That’s Men: Shyness goes when you realise no one is looking, says Padraig O’Morain

We were an unremarkable crowd on the Luas on a wet day, wanting to get the journey over with. One man stood out, largely because it was so obvious that he didn’t want to stand out.

He stayed by the door, eyes down, red-faced, sometimes glancing surreptitiously to the left and right, hunched up, and you could tell by his demeanour that he felt the eyes of the entire tram were on him.

The sight of his discomfort brought back to me a sharp memory of years of self-consciousness and shyness, which I have left behind me to a large degree.

What I recognised in him was the conviction that everybody around you is intensely aware of your presence, doesn’t think much of you, and will judge severely every movement you make and every single thing you might say.

It’s as though they even know what you think and feel, and disapprove of that too.

It’s a rotten feeling, and it takes a lot of the good out of ordinary experiences. The arrival of visitors, and any social situation, such as having to actually chat to people in a pub or in a canteen, are all torture. In your mind, you cannot match up to them.

On top of all that there’s the assumption other people make – unknown to you – that you are aloof, when in reality you’re afraid to open your mouth.

The beginning of a breakthrough came for me when somebody remarked that I was as cool as ice and other people nodded in agreement. They had interpreted my shyness as a sort of unflappability. I realised then that they couldn’t see the turbulence inside.

The realisation didn’t end the shyness, but it brought huge relief: for the first time, I realised I could hide in plain view.

I went into public relations and then journalism, which were paradoxical moves, to say the least. Neither is a business for the shy. But in those businesses I practised the skill of playing to your weaknesses. When I was in PR I learned to write extremely good press releases so that I wouldn’t have to actually ring journalists and talk to them; the prospect was just too scary. My press releases did quite well.

When I made my way into journalism I managed to reduce the amount of time spent ringing people who might not want to talk to me, and having to ask them things, by getting good at researching sources of information, such as the often- ignored written replies to Dáil questions. This was before the internet and Google, so you could do a lot with a bit of information gleaned from the Dáil reports and the like. I still regret the innumerable missed opportunities that my holding back cost me – but not too much: we all have our flaws and I did reasonably okay despite mine.

Eventually the shyness faded away and today that horrible feeling that the man on the Luas was experiencing has worn off. But I am still the one who won’t have much to say at a party or social gathering, and if you put me beside somebody, let’s say somebody well known, at an event, I can suddenly find that I cannot get a single remark into my head to make to them.

But these are small glitches. The point I’m trying to make to people who have that horrible experience of intense shyness is that over time it really does fall away.

You begin to stop worrying about what people think, and you realise that people actually are paying more or less no attention to you at all, and then you begin to feel normal again.

For the shyness to fade away, though, you have to interact with other people: it’s really the exposure to what you fear that changes things.

The man on the Luas, I would say, was in his mid-20s. That was the age at which things began to turn around for me. I hope they will turn around for him soon.

pomorain@yahoo.com

Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.