Don’t cure your shyness, value it: why being a shrinking violet can be a positive

A new book about shrinking violets concludes they’ve been born with a gift

A feeling of ‘apartness’ also allows us insights in others’ behaviour (Rex)

Personal growth is the growth industry of our age. Its guiding principle is that personality is plastic and pliable, a skill set you can learn and change. Dale Carnegie’s children populate the mind-body-spirit shelves of bookshops: How to Talk to Anyone, Goodbye to Shy, Make Yourself Unforgettable, How to Light Up a Room and Make People Like You. They trade in stories of recovering shy people who have transformed themselves from depressed solitaries into social butterflies, the psychological equivalent of those slimmers of the year who pose delightedly inside their old and now outsized pair of trousers.

The shyness institutes use phrases like “social fitness classes”, which make working on your personality sound like going to the gym. In this positive-thinking mode, shyness always has to be “busted” or “conquered”. But if I have learned one thing from exploring the lives of shy people, it is that our personalities do not do these kinds of handbrake turns. All the people I wrote about in my book were as shy at the end of their lives as at the start of them. They found ways to hide it, channel it, finesse it or work round it, but it never went away. And I suspect that, if I reach a grand old age, I will simply find more ways to adapt to my shyness, just as a stammerer learns to avoid certain words.


 Dale Carnegie, author 

In her 1959 book The Day’s End, the nurse Pamela Bright wrote about working on the Middlesex Hospital cancer ward. She noted that her patients died in the same manner in which they had lived: “aggressive, shy, fussy, humorous, grateful, weary, talkative and assertive, they all had their word to say and then departed.” The egocentric were high-maintenance to the end, the theatrical orated their last words con brio, and the unassertive expired quietly in the small hours, not wishing to cause bother. Of course, it makes no sense to cling to your shyness when your life is nearly over and what anyone thinks of you is immaterial. But since when did shyness make any rational sense? If you were rational, you’d have cured your shyness earlier, when it might have done you some good.

I have come to think of my own shyness as an unyielding reality and the best strategy, I have realised, is Zen acceptance. If I just accede to my shyness as an obdurate fact, like having sticky-out ears or crooked teeth, I can live with it. I have decided, as the software developers say, that being shy is a feature, not a bug. I now just assume that after any conversation with a stranger I will come away feeling slightly defeated. In the manner of those signs they used to have in shops warning people off asking for credit, I should probably wear a badge that says, “Please do not expect sparkling conversation, as its failure to materialise may offend.”

If I stop berating myself, the symptoms are relieved and I can start paying more attention to the world and to others. Shyness feeds on itself, so if you don’t think about it, it may not get better but it doesn’t get worse. I do my best to struggle against it while learning to live with it, to be neither ashamed of it nor secretly proud of it. And so the war against my own shyness has ended in an uneasy truce.

As hostilities are suspended, at least I can say that I managed to body-swerve the fate of the hikikomori, those Japanese teenagers addicted to computer games, who hide their shame in their bedrooms. No one needs to leave my meals on a tray by my door or hire a surrogate sibling to coax me out of the house. I no longer think of myself as giving off some invisible, people-repelling pheromone. I am occasionally seen walking round in public spaces in daylight, and in the evenings I can be taken to parties and left on my own without anyone fearing I will do a tearful flit. If someone knocks on my office door, I answer it (most of the time); if the phone rings, I pick it up (usually).

In other words, I can rustle up a passable impression of a normal person because I know it is part of the deal, the levy we pay on being alive, even if it sometimes feels I have to scrape together every penny of emotional effort to pay it. And, like a reformed smoker, I long to nip outside for a few furtive drags of the precious drug of solitude.

“Do you not think that shyness can be a gift to us?” a friend said to me, “by giving us a slanted outlook, a special way of seeing the world?” I demurred then, but I am coming round to her way of thinking. Shyness is unwanted most of the time. But a gift it still is, its attendant feelings of apartness granting us hard-won insights we cannot now imagine living without.

In a beautiful essay, “On Being Ill”, Virginia Woolf writes about how the experience of illness can shatter “that illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another”. When we are ill, we become deserters from “the army of the upright” and look on that army as fighting a brave but futile cause. The otherness of being ill, its enforcement of stillness and isolation, makes us see that we are all, finally, on our own in this world.

