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| Boreas - John William Waterhouse |
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.
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.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
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.]
This was a fully loaded post and I shall need weeks of reading to keep up with you!
ReplyDeleteHopefully some HSP will be able to manage it more quickly. I work at a snail's pace.
KleinsteMotte,
ReplyDeleteTake your time, dear. Life before blogging.
Ah, Knatolee just weighed in. That makes it 33 respondents, an additional high scoring HSP, and a heavy snow storm at Knat's house.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful post! You touch on an issue that I've been mulling over, on and off, for sometime. The relationship between sensitivity and creativity. It seems difficult to imagine those two things are not deeply connected.
ReplyDeleteConfession: I took your test but didn't report my results. I think I was a 9 ... a borderline?
ReplyDeleteLove the quote: "Everyone shines, given the right lighting."
Nance, I love this post, and like KleinsteMotte and Paul, I will be thinking about it for some time, also checking out the books you mentioned. As a young person I was taught by my former church that shy people were "selfish" because they wasted opportunities to share their "gifts."
ReplyDeletePaul Sunstone,
ReplyDeleteDid you get a chance to take the test in the previous post? I was hoping for your impression when I linked to it.
Sightings,
Please mentally adjust those stats to include your result. And thank you.
Donna Banta,
Oh, my. Is there anything your former church didn't want to reshape? And I thought it was tough to live with an ultra-extroverted mother...holy cow! Did I say that?
Thank you, Nance. I'm flattered that you would think of me, but I have a quirk: I never take personality tests.
ReplyDeleteUnbelievable! That you would write about something (shyness) that has been one of my favorite subjects over the years. I hate the word 'shy'! Or I hate the fact that people use the word to denigrate; as if there were something wrong with being 'shy'. There needs to be another word or another mindset...but it's too monumental a task. I can only keep chipping away at it whenever I hear someone use the word to pity someone.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you know that I'm 'shy' as only an INFP can be. Which is a lot!
I will be looking up all the Susan Cain writings I can; just as soon as I finish this comment.
And Joan Baez as well! She has been one of my heroes since I first heard her sing...about 50+ years ago. She gave a concert at our local university a few years ago and I was thrilled to be there and to hear that magnificent voice once again.
Again, thanks for the great post!
Oh Nance...you've done it again.
ReplyDeleteNot meaning to sound predictable, but I, too, think this is a great post. So many things ring true. I was misdiagnosed as a 'snob' by high school peers, when in reality I was simply $#y. Seemed like it was more about being uncomfortable in my own teen-aged skin rather than $#y. (I totally get Steven's confessed dislike for the word.) Makes me crazy (er?) when adults make the judgement about the toddler, "just being shy," as though its a bad thing. Of course they want to have a chance to size us up before they let us in...adults do the same thing; we just have more control over the situation than our children do. They get labeled as shy for doing the exact thing evolution (and parents) have taught; to be cautious.
Loved the manifesto, too.
Now, I'm off to read some poetry written from an HSP teenager's point of view. Thanks for sharing!
This discussion of introversion resonated with me. Introverts do not always fit neatly into a society that celebrates extroversion.
ReplyDeleteShy bladder syndrome? Our bladders are always quiet and hiding in our bodies, so aren't they shy by definition?
I was extremely shy during most of high school and only really shook it off after going into the army. Curiously, after years of being essentially free of shyness I find it coming back at the weirdest times.
ReplyDeletesending me scrambling to the Kindle store:
Got to admit I have an addiction, at the slightest whim I will go at warp speed to the Kindle Store. I current have 45 unread books on my Kindle and 3 I am reading now.
I didn't fit the criteria, but I LOVE the list. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteJoan Didion worked at Vogue magazine for two years in the early 1960's. I still have a letter she personally wrote to me in response to one I (a mere sixteen-year-old) sent to her taking issue with a movie review she had written.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was pretty great at the time that she would value my opinion enough to take the time to answer me. Now, I understand what type of personality she was (and still is) a little better and am even more impressed.
A Pre-Raphaelite girl. Introverts are not always as shy as they may at first seem. Misdiagnosis, as you point out, is ever the risk.
ReplyDeleteWow. There really is a lot of great stuff here Nance. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI love # 11 on the list since I always thought it was just me that crossed the street to avoid having to talk with people. Yesterday I checked out from the library Didion's two most recent books and so it is interesting to find you talking about her here. I will have to come back in the morning to check out your links.
l love all those points but I think #13 is one of my favs! I want McCain's book! And Pico Iyer has been a favourite writer of mine for a long time. Lov hit NYT article.
ReplyDeletePeople should just let people be how they are. Seems obvious, but apparently not. I can't tell you how many times I've been told I'm too shy, too quiet. Well, not so much in the last decade or so, as I've come into my own! No one tells me I'm too quiet anymore, hahaha! But I remain a very introspective person who is quite happy working alone and spending time alone (or with a small group of people.) I spend a lot of time thinking and writing.
