Joe Moran - Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness

Shrinking Violets

The Secret Life of Shyness

JOE MORAN

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Henry Weldon Barnes of the Class of 1882, Yale College.

First published in the United States by

Yale University Press in 2017.

Joe Moran, 2016, 2017. First published in the English language in a different form by Profile Books.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948565

ISBN 978-0-300-22282-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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10987654321

In memory of my grandmother

Ellen Evaskitas, ne Roberts (19171958)

Shyness eludes definition. Is it a sign of morbid self-preoccupation or of rare depth of feeling? As innate as temperament or as contrived as a persona? An affliction to be cured or an idiosyncrasy to be celebrated? Often seen simply as a wish to withdraw from the company of others, shyness can also amount to an undue interest in others, a desire for human connection that defeats itself through anxiety or uncertainty. For me, shyness has less to do with simple timidity or fear than a kind of social deafness, a tin ear for nonverbal cues, a sense that I have failed to grasp some invisible thread that holds communal life together. It feels like coming late to a party when everyone else is about three beers in and having fluent exchanges on some agreed theme as if by magic.

All my life I have been trying to make algorithmic what other people seem to find natural. I still cannot dial a new phone number without having written down, like a call center worker with a corporate script, what I am going to say when the person I am ringing picks up. (It should be a liberation for a shy person to be made invisible by the telephone receiver, like the Wizard of Oz throwing his voice from behind a screen, but somehow it isnt.) I keep a notebook of things to say to people in case I run out of small talkand however full the notebook gets, it never seems to stop me from running out. At parties I no longer look intently at bookshelves or refrigerator magnets as I used to, but have cultivated a cryptic smile, which, I hope, suggests I am benignly amused by the human comedy unfolding before me and unfazed by not being part of it.

The real problem comes with informality, in casual encounters when conversations are meant to form artlessly, as if out of thin air. At work this happens at places like the photocopier, that office-life equivalent of the traditional parish pump, where gossip is exchanged and alliances are cemented, or in corridors, which officially provide direct access to somewhere else but unofficially provide for chance meetings and lingerings. It is in these liminal spaces that I come unstuck, never knowing whether I am supposed to stop and say hello or for how long. I might pause and greet two colleagues deep in conversation and, while they carry on talking, wonder when to interject a word. Eventually, having simply smiled and nodded, I slope off and leave them to it.

The evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar once worked out that there is a natural limit of four on the size of conversational groups. If the group gets any bigger, no one can retain the attention of all its members, and it splits into smaller units. I have found the Dunbar rule to be pretty infallible over the years, but knowing about the problem never makes it easier to solve. When a conversational group subdivides, I attempt to join one of the subgroups but hear the other one in my head, unable to tune out. I end up joining neither and become stranded between two sets of people oblivious to each other and to me. I am often in a circle of people that closes up suddenly like a rugby scrum and leaves me standing outside it, as its constituent parts forget I am there and absentmindedly nudge me out of the loop.

Coming up with the right words, or at least adequate words in some semblance of order, is hard enough. But words are not even the first language of Homo sapiens. We have more discrete facial muscles than any other animal: even when our palates and larynxes were not developed enough for us to do more than grunt, squeal, and whimper like other apes, we could move our lips, cheeks, and brows to convey what we were thinking. We came to recognize the crows-feet that form at the sides of the eyes when we smile as a sign of pleasure and appeasement. We learned to dispense laughter, that placating music that no other animal makes and which the shy find it so hard to fake.

Alongside this wordless language of gesture, expression, and vocal grunt, humans have evolved a complex and ever-evolving etiquette of tactility. I have watched on nervously as, over the course of my adult life, hugging has been transformed from a marginal pursuit into a constant of social life, along with the proliferation of such variants as French cheek-kissing and that bro hug in which the shaken hand becomes a vertical handclasp pulled forward until the two huggers bump shoulders. Hugging has always felt to me like an odd mix of the natural and the artful: natural because bodily contact is the first, endorphin-releasing language we learn as babies and share with other apes, and artful because it has to be silently synchronized with the other personunlike a handshake, which can be offered and accepted asynchronously.

For the truly socially inept, even handshakes can be tricky. As a young man, I used to botch them all the time, offering the wrong hand (being left-handed didnt help) or grabbing the other persons fingers instead of the palm. And then, just as I had completed my long internship in the art of the handshake, it was losing currency, and I had to hastily re-skill in hugging, or at least allow myself to be hugged while managing a sort of bear-claw hold with my arms hanging limply down my huggees back. Hugging me is like trying to cuddle a scarecrow.

The sociologist Susie Scott suggests that the shy are conducting an unintentional breaching experiment.strangers and ask them to give up their seats for no reason. (On the whole, it is better if this researcher does not suffer from shyness.) The behavior of shy people, Scott argues, can be similarly jarring. Their body language shouts discomfort. Their silence unnerves. They lack the split-second timing that allows those deep in discussion to perform like riffing musicians; instead, while mentally scrolling through all the different ways in which the conversation might fail, they miss the beat, and the discussion moves on. So their interventions are rare and erratic, and their words carry too much weight or disrupt the dialogic rhythm. Shy people unsettle others because they unsettle the tacit conventions of social life.

It must have been my bafflement at these conventions that stirred my scholarly and writerly interest in the taken-for-granted rituals of daily life. Shyness turns you into an onlooker, a close reader of the signs and wonders of the social world. Eventually I came to see that this was also the best way of assuaging the self-preoccupation that comes with shyness. I could convert my personal interest in shyness into anthropological curiosity and explore it as a participant-observer, a field biologist of the shy. I learned that shyness has many faces. People who at first seemed to be models of social deftness turned out, from other angles, to be no such thing. The most unlikely people confessed to me that they were shy. I had thought I was surrounded by virtuosos of social rules, delivering word-perfect performances, while I alone was fluffing my lines. I came to see that everyone was struggling to learn these rules that were never written down, although some of us were the class dunces, learning them more slow-wittedly and unwillingly than most.