Shyness Anxiety and Alienation

Yemenat

Ahmed Saif Hashed

I was intensely shy and profoundly introverted afflicted with a terrifying, crippling social phobia. This is how I first knew myself upon awakening to my own consciousness. True, I did not emerge from my first birth silent—I came with a birth cry I can imagine cleaving through the delivery room in our old house. And true, I was mischievous in childhood, perhaps in some stages of life. Yet none of this lessened the crushing weight of my shyness and withdrawal, which bore down heavily on my existence. The nightmares of my anxiety seized my tranquility, haunted my days and nights, clung to my presence, and pursued my escapes. My shame, above all, became the heaviest burden, the greatest impediment to my aspirations.

I was consumed by a dense conviction that my shyness crippled me, that I was unfit for anything in this life, and that my future would be scarred by this disability—inescapable, inevitable, woven into my very destiny.

With every failure, I felt the cause lay in my affliction. Often, I sensed my existence was superfluous, that there was no wisdom in what exceeded its necessity. Existence itself seemed at times absurdly indifferent to need. I lived my absence, my alienation in this clamorous world that bore no resemblance to my withdrawal, my shame, my dread, and had no need for my redundant, tiresome presence.

Later, when I read Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I felt that the hump borne by its hero upon his back—I had long carried it upon mine. That hump reminded me of my shame and phobia, which weighed down my shoulders, denied me countless opportunities, deprived me of so much, and repeatedly confiscated my rights—even as my very presence felt like a burden upon existence itself.

True, at