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| Boreas - John William Waterhouse |
Here in the West, when we come across shy people, we're pretty sure we should either fix them or do something sexual with them or both. I have soft proof. And that is not what we do with them here at Mature Landscaping.
When you do an image search for "shy," you get a lot of soft porn. If you do an Amazon book search on "shy," you get 1,516 results; the related searches terms are
shyness, introvert, and
social anxiety. On the first two screen-pages of Amazon results, there are 24 books listed: 7 (including the top two results) are on fixing shyness in adults; 7 are designed to help children fix their own shyness; 3 are books to help parents fix their introverted children; 3 are soft porn novels, one each for the most prevalent sexual preferences; 1 is a vampire book, which is probably soft porn too; and one is on paruresis or shy bladder syndrome--which, due to propinquity, laziness, and a Western cultural bias, I'm lumping in with the soft porn numbers. You don't even want to know what you get when you do an image search on "sensitive."
The news that encourages me about America is that an
Amazon search on that word uncovers a trove of stuff based on Elaine Aron's seminal work,
The Highly Sensitive Person and other work linking sensitivity to creativity. And some soft porn, in case you were inclined to overestimate your human beings.
(I detect a researchable trend. Theory: A statistical majority of
x number of randomly selected adjectives researched in Google Images and on Amazon will produce soft porn results within the first two screen pages. Or: I need a job.)
Speaking of propinquity, I was taking a lunch break from tallying the results of my informal
HSP test results accumulated from your comments on last week's post, switching focus to my latest copy of
The Atlantic, beloved of all liberal introverts, and I was brought up short by an exemplary article on that HSP-est of writers,"
The Autumn of Joan Didion" by Caitlin Flanagan. Confession: I've never read Didion, although I have
The Year of Magical Thinking on my shelf. I'm a snob about books that are rumored to be wildly popular with women; snob was the identity I chose to go with in high school when I was too shy to pull off friendly or popular; most girls could do one or the other and, therefore, and for other reasons having to do with puberty, I claimed to prefer the company of boys.
This paragraph from Flanagan's commentary on Didion's first novel,
Run River, jumped off the left hand page, sending me scrambling to the Kindle store:
"Taking out Lily Knight was like dating a deaf mute." Lily's sister-in-law remarks acidly (Didion's fiction always includes the wisecraking, jaded older woman): "Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands."
Shot to the heart. And, on the right hand side of the magazine just opposite that quote, a full-page ad for Susan Cain's
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. That can't be coincidence. The ad offers what Cain calls a Manifesto For Introverts.
1. There’s a word for “people who are in their heads too much”: thinkers.
2. Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our “heed-takers” more than ever.
3. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.
4. Texting is popular because in an overly extroverted society, everyone craves asynchronyous, non-F2F communication.
5. We teach kids in group classrooms not because this is the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with the children while all the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the model.
6. The next generation of quiet kids can and should be raised to know their own strength.
7. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend-extrovert. There’s always time to be quiet later.
8. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is the key to finding work you love and work that matters.
9. Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.
10. Rule of thumb for networking events: one genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.
11. It’s OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.
12. “Quiet leadership” is not an oxymoron.
13. The universal longing for heaven is not about immortality so much as the wish for a world in which everyone is always kind.
14. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.
15. Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.
16. “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” – Gandhi
Can I get a witness? And that, naturally, sent me running back to the Kindle store, to my disappointment:
Quiet won't be released for about two weeks and you have to pre-order. Meanwhile, here's
Susan Cain's blog. Here's Pico Iyer's NYTimes article on the subject,
"The Joy of Quiet,", and Susan Cain's NYTimes Sunday Review article on her book,
"Shyness: An Evolutionary Tactic." Oh, and her Psychology Today article, "
Quiet: The Power of Introverts." Psychology Today is the soft porn of psych journals.
I know it's worthwhile to post all these links because I have the results of my soft poll from your comments and, temperamentally speaking, I know where you live...yes, even the
guys who may have inadvertently outed themselves by shying like wild horses from the very idea of taking a Highly Sensitive Person test (I say "may have..." and you know I love you).
HSP Results
Total Pageviews: 120 ( Approximately fifteen of these were the usual folks from Tbilisi and Destrito Federal looking for porn--soft or otherwise--by searching on mature.)
Total n: 32 (30, or 25%, of readers responded by taking the test and leaving a comment. Two additional comments came from two lovely HSP Facebook Friends.) 10 males and 22 females.
HSP High Score Did Not Meet Criteria Borderline Scores Shied Away
M: 2 1 2 2 3
F: 19 6 3 1 0
65.6 % of readers who responded with a comment endorsed HSP traits with a score of 14 or higher, supporting my soft hypothesis that this blog attracts other HSP bloggers at a higher rate than the 15-20% found in random public samples.
They also leave wonderful comments.
I leave you with two more passages from Caitlin Flanagan's Atlantic article on Didion. In describing Dideon's HSP traits, Flanagan reveals her own. And mine.
Didion's sensibility is like that of the young Joan Baez, whom she encountered in 1965: "Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young."
Ultimately, Joan Didion's crime--artistic and personal--is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old.
We'll see about that. I've just downloaded Dideon's first novel,
Run River (1963), and ordered her collection of essays,
Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968). For as long as my finger turns the pages (digital or paper), Joan Didion and I will be girls again.
[Proof that I'm wired this way. Two poems are temporarily added to the top of the
Poetry page, written by me in high school and discovered this week in those boxes of my mother's that were in our garage. Please, judge the HSP traits revealed and not the quality of the poem. But you knew that.]
