When I was a child, I was known as being incredibly shy. Cripplingly shy, in fact. Which tends to surprise people now, because I literally talk to strangers for a living. I spend my days speaking to people from all walks of life, and I absolutely love it.

But for most of my life, my received understanding of myself was that I had been a very shy child. Because that’s how people described me. I was shy, I was shy, I was shy, and I disappeared into that word.

It was only after my autism diagnosis, in my fifties, that I started interrogating that childhood experience. What was it actually like to be shy? What did I feel? What was going on inside that little girl?

And what I realised was that shy wasn’t shy. It was terror. I was absolutely terrified.

I remember walking down the street as a child, looking down at the pavement because I didn’t want to cross anybody’s gaze. The idea of looking into a stranger’s eyes was frightening enough that I was concentrating on avoiding it altogether. And then I walked straight into somebody’s stomach. I remember that overwhelming feeling of mortification, but it was far beyond embarrassment. I felt like the world was going to swallow me whole, because I was absolutely certain I was in trouble. I was expecting to be shouted at. When I looked up, it was my dad, and I think I burst into tears. Interestingly, seeing him was a relief, because at least he wasn’t a stranger, even though my father had a very short fuse and a barky, loud voice that terrified me. But the terror had happened before I even knew who I’d bumped into.

There was a massive trend in the eighties for children to collect stickers by going into shops and asking for them. I must have been about ten, and I really wanted those stickers. But the whole process felt like an impossible mission. I’d have to go into a shop I’d never been into before. I wouldn’t know what the room looked like, where the counter was, who would be behind it, whether they would welcome me or be angry with me, what the right words were, or what they might say back. I’d have to cross the room and approach somebody I didn’t know, with absolutely no idea how the interaction would unfold.

I remember standing outside shops, looking at the door, desperately wanting the stickers but sometimes completely unable to go in. My friends would sometimes get stickers and share them with me, and there were probably times when I eventually managed to go in and ask for one myself, which would have been incredibly significant. But what I remember most vividly is the fear.

There was also a time when we were supposed to sell tickets for a tombola. The idea of approaching people and asking them to buy tickets was completely insane to me. I have this memory, although I’m pretty sure it was a dream, of pretending I’d sold the tickets, taking money from my mother’s purse to hand in at school, and then somehow ending up featured in the newspaper because I’d done so well. I can’t imagine what newspaper it would have been, so I suspect my mind invented the whole thing. But even as a dream, it’s quite revealing of the mental soil in which I was growing up. The lengths I might imagine going to, rather than having to speak to somebody.

And all of that was called shy.

Which is a very cute word, isn’t it? A shy little girl. It sounds quite sweet, perhaps even endearing. But we’re not talking cutesy here. We’re talking deep terror.

What does shy actually mean?

I’ve become increasingly interested in what we’re really describing when we call someone shy. Because I don’t think it’s necessarily a particularly helpful word. I wonder whether it’s often a cute way of describing something quite different, whether that’s fear, social uncertainty, introversion, or something else entirely.

Shyness is generally understood in psychology as involving anxiety or inhibition in social situations, often with a fear of negative judgement. So fear is already part of the definition. But that doesn’t tell us what somebody is actually frightened of, or why.

And I think this is where the word can become a bit of a closed door.

‘Oh, she’s shy.’

And that seems to settle the matter. Perhaps people roll their eyes a little, perhaps they decide not to bother the child, perhaps they tell her not to be shy, as though that were a useful instruction. I don’t know that being described as shy was always perceived negatively, and perhaps there were situations where it made people more accommodating towards me. But I certainly don’t remember it opening up much curiosity about what I was experiencing.

It was a description that seemed to belong to me, a characteristic of who I was. And because I was a child, I adopted it. I didn’t have the language to identify my fear. If somebody had asked me why I couldn’t walk into that shop, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I was terrified because I didn’t understand what was going to happen. I would simply have said that I was shy.

