I can hear you sniggering and guffawing already but this is a true confession: I am really very shy. Sure, I am. Why do you think I hide behind this cute drawing of myself every week instead of revealing my real and lovely visage?
It is a curse, I tell you. I am not talking about a flutter of the heart, a tingle in the stomach, a furrow of the brow effect. My shyness was debilitating. I am talking knee-buckling; papers-flying-out-the-hands-on-stage; heart-jolting; drowning-in-perspiration; mouth-dry-as-parchment, belly-hits-the-floor; I-can't-remember-my-own-name devastation.
And it doesn't help when people give you crazy advice to overcome your shyness–like picturing the audience naked before your presentation.
How is contaminating your mind with images of other people's crinkly, dangling body parts supposed to calm you down?
I tried it once and had to go into therapy for months afterwards because the nightmares got really bad–I was being chased by a giant outie and a posse of deformed nipple rings.
Shyness is more of an international disability than you might realise because being shy is not the same thing as being stupid.
So shy people find really clever ways to mask their handicap–literally. Batman, Spiderman, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Wonder Woman–what do you think those ridiculous costumes are all about?
Remember the cowering secretary Selena who found her claws as Catwoman?
Aaah, yes, shy people hide their identities because they would be unable to face the world and function otherwise. To empower our inner superheroes, we deny our true knock-kneed selves and develop alter egos.
Now that sort of coping mechanism can go wildly off the tracks and you could end up on a mental ward being pumped full of anti-psychotic drugs.
On the other hand, pretending to be someone else has been the salvation of lots of famous shy people.
Tom Hanks, Lucille Ball, Joan Collins (who has lately been reinvented as the salty Queen Mum in the ridiculously campy whodunit-guilty-pleasure-television series The Royals) and Audrey Hepburn are all shadows who used the lights of the stage as their antidote. Politicians, trial lawyers, writers, comedians–peel back the layers and you'll find a lost puppy struggling to cope.
Sounds contradictory but it works. Because when you are an actor, you are not you anymore. The self-conscious boy or girl becomes whoever he or she imagines. And for the lucky few, the imagination eventually seeps into reality.
In primary school, my hand would be the first to shoot up when there was a casting call for plays and storytelling competitions.
I detest competing but I lived through my imagination and the awkward, buck-toothed, short-sighted, chubby girl would shake off her low self-esteem and find brief comfort and validation in the Anansi tales and fairy costumes.
Lots of gifted people struggle to fit in and the very things that make them awkward in public eventually make them rich.
Take Lady Gaga. As we were covering each other's eyelids in black sequins the other day, she confided that in high school she never fit in and she still doesn't do the Hollywood scene because she doesn't fit in there either and she feels very shy among people she doesn't know.
Richard Branson's mother once put him out of the car three miles from home and told him to find his way by talking to people. He was seven and the exercise took him about ten hours.
Today she would probably be arrested for child abuse but her boy is now the Virgin Atlantic billionaire.
I didn't become a billionaire or famous actor (my gift for mixing plaids and polka dots has never received the international recognition it deserves) but when I don my opinionista mask and cape, I can fly–above the sweaty gloominess of childhood shyness.
We shy people can never be cured but we develop fun ways to hide who we are by becoming who we want to be.
Come out of your shell at wrenchelsa@hotmail.com