Nordic countries

On Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness

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“Shy people unsettle others because they unsettle the tacit conventions of social life.”

Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness was not as great a book as I, a lifelong shy person, expected. It did not shed a lot of light on shyness and all its forms and shades – it mostly just introduced us to a slew of famous shy people and the various forms of shyness that ailed them. I expected something more informative or rigorous/scientific somehow, but oh well. Sure, there was some exploration of history, psychology and philosophy and what those disciplines have to say about shyness. But not quite enough.

A few interesting points but mostly it boils down to what I knew before (even if that seems arrogant to say; I know I don’t know everything): being shy is being shy, many people are surprised when they learn that you consider yourself shy, it is not a rare affliction, and sometimes you can fake it (i.e. fake not being shy) in certain circumstances. You never totally get rid of it, but you can tame it – it’s a strange and often mercurial beast.

It has been a swift read as a result of its brevity and lack of depth, so pleasurable and entertaining even if nothing I would necessarily recommend except for a few spots that intersect with topics and conversations I’ve touched on with different people.

Notable bits/quotes:

“Zeno founded the school of Stoicism, a philosophy of self-reliant estrangement from the world and of equanimity in the face of public approval, since status and fame were mere baubles. ‘Stoicism has qualities which foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty,’ write Dalton in Apologia Diffidentis. ‘It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun.’”

 

“Unlike many of his compatriots, Taine did not think English reserve was the result of an obsession with rank and class that had constipated their emotional lives. It was rather, he felt, that they were brimful of feelings, which were all the more affecting for so rarely bubbling up to the surface to disturb dead-calm waters. The English expressed their passions in ways overlooked by the inattentive, but those who watched carefully could see ‘the emotions pass over these complexions, as one sees the colours change upon their meadows’.”

 

“Shyness may have its roots in human self-consciousness, but it leaves us at the mercy of our animal emotions — making us, in extremis, shake with fear, run away, and hide.”

 

“Shyness did not always have to be an inadequacy but could be a positive quality – something you were rather than something that stopped you from being who you were. Shyness’s energies are often reactive and damage-limiting…; “If you can somehow prevent your shyness from clotting into neurotic risk aversion, it can help you face the world with an added layer of gentleness and curiosity.”

 

(Society-level) shame has receded while (personal) embarrassment has grown: “Although we are more able to retain our self-respect in the face of others’ disdain, we are also more likely to feel ashamed when others might see no reason for us to be.”

 

Oh yes yes yes!: “All through history, letter writing has offered salvation for the shy.”

“A correspondence via the Royal Mail has the potential for show-growing intimacy, enhanced by a deliciously expectant wait between sending and receiving, which e-mail and text messages have since destroyed.”

 

“The Nordic countries rival Southeast Asian ones in the subtlety of their language of embarrassment. A shy Finnish historian I met once told me all the different Finnish synonyms for “embarrassed.” Nolo, the most common word, had a negative sense — for instance, in the phrase “Vähän noloa!” (How embarrassing!), “Nobody wants to be nolo,” he said, “because it also connotes being pitiful.” But there were others words, he added, that roughly tallied with embarrassment — kiusaantunut, vaivaantunut, hämillinen, hämmentynyt — which evoked a more general sense of confusion or discomfort and had a neutral or even positive meaning. Another word, myötähäpeä, the vicarious embarrassment one feels for others, what schadenfreude’s kinder cousin.”

 

(Charles) “Schulz came to believe, in a classically Minnesotan form of self-laceration, that his own inhibitions were upended narcissism. ‘Shyness,’ he wrote, ‘is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.’ But the lesson of Peanuts is quite the opposite. Who, after all, is a better model of humanity: Lucy van Pelt, who shouts at the world with bone-shuddering conviction, or Charlie Brown, whose shyness has made him a gentle, fair-minded stoic?”