I was sold an understanding of myself that was something completely different from what I was actually experiencing. And I lived with it for decades.

Where’s the manual?

One of the things my autism diagnosis unlocked was an understanding of just how much of my childhood was spent trying to work out the rules of interaction. I didn’t know what people were going to say to me, I didn’t know what they would expect me to say back, and I didn’t know what would happen if I got it wrong. It was a blank page of fear.

In my family, getting things wrong could come with quite a lot of humiliation. There was a strong culture of teasing, particularly from my brother, who was five years older than me, and my father’s voice could be very frightening. He had a short fuse, and I think I grew up with a powerful expectation that doing the wrong thing would result in being shouted at or ridiculed.

There wasn’t much room to object, either. If you were being teased, you were expected to bear it and grin. I remember making a cassette recording for my English cousins when I was about seven or eight, with French songs and little commentaries between them. At one point I enthusiastically announced the next song with an ‘Et youpi!’ When I next saw my cousins, my uncle kept repeating ‘Et youpi!’ back to me. I don’t think he meant anything malicious by it, but I felt deeply embarrassed. I was already so used to being made fun of that even something intended affectionately could really sting.

Another memory comes from when I was seven, when my parents sent me for solfège lessons with their friend Chantal. A taxi would collect me from school at five and take me from Rue des Trois Renards to Rue des Sept Troubadours in Toulouse. I remember that journey being absolutely terrifying. I was seven, alone in a taxi, with no mobile phones, and on one occasion they even got me lost. I only attended two or three sessions before stopping because I was so frightened of the journey.

I think that was chalked up to shyness, or perhaps to me not enjoying the lessons. But I actually loved the lessons. What I hated was getting there, and I had no way of expressing that distinction.

So I was trying to navigate a world whose social rules weren’t obvious to me, while also feeling that the consequences of making a mistake could be enormous.

But interestingly, when I was with people I knew, when I understood what was expected of me, I wasn’t particularly shy. I could be lively, cheeky and quite exuberant. I often found adults easier to be with than my peers, although that depended very much on the adult. When the conditions were right, I could be very different from the little girl everybody described as shy.

Learning the rules, and learning to play with them

I remember discovering something important about humour when I was about nine. My brother was always teasing me, and I had prepared a retort. I’d planned it and rehearsed it, ready for one of his predictable little put-downs.

We were at my aunt’s house for la Chandeleur, pancake night, and I remember exactly where I was standing, between the dining room and the kitchen. My brother said something demeaning, I don’t remember what, and I delivered my carefully prepared line.

‘La première crêpe est toujours ratée.’

The first pancake is always a mess.

He was the first pancake. I was the second.

And he laughed. Everybody laughed. I wasn’t reprimanded. I’d managed to fight back, effectively, and it felt wonderful. I had discovered a way of using humour to change an interaction, rather than simply being on the receiving end of it.

Then, when I was seventeen, I had to give a presentation in front of my class, about a book we’d each been assigned to read. Mine was Margaret Mead’s Mœurs et sexualité en Océanie, which included her work on societies in Papua New Guinea. I remember it describing some extraordinary sexual rites of passage, including one involving balls of nettles being inserted into girls’ vaginas, apparently intended to prepare them for menstruation and sex. You can imagine how comfortable I felt about discussing that in front of a class of thirty-four seventeen-year-olds.

The first time I was supposed to present, I absolutely crumbled. I was so panicked at the thought of speaking in front of everybody that I simply couldn’t do it. The presentation had to be rescheduled.

But the second time, something happened. I found my humorous voice. I remember getting to that particular passage and managing to acknowledge just how extraordinary it was, with a funny face and some comment along the lines of ‘Can you imagine nettles up the…’ I don’t remember the exact words. I wasn’t making fun of the people or diminishing what I was describing, but I managed to recognise the awkwardness of it and bring the class with me.

They laughed, and I knew they were laughing with me rather than at me. I felt accepted. I felt that I could hold my own in front of an audience, and that I could actually be quite compelling. It was a massive turning point for me.

