But if shyness involves, by definition, self-doubt or insecurity, I was not shy. I thought the world of myself. I was impervious to insults, believing my parents’ theory that the sole motivation for mocking was envy. And if I worried more than the average six-year-old, well that was just because they were all too stupid to notice the things worth worrying about. The rambunctious kids my mother wished I’d befriend were, as far as I could see, incapable of sitting still, ruled by impulse, lacking in empathy, and poor conversationalists. They were living in a giddy stupor.
In the fall when I was seven, I began my first diary. Each entry consisted of a crayon drawing, usually of a stick figure, accompanied by a sentence, also in crayon. I will be in Canada. I will have a new teacher, I wrote. I will make new friends. I will learn French. My parents had told me these things, and I was trying to convince myself they were true, to understand what they could possibly mean. These diary entries weren’t essays, but the books I read every night had already given me the idea that, through writing, such an attempt was possible.
My parents had decided to put me in French immersion because they’d heard that was where all the smart kids were. We’d be living across the river from Quebec, in a national capital where French-English bilingualism was a must. But my classmates had begun learning French in kindergarten, as my sister would do. Like Ms Jackson’s make-believe students, they’d begun with their toes in the shallow end. They’d learned to ask for the bathroom and to politely state their names; they’d asked each other, Comment ça va? and told each other, Ça va bien, merci (no other response was possible, even if things weren’t going well at all). They sang the alphabet and learned colours, days, months, and seasons. By January of second grade, they were speaking French all throughout the school day, no English allowed. And into this no English zone, I was immersed. Immersed all at once, tossed into the deep end, where I sank like a stone.
I was not allowed to say a word in English, the only language I knew, and I sat through my days understanding nothing and rendered mute. If I dared speak aloud, I was reprimanded with the silencing, “En Français, s’il-te-plaît!” I understood what that meant, but how could I possibly translate my thoughts into French? I only knew about ten words. By trapping me in a hole where French was the only way out, the only way to make friends or pass the school year, I suppose my teacher intended to accelerate my learning.
This wasn’t the first time I’d felt the force of language binding my peers together and making me different. We’d first moved from England to Maryland, and when I’d started school there, I’d struggled to change the accent my new classmates informed me I had. “Say water!” they begged me, over snacks. I shook my head, and practised at home the American er, trying and eventually succeeding to replace my tuh with a derr. But all French all the time was a lot harder than saying water, wahderr.
“How’s it going?” My parents asked me. “How’s school?”
“It’s going well,” I responded, dutifully. Ça va bien.
I almost failed second grade, and by that time I had stopped speaking altogether, even in English. I was sent to a therapist. But after the summer, back I went, into the third grade French class.
I don’t know what kind of therapist I went to in second grade, whether she was a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a social worker, but she apparently couldn’t find anything wrong with me, and sent me back to my French class with a clean bill of mental health and no particular advice for my parents. Today, there is no shortage of books for parents whose children are shy, introverted or highly sensitive (which may or may not be different ways of describing the same or similar traits), written by experts who treat those children, who offer them breathing exercises, helpful games, and, if nothing else works, medication. Admittedly, when I read descriptions of calm, reassuring parents playing relaxation games with their anxious or overstimulated children, I’m more than a little envious on my former self’s behalf. But I’m glad I suffered through my wordless childhood before anyone coined the terms “social anxiety disorder” and “selective mutism,” and started prescribing pills for them; I’m grateful I made it into adulthood diagnosis- and Paxil-free.
My parents had their own ideas about the situation. Mostly, I think, they hoped I’d grow out of it, though they worried about my homebodiness, my neediness, and the fervour and fewness of my friendships. My mother also told me, once, in a moment of frustration, “You just don’t think people are worth talking to. That’s all shyness is.” She added, “You think people are thinking about you, but they’re not.” My mother was not alone in her assessment; indeed, Freudians characterize shyness as a manifestation of narcissism. And perhaps it is helpful to notice that each shy person in the room believes herself the only one, believes herself different and apart, a defect in the universe’s otherwise continuous pattern, exempt, even, from the platitudes of human nature—all while, according to surveys oft-cited by the experts, nearly half of North Americans consider themselves shy. So it seems shy or sensitive people are not so much special or strange as afflicted with delusions of their own specialness and strangeness.
But the therapist I saw in 1983 was no shyness expert, and no Freudian; and neither was she a Jungian, in which case she may have mentioned Jung’s correlation of social introversion with “sensitiveness,” a trait he ascribed to an estimated twenty-five percent of humanity. Contemporary empirical studies have backed him up, showing that shy and introverted people tend to feel sensations acutely, to be bothered by loud noises, to retreat into daydreams and fantasies. It may have been helpful to know, when I couldn’t find my voice at all, that, while Jung claimed all neurotics were sensitive, and that the trait rendered them “most useless,” he also said elsewhere that the quiet and careful should cast off futile attempts to become “normal” (his term), that they had their own gifts, their own paths, which would be more difficult, but potentially just as rewarding, than the straighter ones they tended to revere. That may have been helpful to hear, but instead I was sent back to the classroom, where I sat in silence and waited in vain to find some chutzpah, to grow a spine, to stop being, as my British relatives would have said, “such a terrible wimp.”