 

“Cultures with a reputation for fostering shyness, such as the Nordic, seem to have a higher tolerance for silence than most. The Swedish ethnologist Annick Sjögren, raised in France, noticed that in her adoptive country the spoken word “weighs lightly” and is no sooner dispensed than it will “vanish into thin air”. French conversation is a rhetorical performance, detached from oneself, so one can say things without thinking, simply to enjoy the sound of the syllables on one’s tongue, without being afraid that one will be called to account for it. In Sweden, by contrast, what one says is a personal marker, and words are pondered for their meaning. Small talk is kallprata, “cold talk”, and Swedish words for the talkative, such as pratkvarnar (chatterboxes), pladdermajor (babblers), and frasmakare (phrasemongers), convey a suspicious attitude toward talking for its own sake. ‘Talking apparently never ceases to be a problem for the Swedes: a lean across an abyss,’ reflected Susan Sontag after living in Stockholm at the end of the 1960s. ‘Conversations are always in danger of running out of gas, both from the imperative of secretiveness and from the positive lure of silence. Silence is the Swedish national vice.’

The Swedish and Finnish words for shyness, blyg and ujo, carry positive associations of being unassuming and willing to listen to others. Many Finnish proverbs point to the value of choosing words carefully and not saying any more than necessary: ‘One word is enough to make a lot of trouble.’ ‘Brevity makes a good psalm.’ ‘A barking dog does not catch a hare.’ ‘One mouth, two ears.’ According to the Finnish scholars Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, in an essay on ‘the silent Finn,’ the overuse among their compatriots of what linguists call backchannel behavior — nodding, eyebrow raising, saying ‘hmmmm’ while the other person is speaking — is considered intrusive and the preserve of drunks.”

 

My exact observations when I saw film in question; so few words: “The Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s characters are similarly sparing with speech. They work away silently in dull jobs at supermarket checkouts or kitchen sinks and drive through the country’s backroads, chain-drinking vodka while exchanging cryptic grunts. In The Match Factory Girl (1990) thirteen minutes pass, in a film just sixty-eight minutes long, before anyone speaks. …”

“Even in the Nordic countries, silence can carry awkward or hostile subtexts, Ingmar Bergman, in his autobiography, attributes his stammering s a boy to the determination of grown-ups not to speak to a misbehaving child until the child was visibly contrite — a cold shoulder far more painful, he recalls, than the ensuing interrogation, wheedled-out confession, and ritual fetching of the carpet beater. The SWedes have a phrase for it: att tiga ihjäl (to kill by silence). Different cultures may differently assess what constitutes a healthy balance between talking and listening. But silence can be deadly in all of them.”

New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, struggled with a lifelong shyness that crippled her, was subjected to extensive electroshock therapy and nearly lobotomized. Finally found a therapist who understood her (Cawley), who did not ask her to change herself but instead encouraged her to live alone and write – embrace her nature. Learn to live with shyness.

Storr (another psych), “Like Cawley, Storr came to feel that solitariness had its uses and that salvation did not always lie in others. … The naturally solitary could find meaning in their lives by embracing this inheritance rather than simply, as Freud advocated, trying to cure make-believe with cold reason.”

Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins, was famously shy and retiring and not a particularly pleasant personality. And her Moomins reflect this. “Jansson was a great admirer of the book Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward Self-Realization, by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney… ; …According to Horney, there are three kinds of neurotic ‘solutions’ to feeling unsafe or unloved: the expansive, the resigned, and the self-effacing. The expansive neurotics pursue mastery over others; the resigned neurotics strive for independence and self-sufficiency; and the self-effacing neurotics are conflict-phobic, criticizing themselves before others have the chance.”

“Jansson’s lesson is not that shy people should come out of their shells; it is that they should learn to become unneurotic introverts. For Moomins may sulk and skulk fleetingly, but most of the time they are neither needy nor neurotic. Their response to a problem is to think deeply and then make something — a hut, a painting, a poem, a boat carved out of bark — as a way of whittling meaning out of a terrifying world.”

