Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2023-12-10 07:26 pm
silveradept) wrote2023-12-10 07:26 pm
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December Days 2023 #10: Things I No Longer Believe Fully: I'm Shy
[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#10: "I'm shy."
Ya sure about that, person posting about their insecurities and their successes online where people can read them? Person with social media accounts that are regularly posted to? Person who seems perfectly at ease looking silly in front of small children, or who willingly throws themselves on the sword of being in public-facing videos, or who is repeatedly chosen to have their picture in marketing materials (those I don't volunteer for, usually)? Who goes to conventions and does presentations, professionally or otherwise? You're going to tell me that you're shy?
Kind of? Because there's quite a bit going on behind the scenes of many of those situations that make them less shy-inducing situations. The general rules that gets applied in a situation of whether I believe that I'm shy about something or not is the following:
That said, the situations in #3 of this series about not wanting to overstep and wanting to be in positions where I don't come across as creepy or intrusive are important, and depending on the situation, they may over-ride and create a "shy" situation instead of one where I could feel comfortable speaking. Where that usually happens is in situations where there might be the possibility of being interpreted as flirting or otherwise propositioning someone. In situations where that's explicitly allowed and encouraged, that will make things less shy, but one of the things that I have reasonably-sized boggles at is that there are some people who will just go up to other people and start flirting with them, believing the context is right to do so, even without any sort of signal from the person they want to flirt with. (At least stereotypically, the people who do this are men, and media accounts vary about how successful the cold flirt is with the target depending on what kind of story they want to tell.)
You can trace at least some of this shyness to a source in rejection sensitivity. While I didn't have that framework to work with for much of my life, being a smart kid let me come to the perfectly logical conclusion that if I wanted to minimize the opportunities for others to make fun of me for my mistakes, I didn't want to put myself in the kind of situation where I could make a mistake where there were witnesses. If you combine that with the belief in #1 where being a nerd meant being sent to the bottom of the list of potential partners or attractive people, I wasn't exactly going to be in the mood to risk the potential of rejection from anyone at all, and was at least mildly convinced that such a rejection would be loud and invite ridicule about the nerd who sought to rise above their station and believe that someone would be interested in them. Getting out into more cosmopolitan settings helped a little bit, but there's still some reluctance to engage with things (and being clueless doesn't help, and nor did blowing up a friendship by indicating a dating interest at the very wrong time.)
(Unbeknownst to me, because cluelessness, apparently, in spaces where I was comfortable and appreciative and complimentary on the things that people were looking for compliments on, and otherwise being a good conversation partner, a supportive human, and the like, there were people who were evaluating my prospects. Only some of them, I suspect, have ever said to me, in text or to my face, that they had an interest in me, for whatever reasons they have of not pursuing that line of inquiry or interest. Apparently, my most successful methods to this point are people getting to know me over a period of time and then deciding it's worth telling me they're interested in me. This is certainly not a method that can be compressed or transformed into some slick pick-up method that I can sell to other people who are looking for something to up their "game" with.)
And then, when my world expanded again, I ended up getting into the bad relationship, and that basically set me on a path of spending several years not really contemplating being anything other than quiet and reserved, except in specific places and times, since that was the pose I could adopt that would be the least confrontational and least likely to result in upset. So I suppose that one wasn't as much "shy" as "scared," but it certainly wasn't going to be a situation where I was going to be flirty and on display. There was at least one gathering of friends that I was accompanying my ex to where the expectation was that I would be social with the other people who are there, but the pressure of it was far too much for me to handle, since it was a situation tailored to bring every rejection sensitivity weasel out to bite hard, and I basically found a corner to retreat to and stayed there, trying to be as useful as I could to the functioning of the party without having to actually be part of the party. There also wasn't a whole lot of time I spent in that relationship where I was in a situation where what I said couldn't possibly get back to her in one way or another, so I was also circumspect about topics and what I said around the other people when we were hanging out. After all, they were her friends first, and they would probably take her side if it looked like we were having disputes, major or minor. (This was basically true, and also how I found out that my ex would lie about what I had said to her friends to make herself look better and me the villain.)
