Shy Page 2

  Dad arranged for me to talk to a local speech pathologist. She said I could work with kids or adults, in a school or hospital. I enjoyed kids, one on one, and I didn’t mind hospitals. So I enrolled in Speech-Language Pathology. And although I liked my classes at Western, I quickly discovered I was an introvert in classrooms full of extroverts. Did my classmates ever stop talking? I went from school to my small room in a boarding house, where, during the week, I stayed up until the early hours studying, so I could go to Vancouver on the weekends to see my boyfriend. The house was full of eccentrics: Dale, a violin maker, who had long red hair which he wore either down or piled high on his head like a debutante, and lived in the attic; Les, a cross-dressing music student who borrowed my clothes; “Disco Martin,” who worked in a fish-canning plant, arrived home every night at two a.m. and cranked the Donna Summer; Kim, who insisted that Prince Charles would marry a Korean girl, most likely her. I felt a lot more comfortable in my little house of eccentrics than I did with my fellow Speech Pathology students.

  I worked for a year, then went to Washington State University for my Master’s Degree. The Speech Pathology graduate program at WSU was small, the profs friendly and helpful. They drank beer with us. They knew our names. In fact, Elizabeth was deemed too “formal,” so I was known by my childhood nickname of “E.J.” I was one of several Canadians in my program. The department head had a fondness for Canadian students, who, he maintained, kept the departmental GPA high. Though I still felt shy inside, I’d learned that my profs would listen when I talked, and the more I spoke in class, the more comfortable I became answering questions and offering my opinion.

  When I was in my early thirties and working, someone gave me a book about the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventories. I read it. I did the test. I had a Eureka moment. Here was an explanation for my feelings of being different than other people, of needing to spend time on my own. I was different from most other people. I was an INFJ, the personality type of about one percent of the population. According to www.mypersonality.info, INFJS are “artistic and creative,” “live in a world of hidden meanings,” focus on fantasy more than reality (hmm, an evening with the new Michael Ondaatje novel or a party, what’s to choose?), fear doing the wrong thing (yup), are observers (um-hm) and avoiders (you bet), sensitive, tend to be devoted to what they believe in (there is a reason my boyfriends were of the Leftist, placard-bearing type). Many of my good friends (whom I often had to organize, being the “J” in the group) turned out to be INFPS, another rare type.

  Speech Pathology was not listed as a career suggestion for INFJS, though writer was. And yet, my dad was right. I’ve enjoyed Speech-Language Pathology, and it has provided me with an interesting way to make a living. Almost accidentally, I ended up specializing in the treatment of stuttering. In grad school, I was assigned to be the research assistant of Dr. Marcel Wingate, a stuttering theorist and researcher, whose standard definition of stuttering is still widely used. My first job was at the Calgary General Hospital, where I was hired because they needed someone to run the outpatient stuttering program, and no one on staff wanted to do it.

  I found my adult stuttering clients an interesting and diverse group. I met people who, like John Updike, went to considerable efforts to hide their stuttering. I met people who didn’t. I met introverts and extroverts. I met clients who said they’d be extroverts if talking wasn’t so difficult, and, indeed, became more extroverted as their fluency improved.

  I got involved with a rather militant American self-help organization called the National Stuttering Project. (They protested Michael Palin’s portrayal of stuttering in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, Porky Pig, and other negative depictions of stuttering in the media.) I learned how stuttering and people’s negative reactions to it could shape and silence a person. I read the actor James Earl Jones’s autobiography, Voices and Silences. Because of his stutter, Jones was essentially mute and didn’t speak from the ages of six to fourteen. Then his English teacher, a former professor, challenged Jones to prove he hadn’t plagiarized a poem he had written by reading it aloud. Jones did so and discovered he had an actor’s voice: deep and rich and resonant.

  I moved to a job in public health but continued to specialize in the treatment of stuttering. I helped the local support group, and we organized a national conference for people who stutter, called “Many Paths, One Journey.” In 2002, I joined the staff at the Institute for Stuttering Treatment and Research, where I still work today.

