shyness...

Have you ever wondered why some people are shy and others not?  Well sometimes I do. Does it have to do with genes or is it the things that happened in childhood, in other words nature or nurture?

I don’t think that I started out shy, in fact I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I have a very distinct memory of taking a favourite library book to school fr show and tell and standing up in front of the class and telling them about the behaviour of cats. When my own children were small I rediscovered the self same book .

Roll forward to when I was about ten and I had the first lines in a classroom reading of a play. I still remember that cringing feeling at having to say ‘I’m sorry that’s over’ I ask you how unnatural a sentence is that for  kid to say anyway. Mrs McGarry shattered my confidence again and again by telling e to put more feeling into it. Now the is one word that I don't not use today, no not the ‘f’ word but one starting with ‘h’. well I certainly used to hate those play reading sessions with vengeance.

The older I got them shyer I became.  I was a pretty good softball player at intermediate school but I refused to play in an inter-school team. Why, well I had seen how the captains of theses team had to get up at assembly in front of the entire school and announce our score. Having seen that was enough to scare me off representing the school. I watched with something akin to envy and certainly wonder at how some of my classmates could enter the school talent show and actually stand up and sing in fort of the entire school. And yet at the same school I would competed ferociously in classroom word games.

Then there was college, I really wanted to be a cooking teacher and thought that he way to do it was to do Home Economics. No guidance counselling in those dim dark days. And to boot I didn’t get to go to the same college my sister had, but to a snooty more expensive one.  Wellington Girl, must have cost the parents a small fortune to outfit me in the teal coloured uniform.  In the first days of college we all sat pupil aptitude tests and suddenly I found myself in different classes to the ones I had chosen. Full maths and  I still don’t do numbers very well.  French a pretty awful subject for a shy person, needless to say I failed that one miserably because I wouldn’ or couldn’t speak it in class. Inside my head was another matter. Full science, well that involved maths didn’t it, even if I did find the biology interesting.  Couldn’t wait to leave.

Even after my eldest daughter was born it persisted. When I was out  with her in her pram, I would  cross the road rather than walk past someone who might speak to me. How sad is that.

Then I discovered ‘Play Centre’ and through them actually began to grow…..to be continued