The book even delves into Morrissey and his awkwardness and shyness, which, unlike many others so afflicted, managed to make his shyness work to his advantage. And what I most related to: “In this pre-internet age Morrissey relied, like many other shy British teenagers, on the marvelous efficiency of the Royal Mail and the cheapness of its second-class postage to keep in touch with his fellow human from a distance. The most intense crisis of his adolescence, he later said with his trademark blend of flippancy and dead seriousness, was when the price of stamps rose by a penny.”

And within the Morrissey section, a sub-section on Keats:

“The natural mode for the shy lover was the lyric poem: it recollected one’s embarrassment in tranquillity, at a safe distance from the beloved, and eternalized it within a classic literary form. In Keats and Embarrassment (1974), Christopher Ricks argues that one of the great consolations of poetry, with its public articulation of intensely private feelings, is that it helps us to express embarrassment and put it to creative use, making us feel less lonely and estranged in the process. Keats, he says, was a poet particularly attuned to , and insightful about, embarrassment. He felt embarrassed by his lack of formal education, his lowly apprenticeship as an apothecary, his poetry’s poor critical reception, his height (only just over five feet tall)…”

Keats realized that “among the sane, fortifying, and consolatory powers (nature) has is the power to free us from embarrassment, to make embarrassment unthinkable.”

“Keats’s willingness to face the subject of embarrassment in his poems and other writings allowed him to turn awkwardness into ‘a human victory’.”

The keys, though, if you could even call them ‘keys’ as opposed to ‘grin-and-bear-it’ grit (just get through it) come nearer the end of the book.

When offered anti-depressants and other pharmaceuticals to help, the writer concludes pretty much what always crosses my mind: “The sadness caused by shyness is real, and helping others to take the edge off that sadness is a noble aim. But taking a drug for social anxiety — for feeling stupid, boring, or unlikeable — feels like shouting at the wind, arguing with the rain. It feels like trying to find a cure for being alive.”

“All the people I have written about in this book were as shy at the end of their lives as at the start of them. They found ways to hide their shyness, channel it, finesse it, or work around it, but it never went away.”

Sexism, misogyny, racism and inequality in women’s sports

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The tension and irritation has been building up in me for a long time, even though I was unaware of its presence and imperceptible growth. I am not an athlete nor am I someone who has been vocally feminist for much of my life. I had a few conversations with former colleagues – women who were much older than me, who had been through some of the trials of being the only woman working in a completely male-dominated workplace (an air traffic control center). It’s not as though women are not expected somehow – still – to take notes and make the coffee, but back then it was not just understood but was blatantly stated as a requirement and not questioned. Fighting against these slights in daily work life has never been a conscious part of my life. But strides made by women who came before me paved the way for me not to have to think about such things (as well as the installation of automatic coffee machines!).

I believe wholeheartedly in equality for everyone – and I mean everyone – but when I undertook a master’s program in gender studies, the extremes of feminist theory put me off by being so anti-man. I have not personally suffered – to my knowledge – for being a woman, and I am sure that in some measure this is because I am a white woman who, in the Nordic countries where I live, blends into the scenery and enjoys the privilege that comes from so many different aspects of the accident of my birth and the conscious choice of where I live (which is another layer of privilege – having the choice to decide where to live and to go there).

Similarly Scandinavia conscientiously attempts to lead the way on matters of equality. It does not always succeed, sometimes tripping over itself trying to be “too fair” or politically correct and coming out looking foolish. But the thinking is in the right place. I also say that I have not “consciously” suffered because I don’t know that we are always aware of the things we are numb or indoctrinated to. While no man is outwardly making lewd remarks or insisting that I do something degrading or something that is anything other than equal to what he would do, there have probably been times that I was perceived or treated as “lesser than” because I am a woman. I have been blissfully ignorant to this, if and when it did happen, because my life has still been lived on my terms and has been relatively easy to boot.

