I wasn’t always shy. Snapshots of complete confidence: a choir concert, my mum and dad singing, and in the audience, toddler me. I climbed on to the stage after one song, tapped the conductor on the shoulder, and said: “Is it my turn now?” I sang Do Re Mi from The Sound of Music, in front of a paying audience. There was thunderous applause. I remember the look on people’s faces: “Ah! How delightful!” My dad told this story for years.
Shyness didn’t happen overnight. It was a process of feeling exposed. It was the feeling I had to be better than the sum of my parts and any time I couldn’t pull that off, the shyness would come. Heat along my spine, a fast heart, the red on my face like handprints. A stranglehold. That was shyness to me, the feeling I had the power to make the sky fall in, just by being me.
Another memory: my parents never taught me the words bum, poo, wee. It was bottom, motion, urinate. By the time I started school I’d never heard them. They wanted to bring up a child who was… I actually don’t know, and they’re dead now so I can’t ask. They named me after Hayley Mills. I’ve always felt that was significant.
Anyway, I put my hand up and said: “I need to go for a motion.” Maybe time has made all those little five-year-old faces laughing, bright with shock and incredulity, more exaggerated than they were. But I remember gaining the knowledge that they were laughing at something I’d done. It was something about me, but I still didn’t know what it was and if I didn’t know what it was they were laughing at, how could I fix it?
Hiding her light: Hayley Webster, who know also writes under the name Hayley Scott
That’s what shyness felt like, a shift in who I felt I was, from pride, self-knowledge to something else. Shame. Shame in happily inhabiting as much space as I did, like the first time you see yourself in a photo and you don’t look the way you thought you did, and you have that choice: be happy with that person in the photo, or change.
(These days I always feel sad when I see people berating old photos of themselves, as though that person was a different person they’ve now shed. I want to say, be kind to that person. That person is you.)
At seven I …….