  What has kept me working in this area is the courage of my clients. The six-year-old boy who told me he would be more “curious” if he didn’t stutter. The thirteen-year-old who, tired of enduring the gossipy bullying of other teenage girls which didn’t change after she “told,” asked her mom to pull her out of that school and get her some speech therapy. The fifty-year-old who, fed up with having some of his fellow ESL students giggle, roll their eyes, or look impatient when he spoke, stood up, wrote “stuttering” on the white board, and explained to the class what stuttering was and why it was so difficult for him to talk. He asked for their patience. He asked for their respect.

  “I think a stutterer,” says James Earl Jones, “ends up with a greater need to express himself, or perhaps, a greater awareness of the deep human need for expression. Being a…stutterer leaves you painfully aware of how you would like to say something. And I would know, as an afterthought, how I could have said this or that. But at the moment, you are too busy making the choice to speak or not to speak, to use this word or that word. The pain is in the reflection. The desire to speak builds and builds until it becomes part of your energy, your life force. But when I was a boy, speech became a wall I could not surmount.”

  I have come to realize what a complex problem stuttering is. Neurophysiology, genetics, learning, and environment all play a part. I have seen how deeply stuttering can affect people. I meet parents who feel tremendous guilt about their children’s stuttering, who cry when I tell them that they didn’t cause the problem. I meet very young children who, within a week of starting to stutter, cover their mouths and say, “Mommy, help me talk.” I meet adults who, bullied as children, have gone underground, who won’t mention or discuss their stuttering with anyone, not even their spouses.

  Contrary to what we may see in movies like A Fish Called Wanda, there is no one “stuttering personality.” Though the stereotype is that people who stutter are shy, timid, nervous, and lacking in confidence, studies have shown that, as a group, they are no more likely to be maladjusted than people who don’t stutter, though they may, understandably, have more fears about speaking. That so many of my clients are willing to work hard to overcome those fears is testament to their strength and courage in the face of a society that still doesn’t quite understand stuttering.

  Sometimes my clients tell me that they want to speak perfectly, like “normal speakers.” I understand the sentiment (if only I could write perfectly, like this or that author), but tell them that no one has perfect fluency. We all repeat, revise, say um and ah, hem and haw. I tell them perfect fluency can sound memorized, glib, and insincere, like the speech of a famous scientist I once heard whose rapid speech rate and hyperfluency made it difficult to absorb anything he was saying. I agree with John Updike that “people who talk too easily and comfortably, with too much happy rolling of the vowels and satisfied curling of the lips around the grammatical rhythms, rouse distrust in some atavistic, pre-speech part of ourselves; we turn off. Whereas those who stutter win, in the painful pauses of their demonstration that speech isn’t entirely natural, a respectful attention, a tender alertness. Words are, we are reassured, precious.”

  Indeed they are. Nowadays, people often express surprise when I tell them I am shy (though, as a shy person, I don’t do so routinely). “You don’t seem shy,” they say. And it’s true. I rarely blush anymore when strangers talk to me. I can make good eye contact. These are things that I’ve learned. I’ve watched outgoing people and copied them. I’ve made mys
elf enter situations I’d prefer to avoid (cocktail parties with rich, well-dressed people; actually, cocktail parties with anyone). I’ve joined Toastmasters. Still, in a group, I’m drawn to the people who hang back. The people who don’t immediately overwhelm you with talk but who may, if they sense you are sincerely interested in them, offer a thoughtful comment or two.

  In a society that values extroverts, I suggest we pay more attention to the introverts. (But let’s not do so in a showy way that calls undue attention to them, please.) The quiet girl who watches her peers, then silently joins their play, showing them a better way to make that paper boat float. The little boy at the back of the class, drawing and writing in his notebook. Observe them. Find out what they’re good at. They might be architects, artists, writers. Be assured, they are watching, thinking, observing. There are interesting things happening in their heads that we’ll never know about unless we take the time to ask. Unless we take the time to listen.

  The Shy

  DAVID VAN BUREN

  When his brothers trudged off

  to choose their mates,

  did he go too,

  and from behind a tree trunk watch

  the boldest one pick first,

  unsure where to place his hands

  before the invention of pockets.