I don't get why people get their knickers in a twist if you're shy or quiet, but then I don't get why people get their knickers in a twist if someone else is gay or black or does unusual things with cucumbers! ;)
ANd it's still snowing! ANother 6" on tap for today.
Paul, Never take personality tests? Since forever? There's integrity. And, perhaps, a story underneath somewhere.
ReplyDeleteSteven, You are an artist. In the sixties and seventies, I submit, the world was a friendlier place to its INFP's, its artists and poets. A culture inimical to intellectuals, artists and poets seems to come with the rest of the conservative rhetoric in this presidential campaign, making me ever more determined see them defeated.
Kay from MB, Scott Peck (I still think of him) said that he had never met a deep thinker who was not shy and cautious, that such self-consciousness was the very definition of being human. And you are a lovely human.
Ahab, I steered clear of researching shy bladder syndrome, but I think I've probably got that, too. You know, you race out of a movie to the restroom, trying to hurry back to the screen, only to discover there are four people in the restroom with you and your bladder won't cooperate until it senses it's entirely alone. It becomes an economics problem at that point.
Beach Bum, I've been a little shy with my new Kindle Fire, so I was alarmed to find myself clicking away to order stuff on a whim. ERID: E-Reader Impulse Disorder. And it, too, becomes an economics problem at that point.
Linda, You could lie about the criteria and we bloggers would never know. Which might be the whole point.
TexasTPT, We could have been best friends at 16. You could have called me to come over and you'd let me actually touch your Didion letter. Then we'd call Mary Lee.
Edge Columns, Yeah, at some point I should write about my life onstage in spandex. And you sound like you might have a story or two to illustrate your point, too.
Rubye, Would you like to go with me over to TexasTPT's house to touch her Joan Didion letter? No eye contact required.
Knatolee, I think you live in Introvert Heaven up there with your snow and your ducks, your art and your maple syrup tapping. I long to drop in for scones.
I, too, avoid "chick lit" or "favored by women" books but The Year of Magical Thinking is brilliant and beautiful and touching and will leave you breathless and holding your heart.
ReplyDeleteI am now going to take the HSP test... don't you love subjects who miss the deadline for the analysis?
a/b
I really like quiet and soft in a person. I find it extremely comforting.
ReplyDeletewv: lefse. an edible treat for us Scandinavians. Goes well with lutefisk.
Ashleigh Burroughs, I do, indeed, love latecomers and, always, you.
ReplyDeleteJono, Lutefisk is terrifying to HSP's!
One book which I loved, on a more or less related topic: Anthony Storr's Solitude. (No Kindle version, alas, and have you started getting frustrated yet every time you hear that caveat tacked onto a book rec???)
ReplyDeleteWe were over to The Stepdaughter's place for dinner last night. A very nice friend of hers -- a guy (if that matters) -- asked me what use I plan to make of social media in promoting my hypothetically-someday-published book. In A Christmas Story, Ralphie (in Jean Shepherd's voiceover) says that somebody looked at him "like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears." I think the crustaceans abounded at last night's dinner table, too, all around my questioner's placemat.
I said, approximately: I don't plan to use social media to promote my book at all. I'm not a particularly social person in real life and can't see becoming one online.
But, uh, hermitude (?) comes with its own costs. My most ghastly real-life mistakes have almost always followed on the heels of spending waaaaaaay too much time inside my own head. "Overcoming shyness" isn't, I think, an absolute good, an end in itself, because we all know people who really need to just shut up. (Like the Bathroom Talker who plagues me at work.) But exposing the light under our bushel baskets to a lot of mirrors and lenses, pointing in a lot of different directions, can go a long way to making that light better and more balanced and useful. And it's the only way (as Marlo Thomas or somebody similarly perky might say) to make rainbows.
let me be the first to admit that 90% of that went over my head.
ReplyDeleteanyone see pro rasslin last night?
JES, Rainbows and crustaceans. You won't need social media to promote your book; there will be a publisher only too delighted to do that for you, I promise.
ReplyDeleteBilly Pilgrim, I love my bad boys. That might be a Fighter Pilot's Wife thing. You were just providing the perfect other bookend to JES's comment. Please take that test; I can't wait to see the score.
Lovely post.
ReplyDelete"There's a word for people who are 'in their heads too much': thinkers."
My parents should have known I'd be all kinds of trouble. They called me "The Thinker" when I was kid. I don't think it was meant as a compliment. Funny that I still took it as one.
Nance, if you drop in for scones, I'll serve them with our own honey. :)
ReplyDeleteTell Amy Winehouse Duck to move over; I'm moving in.
