________shyAFTER YEARS OF THINKING MY SHYNESS ONLY AFFECTED ME, I REALIZE THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF HIDING IN MY LIVING ROOM WITH THE SHADES DRAWN.

BY CAROLINE KNAPP | So my neighbors think I'm a bitch, snooty and cold. Two years ago, at a neighborhood potluck supper, they stood around on the host's patio, right behind my house, and talked about what a snob I was. "She never talks to anyone," they said. "She acts so superior."

I didn't hear any of this directly, of course, because I wasn't there. When the invitation arrived ("Come on over! Have fun! Get to know your neighbors!"), I told the organizers I had plans that night (a family thing, can't get out of it, so sorry), and then, on the night in question, I parked my car around the block, stole back to my house and hid in the living room: lights out, curtains drawn tight.

A year or so later, I became friendly with the woman who lives next door to me, and she told me about the unflattering party chat.

I was aghast.

"They think I'm a snob? Superior? Can't they tell I'm just shy?"

She shrugged. "I guess a lot of people just don't get that. They read shyness as something else." She paused, then added, "I think shy people are pretty confusing."

This conversation stuck with me for many months, plagued me like a mild but persistent itch. I have been shy my entire tongue-tied, self-conscious life. As a kid, my heart would pound every time a teacher called on me and I had to speak in front of the class. As a teenager, the mere presence of an attractive boy would obliterate my voice, send me into a state of mute terror; authority figures -- college professors, therapists, my dad -- could miniaturize me in a flash, simply by making eye contact.

Today, I've outgrown -- or at least learned to hide -- some of the more obvious symptoms of shyness (the dry mouth, the sweaty palms), but I haven't outgrown the central feelings. Put me in a new social situation, ask me to walk into a cocktail party full of strangers, call on me to make a speech and my first, most visceral reaction can be summed up in a word: ACK! The internal audiotape clicks on at high volume (too scary; you won't have anything to say; people will judge you harshly); the internal video shows me looking stiff and uncomfortable, an awkward grin plastered on my face; the gut impulse is to flee: find a way out, make up an excuse, park the car around the block and hide in the living room.

I'm hardly alone in this. In fact, if experts on the subject are correct, I have more and more company. The insulating, sometimes isolating effects of technology have created something of a safe haven for shy people, allowing us to avoid direct contact with colleagues, sales clerks, bank tellers, even friends. Conversational skills be damned -- we can connect via the Internet, e-mail and ATM instead. And (not surprisingly) we seem to feel shyer as a result. In the last two decades, the number of people who describe themselves as chronically shy has increased from 40 percent of the general population to 50 percent. According to Philip Zimbardo, one of the nation's leading researchers on shyness, most of us (55 percent) report that we've considered ourselves to be shy at some point in our lives, or that we become shy in specific situations (romantic and authority figures top the list of shyness-inducers); a scant 5 percent of Americans say they've never been shy at all.

The majority of shy folk tend to be like me -- naturally inhibited, prone to imagining the worst when faced with new social situations, highly self-conscious -- but increasing numbers appear to live on the extreme end of the shy scale. National surveys indicate that social phobia -- shyness so pervasive and intractable it interferes with ordinary daily functioning -- afflicts one out of every eight Americans at some point in their lives, making it the third most common psychiatric condition.

For most of my life, I've lived with shyness the way I've lived with, say, my hair, which is straight and fine and always has been. I might wish I had a thick, curly mane, but the hair gods gave me this stuff instead; likewise, I might wish I were a confident, gregarious extrovert, but the gods of personality (a team, it appears, comprising geneticists, brain chemists and environmentalists) decided to make me quiet and shy. Fact of life, case closed.

On some not-quite-conscious level, I've also expected others to accept that fact, to understand my shyness as a central, immutable part of who I am. If I'm the quiet one at the dinner party, I expect friends to understand it: Cut her some slack; she's shy. If I'm not terribly forthcoming or demonstrative in a new relationship with a friend or lover, I expect the other party to not take it personally: Give her some time; she'll warm up. I suppose this is why that conversation with the woman next door haunted me so: For nearly 40 years, I've seen my shyness as something that really only affects me -- I'm the one who's uncomfortable here, I'm the one struggling with self-consciousness and anxiety, the less shy have it easy and should give me a break. But her statement -- that shy people are confusing -- raised some rather tricky questions about affect; about the particular kind of power a shy person wields, however unknowingly; about how shyness is experienced not just by shy people themselves but also by the people (shy or not) around them.

The shy often speak in code. My mother was a profoundly reserved person, shy to the core, and yet she had a subtle kind of warmth that the important people in her life learned to recognize. Her expressions of love were never obvious or direct. She didn't hug or coo or say, "I love you." Instead, they were manifest in the quietest gestures and cues: a glimmer of eye contact here, a cup of tea there, a tone of voice that could communicate profound concern or pride if your receptors were properly tuned to receive the message. An outsider watching us interact might have described my mother as cold, withholding, detached, but her style seemed entirely normal to me. When I got old enough to spend the night at friends' houses, I always felt astonished by how demonstrative other mothers seemed to be, how they'd tuck their kids in, rub their backs or stroke their hair. Such behavior struck me as alien, even undignified, and although that interpretation may say something about how low my own expectations for affection came to be, it also suggests that I learned to decode my mother early on, to read between the lines of her reserve and tease out the warmth.

N E X T_ P A G E: The science of shyness

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