  Or did he stay put

  to keep the fire going,

  and shake his club

  up at the moon, confused

  how it could be alone

  yet so sure of itself,

  surrounded by the stars

  that all seemed to know each other.

  I Couldn’t Reveal

  ELAINE WOO

  After school, in her older sister’s pink bedroom

  we stood next to the bed with the chenille spread.

  She put the needle on the record,

  the rhythms of She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah beatled out,

  arched my toes, drove me itchy to tap, tap, tap,

  my torso twist and twirl.

  But I pushed my shiny Mary Janes firmly

  into the floor, pinned my arms to my plaid skirt.

  I looked at her red curls, pin dot freckles,

  upturned lips.

  No. I couldn’t show her.

  My cheeks stung as if visited by a swarm of bees.

  Say Water

  NAOMI K. LEWIS

  “ESSAY,” said Miss B.

  I leaned over my assignment, carefully circling the correct answers with tight, tidy lines, trying to imitate the way the girls sitting on either side of me did it.

  “Essay!” my teacher said again, louder. I’d heard of an essay but, in January of third grade, had never come close to reading or writing one. Was it possible my new class was so far ahead? It sure didn’t seem like it; after all, we’d spent the last twenty minutes matching up pictures of habitats with their animal inhabitants.

  “Essaie,” said Miss B. Try, présent simple, as in J’essaie. I try. I do my best. Also, impératif, as in, Try! French grammar books used exclamation marks to indicate the imperative tone. Try harder! Try harder! I had been liberated, or cast out, from my French immersion class a month before, after a year. I had tried. Not hard enough. I had failed. After the Christmas holiday, I was now trying anew, in the English class.

  “Ess,” Miss B. cried. “Ay.” I noticed with a start that I’d forgotten about the tidy girlish circles again, and had reverted to the loose, messy kind—shaky, amoebic, executed in one second instead of ten. Cupping my hand over the ugliness, I tried to erase it, but only smudged a graphite shadow across the bunny and bat cave pictures, and crinkled the paper.

  “Naomi!” said Miss B.

  All my nerves cringed with the sound of my name, and I bolted upright. Something was wrong. An eerie silence had come over the room; I hadn’t noticed it, but now I realized it had been there for some time. All my classmates were perfectly motionless, like statues, frozen at their desks with fat red pencils in their hands, or walking—a boy stood on one foot, swaying with the effort to stay balanced—and some had their heads cocked, mouths open, as though in mid-word. The room felt unbearably hot, and my new multi-coloured wool sweater was stifling, a sweatbox. A straitjacket.

  “Will someone please tell Naomi what S.A. means? Jenny Lefebvre?” Jenny was Miss B.’s favourite, always chosen for special tasks like handing out tests or walking people to the nurse’s office.

  “Suspended animation,” said Jenny, before reassuming her statue pose, a Kleenex to her nose. I knew it was called a Kleenex because I’d broken down in tears a few days earlier, my nose full of snot, asking blank-faced Miss B. again and again, in my British-mid-American accent, still lingering after a year in Canada, if there were any hankies in the room.

  I sat as still as I could, holding my pencil in a trembling, damp hand. The classroom seemed to have reached greenhouse temperature despite all the snow blowing around outside the window. The worst part was, I’d been lost in my own world, had believed myself safely invisible while I stood out like a fluorescent light. Once again, everyone was in on something I didn’t get. I still didn’t get it. S.A.—suspended animation. Stay perfectly still, in the exact position you happened to be in when Miss B. spoke the magic term. But why? Didn’t animation have something to do with cartoons? And suspended was what happened to bad kids, really bad ones, kids who committed unforgivable acts of rule breaking.

  Then suddenly everyone was moving, with purpose. Putting away the animal habitat assignment. Reaching into their books, their bags, opening their pencil cases. Miss B. had obviously given us specific instructions.

  “Naomi?” said Miss B. “Is there a problem?”

  My days of staring in blank, stark stupidity were supposed to have ended with my move from French immersion to the English class. Smarting all over with the brilliant heat of an invisible spotlight, I buried my face in my arms, the cool wood of the desk against my cheek, and squeezed my eyes shut.