DeleteCognitive Dissenter, Thanks! I've been a beneficiary of your childhood anomaly and I love you for it. A compliment, indeed.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see a current Nance poem. The two you posted are marvelous--clearly, the marks of an HSP. Hard to believe you've never read Didion. You're going to love her. From her earlier essays to Magical Thinking. God, that woman can carve a sentence. Enjoy!
ReplyDeleteI'm finding some of Didion's filigreed sentences require real concentration to decipher, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. Meanwhile, her voice has charmed me completely.
DeleteOmg...there is so much here. I love the Joan Didion quote about dating a deaf mute and I love love Joan Didion's writing in general.
ReplyDeleteWelcome! How on earth did you find us? So glad you did and hope to see you often.
DeleteI'm glad you're discovering Joan Didion. She's such a great writer.
ReplyDeleteEven my brand of snobbishness is convoluted, which, naturally, makes me assume that Lily Knight was also an HSP. That will now be my excuse for absolutely everything. Oh, brother.
DeleteTotal 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.
ReplyDeleteHSP 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.
________________
?? please 'splain your table...thx
Extreme English,
ReplyDeleteThere were 32 participants at the time I calculated results (there have been a few more since then). Thirty of those left their results here and two others provided their results to me in Networked Blogs on Facebook or in person.
I divided the results into Male and Female respondents and into categories: Number meeting criteria for HSP (score of 14 or higher is required); Number endorsing 20 or more descriptives in test, or "High Score"; Number who failed to meet HSP criteria, responding with 13 or less Yes answers on test; Number of respondents who scored on the border of minimum Yes responses (score of 13-15); and Shied Away means number who indicated in comment that they took the test, but they failed to give their results--there were three notable respondents in this category. Note that most respondents fell into more than one of these categories. For the purposes of the hypothesis, the only significant numbers are the total number of respondents and the number who met criteria for HSP (score of 14 or higher).
Of 32 respondents, 21 indicated in their comments that they met criteria for HSP. That's 65.6% of my sample who meet criteria, which is approximately three times as many as the research literature finds in the population in general, supporting my hypothesis that this blog attracts an unusually high percentage of Highly Sensitive People.
It ain't much, as science goes, but it was fun.
I've had trouble leaving a comment here, but am trying it again. Looks like your new comment setup is user friendly.
ReplyDeleteI am extrememly introverted, and intuitive. Happiest when reading complicated political or ecomomic history. Or garden books. I love my garden. I love math. I love charts and graphs.
Classrooms make me nervous. I am worse now than ever. Got to check on the Susan Cain book. I recognize some of her thoughts.
Dianne
I'm spinning - just don't know where to start. Pick something, pick something, Deborah. Well, how about Calgary Computer Repair? That gave me a start, since it's my home town and who knows, maybe the commenter was somebody I was just too shy to talk to in high school!!!
ReplyDeleteI just said to my favourite Belgian, who doesn't really understand this, that reading you (not 'someone like you') is like being wrapped up in a warm blanket against a cold night. I started off laughing at the first para, and then just sank into the rest of it sighing blissfully, and I exaggerate not.
The combination of your funniness, intelligence and HSP-ness is like a narcotic to me. And I can be all quiet and not have to say a thing and still enjoy you! How great is that?
Oh excuse me. I feel giddy. The delight, the sheer wonderfulness of being able to have such lovely fun while in front of my computer all by myself is just...well, I've used enough descriptive (and possibly superfluous) adjectives already. You get my drift. Thank you, Nance, for this perfect before-dinner apéritif!
After I eat that dinner, I'm coming back to read all the comments....and the poetry.
Am I 'did not meet criteria?'
ReplyDeleteI left out the actual number but it was near the top of the scale of HSP.
The thing is, I am not really shy, while in company, I appear highly gregarious, but it's an adopted exterior, learnt and assimilated. I much prefer solitude most of the time.
schmidley,
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry for the comment issues. I've spent the last two days trying to troubleshoot a highly desirable, but highly frustrating new Blogger feature for threading comments. I'm stumped, but at least I'm irritated.
Deborah,
On that test? You got an A+ and college credit. Calgary Computer Repair followed the breadcrumb trail from somewhence and got hooked on the personality test, I think. Seems like a really nice person; if your computer ever needs repair, I hope you'll look her up.
Xtreme English,
I wonder if the size of your screen didn't scramble all the categories and numbers into a meaningless jumble. On my screen, they are all neatly lined up and make marvelous sense. I think I need Calgary Computer Repair.
Friko,
Yes'm, you meet criteria in every possible nice way. And not all HSP's are introverts. Most of us have had to figure out how to "pass," or, at least, how to select our social experiences for compatibility. I imagine you're good at that.
Checking to see if this threaded comment form works.
Delete