Then, after the winter break, after a year of dumb incomprehension, everyone finally gave up on me, and I was switched out of French immersion and into the English class.
That year, Jamie Lefebvre, who happened to be Jenny’s older brother, often babysat my sister and me on evenings when our parents went out. He was tall, almost as tall as an adult, though he must have been about twelve, and had the same reddish complexion and thick blond hair as his sister, though his hair was short and stood up in a series of little spikes. He was shy, too; I saw this when my father asked him what made the hair stand up.
“What do you put in it?” said Dad.
Jamie smiled at the floor, searching for a trapdoor. “Gel,” he said, almost as a question.
Shifting uncomfortably on her high heels, my mother grinned her nervous, pre-party grin.
“Oh!” said my father. “Gel! Well, it’s very cool.”
Jamie smiled at his shoes, humiliated.
My bedtime was at nine o’clock, an hour after my sister’s, but Jamie always let me stay up until ten, to see the second half of a two-hour Love Boat special. These always seemed to be on when my parents went out, a coincidence both Jamie and I found weird. Since the only TV was in my parents’ room, Jamie and I watched The Love Boat in there, me lying on the bed in my pyjamas, chin resting on my arms, him sitting in an armchair. During the commercial breaks, we discussed the show’s plot—which couples were falling in or out of love this time, and why, and whether they had a chance. I never thought about Jamie when he wasn’t around, but when we were alone, I forgot to be uneasy, forgot to be embarrassed about my opinions or solar system pyjamas, forgot to expect mockery. I handed my Love Boat analyses over to him and watched him consider them seriously before responding.
In one of these Love Boat specials, a
s I remember it, Vicki, the captain’s teenaged daughter, falls for a tall, handsome young cruise passenger travelling with his strangely overprotective parents. Vicki and the young man are left behind on a tropical island for a whole day, which they spend frolicking, foraging, getting to know each other and falling in love. As the sun sets, the ship appears on the horizon, sailing back to pick them up. Vicki and the boy embrace; they kiss; they prepare to kiss again, more seriously this time.
“Wait!” The boy turns his head, distraught. “Vicki, there’s something you need to know. Something about me.”
“About you?”
“I’ll understand if you can’t accept this, can’t be with me…”
“What is it?”
“Vicki, I’m—I’m retarded.”
Close-up of Vicki’s face, inner turmoil written all over it. Commercial break.
Jamie and I turned to each other, baffled. The guy was a great conversationalist, fun to be around, beyond socially adept. What did he mean, retarded? And why would Vicki care?
But Vicki did care. In the last segment of the show, she parted ways with the dashing young retard forever, explaining that she just couldn’t handle it. He had no hard feelings; he understood; he only felt bad for not telling her sooner.
Jamie let me stay up even longer than usual, to discuss the plot’s absurdity.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Me neither. I mean, if they love each other…”
“I know.”
“And she couldn’t even tell…”
“I know—and how is he retarded? If he seems fine?”
“Yeah…”
I ran to my room as my parents’ car pulled into the driveway, to lie awake trying to figure it out alone, without the benefit of Jamie’s advanced age and insight. In French, I’d learned, the verb retarder meant to delay, to make late or to set back.
J’ai été retardé meant, I was held up. Ma montre retarde meant, My watch is slow. So, did Je retarde mean, I am slow? That seemed right, with my mind’s tendency to quiver in each calamitous moment, gears straining.
Just a few days before, I’d found myself alone in the school washroom with Sally, a popular girl in my class. This Sally had an even-featured freckled face, dark hair, trouble with math and spelling, and no inhibitions. Some days she wore eyeliner, though I’d heard her claim she put it on as a joke the night before and couldn’t get it off, and at recess, she was always the first to kiss the boys chased and pinned down by her friends. Though I didn’t like anything in particular about her, I longed to be her friend. Bolstered by a good grade I’d just received and the English class’s promise of a new start, I chatted with Sally for five straight minutes, by the sinks.
“Why don’t you ever talk?” she asked, as I turned to leave.
I shook my head, waiting for words to explain.
“I didn’t know you could talk,” she went on. “I thought you were retarded.” She said this easily, seemingly without malice, which was worse than if she’d said it to be mean. She was telling the truth. By retarded, I knew she meant mentally sub-par and socially disastrous. My affliction was no “learning challenge,” but something more elusive that made me fundamentally uncool and unable to understand why. I was unacceptable. Unfriendable. Hopeless.