  When I was thirty and had just finished grad school, I found myself stranded in the prairies, unemployed and suddenly single. I wanted out, and to that end, I took a three-day course on teaching English as a second language abroad. In the afternoon of the third eight-hour day, we each taught a mock class for ten minutes; each mock teacher began by telling the others the age group and knowledge level we should assume. At that point in my life, I was confident enough speaking in public that I don’t remember my own teaching attempt. The ten minutes I remember belonged to a girl who told us we were five-year-old French children, in France, in their first year of an English immersion program—all English for the whole school day. She wrote her name across the board: Ms Jackson, then showed us a series of coloured cards. She walked around the room, saying each of our names the way you would a child’s, and it was our job to name the colours.

  Some people didn’t bother acting. When their turns came, they said, “Red” or “Orange” in their regular voices, smiling indulgently, a little embarrassed. Others used French-kid accents and sat wonkily, childlike, in their chairs.

  One guy made himself the class clown, yelling, “Madame! Madame! Je sais, je sais! C’est rouge!”

  Ms Jackson answered evenly each time, “In English, please, Tom. We need hands, Tom.” Then she ignored him. She was good.

  She came to my desk, and looking directly at me, she held up the sky-blue card. “Naomi. What colour is this?”

  I stared back at her.

  “What colour is this?”

  I didn’t move. She held the blue page a little higher and smiled encouragingly. I buried my face in my arms on the desk.

  “Aww,” said the blonde girl across the room, with real sympathy.

  “Oh,” said Ms Jackson.

  I heard murmurs of appreciation at my acting prowess. But then I couldn’t bring myself to lift my head. I was scared. It wasn’t an act anymore; I had become a child, and Ms Jackson, younger than me in real life, was my well-intentioned teacher. My heart pounded, my face burned. I cou
ld hear her breathing, still standing there, waiting. Every eye in the room was on me, waiting to see me exposed. The longer I waited, the worse it would get. That old irony: in trying to disappear, I was making a spectacle of myself.

  I lifted my head an inch and peered up.

  “You can do it,” said Ms Jackson.

  I giggled with terror.

  “What colour is it?”

  “Blue,” I whispered.

  “Yes! I heard you! Good.” Visibly relieved, she moved on.

  “That was so realistic,” said the blonde girl, not to me, but loud enough for me to hear.

  My heart rate began to slow again, but the thud of blood through my ears grew louder as my body relocated itself. The old familiar nausea set in.

  “Dude.” The guy sitting next to me leaned close, his hand on my binder. I’d been joking around with him since the first day. “You really were that kid, weren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could tell all along.”

  “You could tell…?”

  He hesitated before saying it, before admitting gently that none of my jokes or eye contact had fooled him. He tightened his grip on my chair, as though to bolster me from the blow of his words. “That you were shy.”

  If shyness was the right word for it. And yes, there’s no denying I was a shy child. Some of the things I dreaded: ordering in a restaurant; the sight of a ball flying toward me, whether soccer, base or basket; piano recitals; a lot of people talking loudly at once; being called upon to speak in class. In fact, I not only dreaded those things but also was paralyzed by the prospect of them, stunned into blank stillness.

  I didn’t start out shy, though. I wasn’t shy until my family moved from Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, to Ottawa, when I was seven and halfway through second grade. Until then, I was the kind of child who prefers reading to playing a sport and listens more than speaks, and I had two close friends I loved with a frenzied passion, not a wide group of acquaintances. I was also a worrier. I worried about the inevitability of death and whether there was more to life than the mundane. I believed everything I learned in school and found my comfort in following rules, in staying perfectly in sync with the world’s structure, as presented by my teachers, to the extent that, on the day we learned the four food groups, I panicked because I’d only had two of them for breakfast that morning. Weak and dizzy with malnutrition, and struggling quietly to contain my tears, I was taken to the nurse’s office, where I refused to listen to reason. My teacher had just said it was important to eat something from each group at each meal; that morning I’d had toast and jam, directly violating the imperative. I wasn’t about to listen to any nurse trying to explain what a cumulative effect was. Finally they phoned my mother, who came to my rescue with a whole-wheat sandwich containing cheese, beef and lettuce, covering my bases.