Revealing this as my backdrop, I can’t really explain what incensed me and pushed me over the edge about sexism, misogyny and racism in women’s athletics. Not even looking at the flat-out stereotypes any longer (as though all women athletes must exist at caricature-like extremes, i.e. either women who appear as masculine, steroid-pumped sportsmen-lesbians from Cold War era East Germany or ultra-feminine, would-be fashion models who look cute in a short skirt). Either direction these stereotypes travel, they smack of objectification and are on display for the criticism and analysis of the world (and it’s not just men engaging in the bitterest criticism). Not because they are athletes in the public eye but because they are women.

We can see this dynamic quite publicly and visibly played out in the form of Bruce Jenner, former Olympic champion, who is now known as Caitlyn Jenner. As Bruce the athlete, no one would have questioned how he looked or would have sexualized his existence to the degree that all women athletes put up with today. And as Caitlyn, she is suddenly subject to this kind of scrutiny. Jon Stewart explained it best in a recent episode of The Daily Show. Now, suddenly, as a woman, Jenner’s worth is all tied up in her “fuckability” and her beauty.

This holds true for women athletes the world over. And when it is not explicitly about their bodies as objects, and how their bodies and fashion sense reflect on their character (!) or deservedness to win (!!) (e.g., when a Wimbledon winner (Marion Bartoli) is ripped to shreds because she is “too ugly and/or too fat” to win), it’s about the invisibility or lack of support for their sports. FIFA‘s (soon-to-be-former president) Sepp Blatter infamously remarked that women’s football might be more popular if they wore tighter/shorter shorts; Al Jazeera reported on the discrimination against female footballers in Brazil while The Atlantic reports that Brazil’s biggest male footballer makes 15 million USD a year, while its biggest female football star cannot find a team to play for. Al Jazeera and more recently John Oliver highlighted the sexist inequality of FIFA insisting that the women’s World Cup be played on artificial turf rather than grass.

All of this is frustrating but not quite the infuriating push I needed to get really angry. Instead, Serena Williams’s win at the French Open this weekend finally made me seethe with rage. Looking at her winning history, she is singularly the greatest female tennis player ever to play the game. Can she be recognized simply for these record-breaking achievements in athleticism and sporting victory? No.

No one is or has been (in recent memory) more susceptible to the powerful and ugly forces of sexism, misogyny, racism and inequality than Serena Williams.

If all female pro-athletes, particularly in a “demure” arena like tennis, are treated like sex objects who should be supermodels, what can we expect? And when the kind of racially charged, barely veiled racist language cues come into play on top of the sexism and objectifying, shouldn’t every woman be angry?

**Edited later to note that The Atlantic published a piece on French Open men’s champion, Stan Wawrinka, which states: “It’s that Wawrinka doesn’t look or comport himself like a Grand Slam champion. From his bright pink “pajama” shorts to his faintly dadboddish physique, the Swiss native looks more like someone you’d find at Home Depot than Roland Garros.” Finally someone jumps on what a man looks like and how he “comports” himself. Equality, right?

The culture of taking undeserved credit

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the workplace culture of assigning and/or taking credit for accomplishments, undeservedly or unwittingly. It is pervasive in almost every work culture. I don’t really want to go on a rant – but I suspect I will.

For example, an employee’s name may be assigned to a project, and that person may ostensibly, supposedly be contributing to a project – but perhaps that person is contributing nothing (and is possibly even detrimental to the project being completed on time). Yet somehow the incompetence is covered for, or just never exposed, and while the project team suffers, the higher-up management types just assume this dead weight in reality is pulling her weight in theory.