There was also a fair amount of misunderstanding in that period, and it's only with time and perspective that I can see how some of that misunderstanding was deliberate so as to put me on the defensive and trying to either explain myself or find some way of making up the rudeness to the person who was telling me what I was doing or saying was rude (or un-customary). It was, for the most part, playing a game of Mao, but with people, rather than cards, and I was entering the situation several rounds into the game, where several of the secret rules had already been set, and nobody was telling me anything unless it was "conduct unbecoming" or something similar. And sometimes even when I had figured out the rules, I would get a penalty for "conduct unbecoming" because it wasn't what she wanted me to do.
In any case, all of that context generally leads me to try and be contextually aware when I'm in various places. I've developed several roles for use in text and in person and am often juggling when to use them or evaluating whether this is an appropriate situation to put myself in or whether this is a good compliment to give in this moment in time and place in the world. The performer in Story Time is a role. The person setting others at their ease because technology is misbehaving and I understand that and am giving a running commentary on what we're going to do and how I expect the technology to behave is also a role. At convention, the expectation is that cosplay will be appreciated for the effort and the interpretation and sometimes you go "Oh, neat, the floor lights that light you from below makes your Bowsette look even more sinister, can I get a picture of that as well, please?" And most cosplayers are very good about "yes, of course, we can take a picture" when you say things like "when we're not in the crush of people in this spot, can I get a picture?"
It's when I'm in a situation where there isn't an obvious role to grab, there's not a conversation topic that everyone is going to be at least willing to offer an opinion on, and/or where I recognize there are more than a few ways of embarrassing myself or doing something out of line because of not understanding or being able to see the lines of the unwritten rules that I end up clamming up. Or where it's a group of friends who are having a great conversation among themselves, and I'm present, but I haven't been invited into the conversation. (And it hasn't been explicitly said that this conversation or conversational group is a "jump in when you have something to say" kind of situation. That's my cultural upbringing. Others' defaults are different than mine.) Or, sometimes it's that I have been trying to pay attention to what's going on, but my VAST is also trying to pay attention to everything else that's going on, including other audio or visual streams that are within my perception. Since I'm trying to process all of those inputs, I might not say anything and then try to catch back up with context once I can focus again.
Which, I suppose, is less about my Myers-Briggs test, or my natal chart, or any other kind of thing you could substitute in here that would explain some of that personality, and more that I like having a little bit of structure in my social environments, or a "hook" that I can use as a way of getting over inertia and getting into the flow of things. I really do like the color systems and the like where someone can indicate whether they're interested in conversation (or photography) so that there's less opportunities for misunderstanding (and thus, less opportunities for the rejection sensitivity weasels to bite.) I also wish there were some way of communicating other information, not just about general desire to communicate, but some way of distinguishing the "I will be happy to have you compliment my fashion taste, if you do it in a way that isn't sexualizing me." from the "I am dressed in this way specifically to solicit commentary about how hot I am, please compliment me in this manner." or similar gradations that make it easier to tailor things to a form that will not only be acceptable, but welcomed, while avoiding the parts that will be unwelcome. Some of this can be determined by context, of course, but others can't, and in other cases, it would be something much more like "if your gender presentation is masculine/male, please do not compliment me on attractiveness, I do not know you. If your gender presentation is feminine/female, you may compliment me on my attractiveness, because you are not trying to sexualize me into my component parts without appreciating the totality of me."
I guess what I'm really saying is that it would be nice if people gave decent debug logs, even if some of them would be redacted some to protect privacy. I don't fully believe it's "shyness" that's causing recalcitrance anymore, as much as it is rejection sensitivity and being cautious about whether what I'm doing or saying is broadly acceptable in the context I'm in and is specifically acceptable to the person who will be on the receiving end of it.
#10: "I'm shy."
