personality (a fantasy, not even therapy can achieve) might also be shallow and uninteresting. I agree that “In therapeutic times like ours”, this idea goes against the grain but it is “ultimately more humane”. Quite often it’s our neurosis that gives us an edge and depth of character, an authenticity, charisma. Certainly, Prior emerges a better character by deciding to look fear in the eye and actually feel her feelings rather than anaesthetise them.

My partner is shy and does audacious things every day. I think I love him because he makes me feel braver about being in the world. My brother-in-law is shy. His blushes are accompanied by a little facial tic…endearing, not treacherous at all. A little visual cue perhaps to go easy on him, be gentle. I can be shy too. My brother-in-law would laugh out loud at the thought of it. I can even hear him chirrup “How ridiculous”!