I have worked in a lot of situations populated with characters who fit this type to a T. They are sure to have their name prominently featured in the project and get themselves assigned to a handful of tasks they will never actually complete (causing the rest of the team – or even people outside the team – to pick up the slack). Often internal corporate pressures will force the rest of the team to “support” this person because, you know, we’re all working on this collective farm (welcome to the kolkhoz!) together toward the same goal thing. At some point, as the culprit does not deliver, does not attend required meetings (or attends physically but not intellectually) and delays progress, everyone gets frustrated but no one knows quite what to do. What is the sensitive corporate way of handling this kind of situation? The culprit is also a part of multiple other projects, sometimes even insisting on taking the lead. But these projects drag on for months without any discernible progress, and when the culprit is asked about the status of X or Y project, s/he says, “Due to my obligations in Z project, X and Y are not finished” – never mind that, for example, project Y may have an impact on project Z and thus needs to be completed in line with the requirements of project Z. The real problem is that the culprit – like all those who manipulate in the workplace – is playing a game, creating the illusion of being so busy (and probably actually being busy running around in circles pretending to do all the things s/he has taken on), that s/he earns a reputation as some kind of workhorse and saint who takes on all kinds of projects outside her purview.

Problem is – nothing gets done, and yet most people (especially decisionmakers and executives) don’t see it because they are not on the tactical frontlines (or to keep up the collective farm analogy – let’s say, they’re not plowing the fields because they are too busy making five-year plans while the people around them starve) and because other people cover these culprits’ asses. (And the culprit is usually a “play dumb” type who relies on the goodness and open, sharing nature of corporate teammates. S/he milks team members for just enough key information to say all the right things to the right people to make it seem like s/he knows what is going on. But in fact, s/he does not.)

In every situation to which I have been privy, however, these are the exact people who get promoted and who are championed as “future leaders” in companies. Maybe not always (because sometimes these characters manage to out themselves as idiots). But generally speaking these characters know how to play the game – they do the bare minimum but do get actively involved just when the stakes are high enough that someone “important” will notice. They generally look and act the part and know how to play a political game – and want to play it. It’s a game of appearances.

Naturally not everyone wants to play it or look the part. I certainly don’t. I just want to do my work and move on. I would go so far as to say that in most roles and situations, I just want to be invisible – deliver what is asked and little else. I don’t really need credit.

The thing is, though, that while I may not want or need credit – I also do not want someone else to take credit for my work. I had a long discussion with someone about this recently – we are not attention whores or credit seekers, but it burns us up to see someone (usually the aforementioned “culprit” type) sliding in and taking credit for things that had very little to do with them. Again, how should one handle this dilemma, particularly when there seems to be an institutional blindness to it, which is applicable almost across the board in most companies? The real driver of work and progress is often also seen as a troublemaking, squeaky wheel because s/he keeps pushing and asking questions. S/he doesn’t, therefore, seem like the ideal candidates for promotion. But someone who plays politics, forms some alliances, seems subservient enough to his/her managers while giving the appearance of being both a high performer and team player – while in reality being neither – and who is happy to unquestioningly toe the corporate line and never ask any questions – that’s the future of the company.

Clearly there are people who craft entire careers around building false impressions and being just what they need to be in the perception game that corporate life really is.

Credit and the dirty little secret of maternity leave

In the Nordic countries, where I have spent most of my professional life, maternity leave is a right and an obligation – and it is usually comprised of anywhere from ten months to 1.5 years off work when a person gives birth. (Men and women share the allotted time off.) I am sure I will instantly set myself up as a lightning rod for criticism here – because who on earth attacks pregnant women taking their much-deserved maternity leave? No one attacks mothers but those who want to get their asses kicked.

But when it comes to workplace credit-taking, being on maternity leave seems not to be an impediment to receiving credit for accomplishments and achievements. It seems not to be a reason that a woman should not include projects and achievements on her CV when she was nowhere near the workplace when those things happened. In the former case, I won’t say this is the fault of women who go on maternity leave – they cannot control whether someone at work assigns credit to them for work they never did. This is a matter of perception and impression.

I have been in enough situations where people who have been on maternity leave for a year are getting credit for things that happened wholly while they were away. This is not their fault – this is a byproduct of the impression they left before going on leave, and how relevant their place in the company is. A good example of this – in a previous role, I helped in a rather instrumental way in bringing a project together – there were a lot of people involved, so it is not like I was the sole horse who pulled the plow (you knew the farm would come back into it, of course). (Definitely a big difference between the plow horse and the one-trick pony of the oft-cited dog-and-pony show.)