Ya sure about that, person posting about their insecurities and their successes online where people can read them? Person with social media accounts that are regularly posted to? Person who seems perfectly at ease looking silly in front of small children, or who willingly throws themselves on the sword of being in public-facing videos, or who is repeatedly chosen to have their picture in marketing materials (those I don't volunteer for, usually)? Who goes to conventions and does presentations, professionally or otherwise? You're going to tell me that you're shy?
Kind of? Because there's quite a bit going on behind the scenes of many of those situations that make them less shy-inducing situations. The general rules that gets applied in a situation of whether I believe that I'm shy about something or not is the following:
- If it's a situation within my expertise, my engagement with the conversation intends to be well-reasoned, insightful, and welcome, and we can all comfortably talk as knowledgeable people among each other.
- If it's a situation where I have a known person also present, have been assigned a role, there is a clear conversation topic, or given an icebreaker or prompt that is meant to help kickstart conversation among people, that is often enough to overcome the inertia and get me talking with other people that I don't know.
- If I have questions, I will often try to ask them in the correct forum and time to get responses, because I would like to know the answer to the question. Or, if the answer is inconclusive, the reasoning behind the thing, or something similar.
That said, the situations in #3 of this series about not wanting to overstep and wanting to be in positions where I don't come across as creepy or intrusive are important, and depending on the situation, they may over-ride and create a "shy" situation instead of one where I could feel comfortable speaking. Where that usually happens is in situations where there might be the possibility of being interpreted as flirting or otherwise propositioning someone. In situations where that's explicitly allowed and encouraged, that will make things less shy, but one of the things that I have reasonably-sized boggles at is that there are some people who will just go up to other people and start flirting with them, believing the context is right to do so, even without any sort of signal from the person they want to flirt with. (At least stereotypically, the people who do this are men, and media accounts vary about how successful the cold flirt is with the target depending on what kind of story they want to tell.)
You can trace at least some of this shyness to a source in rejection sensitivity. While I didn't have that framework to work with for much of my life, being a smart kid let me come to the perfectly logical conclusion that if I wanted to minimize the opportunities for others to make fun of me for my mistakes, I didn't want to put myself in the kind of situation where I could make a mistake where there were witnesses. If you combine that with the belief in #1 where being a nerd meant being sent to the bottom of the list of potential partners or attractive people, I wasn't exactly going to be in the mood to risk the potential of rejection from anyone at all, and was at least mildly convinced that such a rejection would be loud and invite ridicule about the nerd who sought to rise above their station and believe that someone would be interested in them. Getting out into more cosmopolitan settings helped a little bit, but there's still some reluctance to engage with things (and being clueless doesn't help, and nor did blowing up a friendship by indicating a dating interest at the very wrong time.)
(Unbeknownst to me, because cluelessness, apparently, in spaces where I was comfortable and appreciative and complimentary on the things that people were looking for compliments on, and otherwise being a good conversation partner, a supportive human, and the like, there were people who were evaluating my prospects. Only some of them, I suspect, have ever said to me, in text or to my face, that they had an interest in me, for whatever reasons they have of not pursuing that line of inquiry or interest. Apparently, my most successful methods to this point are people getting to know me over a period of time and then deciding it's worth telling me they're interested in me. This is certainly not a method that can be compressed or transformed into some slick pick-up method that I can sell to other people who are looking for something to up their "game" with.)
And then, when my world expanded again, I ended up getting into the bad relationship, and that basically set me on a path of spending several years not really contemplating being anything other than quiet and reserved, except in specific places and times, since that was the pose I could adopt that would be the least confrontational and least likely to result in upset. So I suppose that one wasn't as much "shy" as "scared," but it certainly wasn't going to be a situation where I was going to be flirty and on display. There was at least one gathering of friends that I was accompanying my ex to where the expectation was that I would be social with the other people who are there, but the pressure of it was far too much for me to handle, since it was a situation tailored to bring every rejection sensitivity weasel out to bite hard, and I basically found a corner to retreat to and stayed there, trying to be as useful as I could to the functioning of the party without having to actually be part of the party. There also wasn't a whole lot of time I spent in that relationship where I was in a situation where what I said couldn't possibly get back to her in one way or another, so I was also circumspect about topics and what I said around the other people when we were hanging out. After all, they were her friends first, and they would probably take her side if it looked like we were having disputes, major or minor. (This was basically true, and also how I found out that my ex would lie about what I had said to her friends to make herself look better and me the villain.)
