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I CAN’T BE seen. You brush past me and I’m not there. When I try and speak, the words hold each other back. When I do speak, it’s futile. You can’t hear me. Or if you do, it’s dismissed. I’d prefer death. I’d prefer not to breathe than try to speak to you. It’s a long time coming. But my shyness could be what’s nearly killed me.
23 years. Roughly. That’s how long depression has forged its way in and out of my life. What’s puzzling, is why has it taken up until the last few months of my life to link childhood shyness to depression.
Depression. Mental illness, yes. But is it more than that? Can it be an emotional illness? I remember when the suppression of emotions hit. It wiped me out. The darkness. It would take four years and continued, severe panic attacks to eventually seek treatment. This was 1997.
You have to help yourself too
Then you sail without control, on the periphery. You consider suicide. You let it become a part of your thinking. How you control your mood. It becomes a comfort. Pieta House works. But you have to help yourself too. But how did it come to this?
Shyness and quietness lived in solidarity. I was a happy child. But sensitivity to the world around it was all encompassing. Life’s fleeting challenges and interactions, didn’t bounce off me. Every interaction would sink in. Every negative interaction, innocuous as it may have been or not, analysed forensically. Yet there was no real vent. Because everything was held back.
Every bit of anger was held within. Like any child, I fought with parents and siblings. And that, along with love, made it the safest of places. But as independent social interaction grew, I retreated. At ten I recall my first want to end my life. It was no other reason than I was sad. I had every opportunity: sport, drama, school, cub-scouts. Every opportunity to find a release valve.
But I wasn’t made that way. All pain was sent inward. The sadness of not feeling a part of something. Of not being strong. Not being able to engage in a full way. It all processed itself, in a negative way.
Childhood shyness to teenage depression
My own trajectory was a long progression from childhood shyness to teenage depression. The shyness was centred around a lack of confidence to speak, to interject, to express and to feel outwardly. I still struggle in this regard.
I told a friend recently I write better than I speak. He said he speaks better then he writes. Both have their strengths. But ultimately expression is paramount.
There are ways though. Ways to help yourself. To help others. To help young people. To stop them from harming themselves.
Moving out of your comfort zone is a start. Putting yourself in social situations without considering it. Retraining how you think about people. Starting conversations. Your words aren’t poison. Not everyone is going to embrace your warmth. But most will. And stop punishing yourself. When you feel isolated and apart, let yourself be consumed by other things.
But at the root of shyness, is sensitivity. Sensitivity can be the greatest gift if used and channelled in the right manner. Or it can help destroy you.
I can only speak for me. Sensitivity led me to retreat inward and ultimately to stand on my own feelings until they took my feet from under me. But use it right and help those you care about utilise their sensitivity.
Dance in your kitchen with your son who won’t dance in public. Speak to your friend outside of your protected comfort zone. And look inward, sure; but then set it loose. In any way that feels right for you. Because ultimately, all that really matters, is how you feel. And if you feel sad inside, that’s not the place for those emotions to settle.
Brian Strahan is a freelance writer and author, writing on sport and mental health. He can be found on Twitter @StrahanBrian.
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I really appreciate your advice every week I’m a gardener in my 60s and learn something new every week
The follow the sun because one side of the plant grows faster than the other depending on the sun’s location and that pulls the plant around.
It is far more likely that it is in response to a daily rhythm that we experience,of course for different reasons -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfBsWFfWkGE
Sunflowers are far smarter than some Journal readers who insist on following an impossibility , after all, the sun rise and sets each day in response to one rotation -
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” Harvard
@Jenny mcCarty: It is rare to encounter a person who can reason properly and have some sense of why our nation and the international community ended up with horrific notions such as one weekday and one rotation are not the same thing. I have dealt with these issues for many years and I am familiar with where people jumped the tracks, in this case they modelled rotation using a clock and came up with a value less than 24 hours with the accumulation over the year giving them one more rotation than weekdays. Common sense should intervene but these people are unapologetic while the young sunflowers simply fix their gaze on the central and stationary Sun and allow the rotation of the Earth to do the work once each weekday and every weekday.
@Gerald Kelleher: research flat earth and you’ll have a perfectly valid reason as to why sunflowers follow the path of the sun
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