SHY MONSTER
The reason I know today is a good day is I talked to the staff guy at the running store.
When my mouth opens and puts things into the world before I can get more than three or four words ahead of it in my mind to edit and tidy it up and calibrate the tone for the person I’m talking to, what happens is that this sort of goofy, endearingly awkward creature lopes out of the starting gate, drool flying. It’s like a good-natured dog that got bigger than it is inside its head, so all 150lbs of it are always trying to get in your lap—like, with an unusual level of commitment and transparency.
Maybe that’s why (and here goes several hundred from my readership) I don’t find it especially easy to like most dogs: they are more like what I would do well to let myself be (unapologetically social, physically present, un-premeditated), and thus a reminder of just how far off I am, still, at 41, from freedom.
[Consider the barn cat’s repertoire for reference: hide, run away super fast, hiss and scratch if needed, fend for yourself, get inventive to survive, hide again but better this time, live in proximity to others but not with them.]
When I’m not quite sure what on this green earth I am in the process of saying to the running store guy, some other part of me grabs the popcorn and settles in to watch the show. It’s sweet, really, witnessing the creature tumble around the room. OH HEY WHAT DO PEOPLE SAY ABOUT THIS VEST OH YOU DON’T KNOW THAT’S OK I ALREADY KNOW I LIKE IT HEY WHAT ABOUT THIS AIR QUALITY INDEX WHAT ARE THE OTHER RUNNERS DOING HUH YEP I WAS SCHEDULED FOR A LONG RUN TODAY TOO OH YOU’LL HAVE TO DO TEN MILERS ON THE NEXT THREE CONSECUTIVE DAYS TO RECOVER YOUR SCHEDULE HEY TOTALLY ME TOO and of course, Running Store Guy is just doing his job when he nods and smiles, and I think he maybe finds the creature a little amusing and likely a little nuisancy and she is — unreachable— because she’s already decided this moment is PRETTY GREAT WHY NOT.
*
You may have noticed I am fond of the caps key. That may be, in part, because it is often the voice of a Shy Monster. It reflects the mode of the creature within me that exists without calibration.
*
When I showed up at grad school still believing I’d gained entry via clerical error, one of the first things my first workshop professor, Jim Galvin (an actual cowboy with 200 head of cattle, in addition to being a Dante scholar and hopeless romantic) said to his class of terrified, electrified, intensely needful poets, was “shyness is a form of ego.” In other words, if you’re withholding because you feel afraid, you’re just as invested in how people see you as the asshole in the other corner of the room who won’t shut up about how amazing he is.
I think this is true of me, probably as much as it is true of other shy people, but the most relevant thing about Shy Monster is the Monster part, which I didn’t half-hide in the second word-slot by accident: as endearing as it may often be, the Monster is unpredictable, unapologetic, and feels ridiculously deeply—and is therefore very powerful.
I imagine what I fear is my own power, because: *If* I exert myself with the full range of this Shy Monster and find that no one can respond in kind, will I be able to bear that loneliness?
*
We took the kids to South Hill Cidery the other night with friends for the view, the food and drinks, the music, and the escape from our house and daily and deepening trough of patterns. The kids threw a couple tantrums each, fairly standard operations for the first three, but the fourth, issued by my daughter, arose from a very real and primal fear of thunderstorms. We could see several systems all around us gathering, rising, even the circular convection underneath the nearest one from that outlook, and for a while, the grandeur and our positive chatter was enough to dampen and delay my daughter’s fear. But when the thunder started, her legs went stiff and began to swing along my sides as though she were running. She started to pant and plead. “Please Mama now, Mama now, go home, go home, please!”
I was already on my way, but that wasn’t enough. She was really getting worked up; her fear had its own momentum. As I carried her towards the car through the bruised and slowly rotating sky around us, I started to speak in a low voice, right beside her ear, with the razor-steadiness that comes of knowing you must get through to someone, that you must succeed in a given moment: “You are safe,” I said. “Can you say that? I am safe?” She repeated the phrase with more volume and conviction than I thought possible from her small, quaking body.
As the words came out of her mouth I heard something happen. It was like she came back into herself. My friend heard it, too, because she whipped around and said, “Yeah you are,” in a conspiratorial drawl, nodding and grinning with dual congratulation and encouragement.
*
Here is what I have to say to you, Shy Monster: there are those, already, who would answer your call. There are very real people who would meet, who will meet, who have met you under the storm, even when the terrible sky is of your own devising. And of course, when you are asked by those who feel a bit more calm than you do to say, “I am safe,” we know this is only really partly true, since suffering is part of life and we all will die.
BUT. One of the things you are so good at is this moment, this one, when we’re still very clearly alive, and here you are, showing us how to do it best— as you careen around, sniffing and licking and climbing into laps and knocking shit over, filled to bursting with every piece of this finite, immeasurable life.
Yup, “shyness is a form of ego” makes sense, it personally computes...AND I'm guessing it was a very effective way to loosen up a cowering class. Same guy who said "men were put on the earth to move stuff around" wasn't it? In addition to being a Dante Scholar and a real cattle rancher, he was more than an arm-chair psychologist.
So I push stuff around a lot to provide cover for the shy monster.
OOF