But when the time came for a big public event in which the contributors were thanked, I was not on the list while all kinds of people who were only tangentially involved were – including one woman who had been on maternity leave for the entire duration of this project. Her influence, her work – absolutely nothing that was connected to her had any connection to this project, and yet, her presence or role in the company was pronounced enough that she could be named as someone to thank in this project while invisible, under-the-radar me was, well… invisible. Again, it’s not that I thought I should be feted for doing my job – I just did not want to see people who had absolutely no hand in it get credit. Maybe it should not matter in the big scheme, but in some way, acknowledging someone else for work in which they had no part at all is a bitterer pill to swallow than not being acknowledged myself. In this case, it was, as I said, someone on maternity leave, so it was not as though she was one of these aforementioned “culprits” who operate in snake-like fashion to slither away with undeserved credit.

It further confirms the idea that credit – and promotability – is about appearances. Not only literally looking the part but most importantly acting the part: some variation of loud, outgoing, social, always-on, opinionated, always-networking, making your presence known. Arguably in work situations, you have to be this way to some degree to climb the ladder. Almost no amount of genius or competence can help you climb the ladder in sales and marketing if you don’t have some of this memorable surface-level personality to match. And in many cases, all you need is a memorable enough surface-level personality. Generalizations, yes, but based on observation. The larger the organization, the more true these observations seem to be because accountability and personal responsibility is diminished further and further the more layers of people, processes and projects you have to cushion your performance or lack thereof.

The latter part of my argument touches a bit more on the diabolical part of taking credit, and in these cases, it would be almost indisputable that the person in question had no hand in the project/accomplishment at all because they were supposed to have been on maternity leave. No one is going to check into this, though, so it makes me wonder about whether this is some kind of tacit, silent understanding between employers, future employers and maternity-leave takers that CVs will be padded with false or misleading accomplishments? (I have no idea – I have never been on maternity leave to test out this theory.)

I have known several people who spent virtually their entire engagement at a company on maternity leave, and yet after the leave ends, particularly if they are moving on to a new company, they pad their resumes with accomplishments that could not possibly have been theirs. Basic math would tell a prospective employer what s/he needs to know without even consulting former employers/references. The projects they highlight were undertaken wholly (or mostly) while they were out having and rearing a child. But no one questions this even though maternity leave in the Nordic countries is about a year in length.

I don’t know if job applicants and potential employers just have an unspoken understanding that this is how it works or if these potential employers scrutinize the claims made on a resume more closely when they hire. It’s just another case of taking credit where it isn’t due and leveraging it to create a false perception and expectation. That is not to say that these claims, however misleading, are untrue in that the person in question cannot deliver the results they claim – they may very well be absolutely qualified. It is true, though, that they definitely did not deliver those results in that specific case listed on their CV. I am just wondering about the underhanded mechanics of this process and whether it is ever actually questioned.

And back to the collective with me…

The Last Farm short film: A new meaning to DIY

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Years ago at a film festival in Iceland, I saw the short film The Last Farm (Síðasti bærinn). It has been years since I saw it and stumbled recently upon a link to the film and watched it again. It is as stark and arresting (both visually and in the simple storytelling) as when I originally watched it. Nothing like taking matters into one’s own hands.

Meanwhile I have been thinking about furniture, home improvements and sitting in the sun during my few moments of free time. Spring came mercifully early to the Nordics this year, and I am eating it up. Speaking of eating, I love discovering amazing places in hidden spots. Recently stumbled on Grön Ko in Säffle (which is sort of the middle of nowhere), and I am in love with it. I am always looking for ways to get more local, non-processed foods. I long for more vegetables and herbs, but it is also nice (if bothering with meat) to source it somewhere that is not a faceless, vast grocery chain.

Also speaking of eating, there will be a big bake coming up shortly.