On shyness
These two comments I received following my transpocalypse review made me think:
Gemma wrote
Hon, I wish we had got to talk more. Next time? It's so hard to believe that the vibrant, colourful Miss K. (of the stripey tights and Six Inch Killaz) might be shy; our websites and ourselves are often very different, aren't they?
Gillian wrote
Shy?
Wow I'm shocked to read of shyness, I was a bit nervous to come up and say hello. Hope to chat next time.
Thing is, I do tend to go a little quiet in group situations, especially when there are a lot of people around I've not met before. Which does seem kinda bizarre when you consider that, put me on a platform and I genuinely have absolutely no inhibitions, be it on stage, or blogging or whatever.
Of course there's that old theory that performers are actually very shy people, which I think is very true in my case. The exhibitionist streak hides something very different. Why? Deeply insecure? Covering up perceived inadequacies?
Whatever, a lot of performers I've met are deeply private and quiet people and I guess I fit that pattern.
And the kicker is, there's an interesting Japanese quality (or defect) which is an almost pathological fear of something called "losing face". Japanese people are brought up to abhor losing face in any way, from being bested in business through error or negligence, to simply not knowing the way from Maenocho to Ikebukuro. It's why we hardly ever use the word "no" - the act of denial being a precursor to loss of face. Nutty.
At extremes, it leads to the custom for ritual suicide; at the mildest it means that Japanese people tend to be excessively reserved (if you don't pipe up, you can't reveal your defects and so you can't lose face).
So I think I also suffer from this national form of OCD to a certain degree as well.
Perhaps shy is the wrong word, actually. I'd go for "ungregarious". I've never really thought about it this way before, but what I realise now is that I'm really good in groups of up to about 5 people, especially close friends, which is why in big groups I tend to stick to that size of a sub-clump of people (on Saturday, Siobhan, Ian and Kim got the nod).
So, there you are, on Saturday, some of you were "fortunate" enough to meet Miss K, narcissist, exhibitionist, reclusive, obsessive compulsive, antisocial transgendered z-list celebrity. With trousers that refused to stay up.
No change there then.
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