Five years later, when I’d just finished junior high, my sister and I spent three weeks of our summer holiday at our grandparents’ house, and one afternoon our older cousin, Zarah, who lived nearby, came over to swim with us. I practised my back dives for a while, then sat beside Zarah in a deck chair, helping myself from the bowl of nuts Oma had brought out and writing descriptions in my diary—descriptions of Opa working in the garden, of the trees and the fence, and of the cool blue water, of the sensation of diving in. I held myself to writing at least one or two of these descriptions every day, partly because L.M. Montgomery’s character, Emily, did similar things, and ended up being a writer, and partly because it was deeply satisfying. Satisfying because I found written words so much more accurate than anything I ever said out loud. And satisfying because, after all, when one writes water, there is no accent, no squeaky, little-girl stammer. In the written word, in that attempt for precise expression, there is dignity.
“So, did you like grade eight?” my cousin said. “Were there any cute boys in your class?”
“Not really.”
“Are you excited to start high school?” said my cousin.
“I guess.”
I longed to tell Zarah the truth, that I was no more excited about high school than I would have been to travel to Pluto—just vaguely terrified and mostly numb, the way one is when faced with the unimaginable. But I didn’t know how to explain that grade eight had happened just alongside me, exhausting and impenetrable. That I’d eaten alone at lunchtime, and at recess hid in the bathroom or sat on the grass, watching. She didn’t even suspect I’d stayed home at least once a week to lie in bed all day, drained and nauseous, sleeping and sipping broth as though I had the flu; and the flu is what my mother and I persisted in calling it. Zarah was accepting me under false pretences, and I wished I could tell her, There’s something about me you should know. But what was this something; how could I describe it? I’m unpopular barely scratched the surface. That I was shy, she’d probably figured out. I’m retarded seemed to strike deeper into the matter.
At the end of the school year that June, some of my classmates, whom I’d been with for three years, had made a yearbook. They pasted all our school photographs on facing pages, and wrote at the top, We Will Remember…. Each student got a caption. Amanda and her daring; Laura and her laughter; Alex and his cuteness. Under my photo was written, Naomi and her silence. At the last minute, they generously changed it to Naomi and her mystery. What bothered me wasn’t the caption, but the photograph. I would have rather they left it out entirely. It wasn’t true that they’d remember me; how could they, when I’d made myself so absent?
We were each asked to write a sentence or two to accompany our photograph and characterization, and I examined the black-and-white image, took in my strained smile and dorky striped shirt, my jutting collarbone and tufty hair, and wrote, Please don’t remember me this way. Even as I wrote that sentence, to be typed up and reproduced, recorded for perpetuity, I must have felt, tightening around my throat, the noose of self-fulfillingly prophetical paradox—instead of achieving invisibility, I was exposing myself again, was wearing the very quality I wished to hide like a flashing red light.
According to the contemporary studies I have read, however, ten out of the twenty-three students in that classroom likely considered themselves shy, or do now, in retrospect. So how did the other nine resist exposing themselves so? How did they avoid being remembered for their silence? Did they, indeed? Looking back, I see one loud girl proclaim herself president of the yearbook committee, and I see a small crowd in identical outfits coalesce around her. I see a lot of carefully set faces. I see Mark, the boy next to me, stare intently at his hands when the teacher looks for volunteers. What did the yearbook say we’d remember about Mark? I forget, now. I see the Hispanic girl—the only one at the school as far as I know—lean low over her notebook, cupping her hand around whatever’s she’s drawing. She speaks only when questioned, in mumbled, heavily accented monosyllables. Once she glances up, and our eyes meet, briefly, before we both look away. The yearbook will command that we always remember Karla and her hair, which is curly, short and unstylish, with a long, braided rat-tail at the back.
Still, none of this quite gets at the questions—why do half of us call ourselves shy; what do we mean? And why is it so quickly assumed, especially in the age of “social anxiety disorder” and “social phobia,” that we ought to focus our efforts on becoming yearbook-committee president types? Many of the advice books cite a study that found shy Chinese children the most popular among their peers, and shy Canadian children the least popular among theirs. In fact, the Chinese word for what we call shyness translates, has underst
anding. The experts usually mention also that Japan boasts the most shy people, per capita, in the world, and Israel the fewest. The advice-givers’ biases colour what they say about all this, either imagining Asia as a haven for the quiet and watchful, or describing emotionally broken Japanese children cowering in shame while the joyous Israelis hold their emotionally healthy heads high. In any case, what the experts agree on is that, when in Israel, or in the US or Canada, you’d better hope you’re not shy, especially if you’re a child. And if you are shy, you need, depending on whom you ask, either a big hug or a swift kick in the pants.
There’s a scene at the beginning of the film Hilary and Jackie, in which a young Jacqueline du Pré encounters a strange woman who tells her a secret. At the end, we see that scene again. The woman is Jackie as an adult, a ghost, and she tells her younger self, “Everything’s going to be all right.” I can’t resist the appeal of that fantasy, of reaching back to my former, smaller self, to reassure. When I imagine encountering that Naomi, I tell her that half the people in every room feel something like she does. I meet her solemn gaze and promise that she will, slowly, grow a thicker skin, one she’ll have to sustain all her life with humour and good company and measured solitude. I tell her that she’ll grow up to have the life she wants, albeit infused with two-faced longing—to be granted privacy, and to be understood.
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