Growing up, I was painfully shy. I don’t mean charmingly bashful. Well into my teenage years, I was truly terrified to speak in many group situations and visibly nervous and ill at ease if I did work up the nerve.
My shyness was the defining factor of my social life, and I was sure it would bar me from ever having the life that I wanted, one that would include parties and boyfriends and a wider group of friends than the few close ones I had. (If I had been more precocious, I would have worried about its professional ramifications as well, but I didn’t yet realize that success in the job world doesn’t generally entail the exact same skill set required to get good grades.)
Then, at sixteen, I discovered alcohol. For all the problems that alcohol can cause—and I certainly have had a mixed relationship with it—drinking also helped me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. By enabling me to temporarily throw off my anxiety, alcohol allowed me to experiment with being a bolder, more carefree and confident version of myself. I developed an almost sensory memory of what it was like to be that person, and I learned to mimic it, to a degree, even when I wasn’t drinking. This was tremendously useful—it was, I might even go as far as to say, life-changing.
By the time I went to college, my shyness had not gone away but had become manageable. As an adult, I’ve often felt nervous before—and during—a party or a group outing, but the same is true for most people, I think, and anyway I haven’t felt crippled the way I used to when I was young. Until recently. At 37, my shyness seems to have returned full force, at least in one area of life: online.
For many people, social media seems to be what drinking was for me long ago—a way to overcome, or at least get around, shyness. I see people who are timid and reserved in person boldly carve out charming (and occasionally not-so-charming) online personalities.
I must be constituted differently. On the Internet, I freeze up the way I used to at camp when I was ten or eleven, eating dinner with a group of girls whose sophistication and rapid-fire banter I sought in vain to match. Someone I admire from a distance tweets something at me, and I feel like the kid who has just been assigned lab partner of the most popular girl in school, who wants desperately to make a good impression but is terrified of saying the wrong thing.
And yet . . . I’m not trying to impress anyone online—I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of being witty on Facebook or Twitter. Non-embarrassing is the bar I’ve set for myself. In replying to someone’s tweet, all I want is to be nice and friendly and appreciative, without being weirdly, overly nice and friendly and appreciative; to address what has been said and to be respectful but also honest if I don’t happen to agree—and to do all this without using so many exclamation points and au courant abbreviations that I seem like a total bubblehead. Easier said than done—at least for me. After a bit of fretting, I often give up—I don’t reply at all, favorite the tweet instead.
One difference between Twitter and real life—one reason Twitter is harder for me at least—is that in real life, the niceness and friendliness is generally conveyed in tone of voice and expression; you don’t have to worry so much about consciously projecting that. (Also: not as much time to overthink in real-time conversations.)
Perhaps my discomfort online is strange because I’m a writer. You’d think the written word would play to my particular strengths. But I think the salient aspect of “social media” is in the word “social.” Writing an article or a book feels private when you’re in the midst of it. No matter how personal the content, no matter how controversial the positions staked out, this kind of writing feels, to use an analogy, more like the school-work component of adolescence than the hanging out part (which is also what makes it so eligible for procrastination). Social media feels like being at a dinner party, far more than writing a scene in a novel about being at a dinner party does.
Why am I on Twitter at all if this is how I feel, you might reasonably ask. The answer is that for someone in my profession, it’s become something of a job requirement. Of course, many writers are great on social media—smart, funny, charming, courageous enough to not only engage in repartee but to stake out positions that might not win them friends or followers. I know because I like reading other people’s tweets as much as I dread writing my own. (Gary Shteyngart, Mary Karr, Alexander Chee, Teju Cole, Gabriel Roth, Porochista Khakpour, and Jami Attenberg, to name just a few, are some of my favorite writer-Twitterers.) I admire the ability to be oneself on Twitter in much the same way as I admired the interpersonal ease of so many of my peers when I was young. It speaks not only to the ability to express oneself succinctly but also to an uninhibited frankness that is itself winning.
It’s not just Facebook and Twitter. I’m also impressed by how quickly acquaintances respond to emails, how willing they are to get into rapid, real-time exchanges. Many people can compose a funny, breezy reply and press send in far less time than it takes me to decide if I should sign my name or just my initial or if no signature is needed. (Again, for me, it’s often the desire to be both friendly and nice without being overly friendly and nice that trips me up.) As a result, I tend to take a while to respond to emails, sometimes waiting at least a day, so as to set a pace that is more like old-fashioned letter-writing than G-Chatting (which naturally I avoid entirely).
Ironically, one of the things that makes the Internet difficult for me is that it offers exactly what I wanted when I was young. I used to long to be one of those people whose shyness is taken for aloofness because aloofness seemed to confer social cache. Alas . . . my body language, my expression, my faltering tone always betrayed me, exposed me as a person who sought to please, who was a bit nervous. Vulnerable, not intimidating.
On the Internet, aloofness finally seems attainable. If you’re sitting by yourself at home, nobody can see your blushes or lip-biting. To my surprise, I now find this prospect anything but liberating.
As an adult, I want people to know I’m shy. I’ve come to see a certain usefulness in its lingering vestiges. If I’m quiet or seem a little awkward in a new social situation, I rely on the fact that the people I’m meeting will pick up on other cues and realize I’m just shy, that I don’t mean to snub anyone. They’ll attribute an awkward remark to the right cause—nervousness—rather than anything more ill-intentioned. It’s different online. If, from nervousness, someone like me fails to respond to people who tag us on Facebook or tweet at us, they might well think we’re snobbish. (Why did this seem like a good thing when I was a teenager? The prospect makes me miserable now.)
It’s funny. Social media offers a chance to present a persona to the world, one who may not resemble in all particulars one’s real-life self, and yet my favorite social media presences tend to be those whose online personalities hew fairly closely to their offline selves—who manage to be appealing and interesting without being significantly more aggressive or boastful online than they’d have the nerve to be in person. Instead they seem to be restrained by the same considerations (tact, empathy, fairness) that operate in real life.
In that sense perhaps, maybe, for all my failure to thrive in this medium, I am simply following in the footsteps of those I admire. After all, my online persona is as shy as my offline one. I just wish there were some kind of tag for someone like me, one that would read, “I’m not mean, #JustShy.”
Adelle Waldman is the author of the novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
The post Shyness Is Nice (Except on Social Media) appeared first on Vogue.