There was also a fair amount of misunderstanding in that period, and it's only with time and perspective that I can see how some of that misunderstanding was deliberate so as to put me on the defensive and trying to either explain myself or find some way of making up the rudeness to the person who was telling me what I was doing or saying was rude (or un-customary). It was, for the most part, playing a game of Mao, but with people, rather than cards, and I was entering the situation several rounds into the game, where several of the secret rules had already been set, and nobody was telling me anything unless it was "conduct unbecoming" or something similar. And sometimes even when I had figured out the rules, I would get a penalty for "conduct unbecoming" because it wasn't what she wanted me to do.
In any case, all of that context generally leads me to try and be contextually aware when I'm in various places. I've developed several roles for use in text and in person and am often juggling when to use them or evaluating whether this is an appropriate situation to put myself in or whether this is a good compliment to give in this moment in time and place in the world. The performer in Story Time is a role. The person setting others at their ease because technology is misbehaving and I understand that and am giving a running commentary on what we're going to do and how I expect the technology to behave is also a role. At convention, the expectation is that cosplay will be appreciated for the effort and the interpretation and sometimes you go "Oh, neat, the floor lights that light you from below makes your Bowsette look even more sinister, can I get a picture of that as well, please?" And most cosplayers are very good about "yes, of course, we can take a picture" when you say things like "when we're not in the crush of people in this spot, can I get a picture?"
It's when I'm in a situation where there isn't an obvious role to grab, there's not a conversation topic that everyone is going to be at least willing to offer an opinion on, and/or where I recognize there are more than a few ways of embarrassing myself or doing something out of line because of not understanding or being able to see the lines of the unwritten rules that I end up clamming up. Or where it's a group of friends who are having a great conversation among themselves, and I'm present, but I haven't been invited into the conversation. (And it hasn't been explicitly said that this conversation or conversational group is a "jump in when you have something to say" kind of situation. That's my cultural upbringing. Others' defaults are different than mine.) Or, sometimes it's that I have been trying to pay attention to what's going on, but my VAST is also trying to pay attention to everything else that's going on, including other audio or visual streams that are within my perception. Since I'm trying to process all of those inputs, I might not say anything and then try to catch back up with context once I can focus again.
Which, I suppose, is less about my Myers-Briggs test, or my natal chart, or any other kind of thing you could substitute in here that would explain some of that personality, and more that I like having a little bit of structure in my social environments, or a "hook" that I can use as a way of getting over inertia and getting into the flow of things. I really do like the color systems and the like where someone can indicate whether they're interested in conversation (or photography) so that there's less opportunities for misunderstanding (and thus, less opportunities for the rejection sensitivity weasels to bite.) I also wish there were some way of communicating other information, not just about general desire to communicate, but some way of distinguishing the "I will be happy to have you compliment my fashion taste, if you do it in a way that isn't sexualizing me." from the "I am dressed in this way specifically to solicit commentary about how hot I am, please compliment me in this manner." or similar gradations that make it easier to tailor things to a form that will not only be acceptable, but welcomed, while avoiding the parts that will be unwelcome. Some of this can be determined by context, of course, but others can't, and in other cases, it would be something much more like "if your gender presentation is masculine/male, please do not compliment me on attractiveness, I do not know you. If your gender presentation is feminine/female, you may compliment me on my attractiveness, because you are not trying to sexualize me into my component parts without appreciating the totality of me."
I guess what I'm really saying is that it would be nice if people gave decent debug logs, even if some of them would be redacted some to protect privacy. I don't fully believe it's "shyness" that's causing recalcitrance anymore, as much as it is rejection sensitivity and being cautious about whether what I'm doing or saying is broadly acceptable in the context I'm in and is specifically acceptable to the person who will be on the receiving end of it.