Healing

There is a place for shy, introspective persons. It is not a comfortable one. These are the creative ones, the ones who develop their minds, the ones who think while others act. They are the ones taken for granted, their worth unrecognized. They are the ones who cannot get dates...

Remember the time you could not think of anything to say to the woman sitting across from you in that little cafe. There was a painful lump in your throat, and you stammered when she looked your way. She smiled at you sympathetically, but still, there was no way to reach out to her, to touch her... and you lost yet another chance to make contact.

Remember that party, when you were standing off to one side by yourself, and the other people were stealing brief glances at you over their shoulders, laughing quietly, giggling, some of them. You approached several of the women, but quickly they found excuses to move away. Finally you walked out into the bitter cold night air, only then to realize that your fly was open.

Remember leaving that one dance, and ahead of you, walking home, was the woman you had danced with for hours. She met your eyes, momentarily, nearly smiled (you thought), but kept walking. You could not quite summon up the courage to approach her, to ask if you could at least accompany her to the nearest subway stop. She walked away into the night, and you never saw her again.

A gaping chasm splits off the landscape of the shy and lonely from the rest of humanity. This is the great divide between losers and winners, so we are told. What radical transformation, then, would it require to reshape a shy person into an extroverted, socially adept one? Where would you find the kind savior to rescue you from the prison of your loneliness and tutor you in the social skills needed to escape from the four walls of your own head? Where can you learn to care for, to love another?

Personality change is virtually impossible under ordinary circumstances. Likewise, saviors are in ridiculously short supply (and not so easy to recognize when they are found). What shapes your fate is your own perceptions, your old ingrained habits of fear and failure. Others sense how you feel about yourself and mirror your self-image back at you. Face yourself, know thyself, and take your life into your own hands. Become a stronger person and depend no more on fortuitous happenstance, on wishing and hoping.

We are all worms. 
But I do believe I am a glowworm.
-- Winston Churchill

Only the bridge of self-acceptance and understanding traverses the narrow passage to our fellow humans. We shy people must of necessity become our own rescuers, teachers and saviors. Yet, if the tools for self-transformation exist, they are difficult to use. Social skills can be learned, as a rule slowly and sometimes painfully, but loneliness is a powerful motivator.

The useful social skills are subtle elaborations of what we already know and do, but of a somewhat higher order. Obvious examples include listening, starting a conversation with a stranger, speaking for an audience (notably the not-so-lowly art of telling jokes), effective writing, and dancing.

Unlike most people, those who sleepwalk their way through life, the ones to whom self-confidence was spoon-fed as part of the socialization process, you stand out as "weak" and unsure of yourself. Of course, those others are self-confident, they belong to a family, a group, a social circle that nurtures and reinforces their belief in themselves. But it is not rooted deeply within their own self, and there is no steel beneath the surface. Their character lacks the fire-hardening of adversity, and is all the more vulnerable and fragile for it. It requires only one sharp blow, one misfortune or bump to disrupt their 'sense of place', their self-confidence, their fundamental identity.