Of course, learning how to speak confidently didn’t mean I suddenly understood every social convention. In my twenties, I was a bit of a bouncy ball. Hello ADHD. I was chatty and bubbly, often very drunk, and deeply insecure. I thought I was a bit dim and stupid, and I suspect quite a few people thought so too.

I remember two leaving speeches from jobs in my late twenties or early thirties. In one case, the company was folding, and we’d all gathered for a cake and a card. Somebody asked whether I had any famous last words, and I said something like, ‘Fuck you all. I never want to do this ever again.’ I thought I was just expressing how relieved I was that the whole thing was over, because that’s what they’d asked me.

Then, when I left CBBC to move to another part of the BBC, there was another leaving celebration and I said something along the lines of how boring the job had been and how delighted I was to be going somewhere much more interesting. I wasn’t trying to be offensive. I thought it was perfectly obvious that if I was leaving one job for another, it was because I wanted to do something different.

The expressions on people’s faces were extraordinary. And afterwards, I felt mortified. I’d completely misread the expectation.

I’d become much more comfortable speaking, but I was still learning the code.

I think the journey out of what everybody called shyness was made up of a huge number of little experiences. Going into the shop and managing to ask for the sticker. Having an interaction that didn’t end in catastrophe. Realising that I could get something wrong and the world wouldn’t swallow me whole. And gradually understanding what people expected, while also caring less and less about always getting it right.

What’s particularly interesting is that nowadays I often deliberately interact with people in a way that isn’t quite what’s expected. If I’m at a supermarket checkout and someone says ‘Good morning’, I might answer, ‘Well, that’s one way to put it.’ I’ll often find something to say that makes the cashier smile, something that takes us out of the automatic script for a moment.

It’s never aggressive. It’s about connection. And it’s something I do almost without thinking now.

I’ve learnt the rules of engagement well enough that I can start playing with them, and I can take an interaction somewhere I want it to go. Rather than simply engaging in small talk, I can turn small talk into an art form, an art of connection.

I’m reading Peter Wharmby’s Untypical at the moment, and he talks about how difficult small talk can be for autistic people. I recognise that difficulty, but I also recognise how much I’ve learnt to make those interactions my own. It’s taken an enormous amount of learning and experimenting, and it has given me much more agency.

Cutified out of existence

When I finally understood that my childhood shyness had actually been terror, I didn’t feel particularly angry. I felt deeply sad.

It was a real rug-pulled-out-from-under-my-feet moment, a massive ‘oomph’ of realisation. Here was something that had been such a formative part of my understanding of who I was, and suddenly I realised it was something completely different.

I felt a deep wound in that discovery, and a tremendous sense of unfairness.

Because my experience had been cutified out of existence.

I had been given a lovely little word for something that was actually terrifying, and that word had allowed the terror to be dismissed. Even I had dismissed it, because I didn’t know it was there. I had no other language for the experience, and so I’d accepted the description that everybody else gave me.

I was shy.

And I disappeared into that word.

I don’t think all shyness is necessarily terror. I’m curious about what other people experience when they describe themselves as shy, and what they might discover if they really interrogated that feeling. Perhaps some people are temperamentally more reserved. Perhaps it’s about introversion, although introversion and shyness aren’t the same thing. Perhaps it’s fear of judgement, uncertainty, overwhelm, or something else altogether.

But I think that’s precisely the reason to be curious.

When we describe somebody as shy, are we actually understanding their experience? Or are we giving it a name that allows us to stop asking questions?

Are we mistaking somebody’s difficulty participating for a lack of desire to participate? Are we treating something as a fixed personality trait when it might change completely under different conditions?

And are we sometimes making something that is genuinely painful sound so sweet and harmless that nobody thinks to help?

I don’t think being called shy opened many doors for me. Quite the opposite. I think it often closed them, including the door to my own understanding of what I was experiencing.

And I wonder how different things might have been if somebody had been curious enough to ask what was actually frightening me.