And yet illness, Woolf suggests, also opens up “undiscovered countries”, new fields of awareness that can be as creative as they are chastening. They remind us that our lives are built on sand and that in the end nothing matters. People trapped in the impenetrable bubble of grief often say the same thing – and shyness offers us a low-intensity but longer-lasting version of this state of feeling lifted out of the swim of social life, looking askance at a world that seems baffling and strange.

It is true that the sense of alienation this brings may turn us slightly mad. But being behind that distorted wall also lets us look at the social world from the outside in. And that is a gift – as long as we keep a grip on reality by scaling the wall occasionally, and joining in once again with the make-believe of the army of the upright.

British modernist author Virginia Woolf (Getty) (Getty Images)

Collectively, though, we still cannot make up our minds about shyness. Some see it as a form of rudeness or conceit, others as a sign of sensitivity and sagacity in the insincere soup of social life. I have come to feel that it has little meaning other than itself. It is so dirt-common that no especially disagreeable or virtuous human attributes can be extrapolated from it. It cohabits with egotism and self-pity as readily as with modesty and thoughtfulness. Shyness is just there, another piece in the intricate jigsaw of human diversity, and all that studying it has taught me is what I knew already: human behaviour is endlessly rich and odd.

In her book The Scars of Evolution Elaine Morgan argues that many parts of the human body are merely accidental residues of the weird, purposeless process of evolution. That kink in the lumbar region of the spine that allows us to stand up, for example, is an evolutionary bodge, which means that our vertebrae are unable to take too much strain without slipping out of place. And so a choice made by a few of our ape-like ancestors about four million years ago, to stop moving on all fours and stand erect, accounts for today’s most common reason for being off work: lower back pain. In a phenomenon that evolutionary biologists call maladaptive behaviour, traits that evolved to allow an animal to thrive in one situation may not work in another.

Natural selection rarely alights on the perfect solution. It just eliminates the unworkable, and ends up with billions of different solutions to the problem of being alive. Perhaps that is all shyness is: just one of those billions of solutions. No one, and certainly not me, would call it an optimal solution. But it is a solution, part of what the nature writer Richard Mabey nicely calls the “redundant embroidery” of existence. And rather like lower-back pain, which eases with time but is prone to recur, shyness can ebb and flow, afflicting us without warning like sciatica.

Without shyness I suppose people might be happier, in the same way that they might be happier without back twinges. But perhaps the world would also be a little blander, less creative and less interesting. Nature may be a mess, but it has an ingenious capacity for making the best of a bad job. Evolution’s incremental tinkerings do improve things. The lower vertebrae of our backs, for instance, have grown gradually bigger over millennia to sustain better the weight they have to bear.

If, as Morgan puts it, “the first few million years of bipedalism were the worst”, then the same could be said for shyness: after living with it for so long, we should have learned to rub along with and even make use of it. And just as the natural world needs unlovely things such as peat bogs and earthworm colonies to maintain its equilibrium, so perhaps the world needs the shy too – and the bold, and all shades in between – to make up the delicately balanced ecosystem of human behaviour.

Life is a matter of negotiation and adjustment to conditions – rather than destroying competitors in pursuit of that much misconstrued Darwinian ideal, the survival of the fittest – and I prefer to see shyness like this. We are shy because we know we are different from other living things. And because humans also carry around with us this rare cargo of self-consciousness, we are uniquely aware that, for all our need for intimacy, we face the world alone. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, the journey from one brain to another is the most difficult we will ever make, and every attempt at conversation is a gamble, with no guarantee we will be understood or even heard. Given these unbending realities, isn’t a little shyness forgivable?

I have fought all my life the sense that being shy is a personal affliction that has left me viewing life from its edges. This feeling was early acquired and now seems hard-wired, for no amount of mature reflection seems entirely to rid me of it. But at least I now see in my more lucid moments that it is an illusion. Not only is shyness essentially human, it may even be the master key that unlocks our understanding of those sociable creatures, homo sapiens, lumbered with this strange capacity for turning in and reflecting on themselves. Shyness isn’t what alienates me from the rest of herd-loving humankind; it’s the common thread that links me to them.

This is an edited extract from ‘Shrinking Violets: A Field Guide to Shyness’ by Joe Moran (Profile Books, £14.99 hardback and ebook), published on 1 September