CAME HOME TO A WOMAN I COULD NOT RECOGNIZE

FWIW: I'm on a Billy Joel kick right now.

This man hanging out of his souped-up Jeep seems like the most chill guy in town. He’s wearing a loose t-shirt and an even looser grin, leaning out the driver’s side window at a red light. He almost sings to me across the way, “Party paaarty you gon’ paaaaarty tonight?”

I glance up but keep walking. The night turns on as the men howl at the horizon, the moon, the rare woman alone here. The sky is hazy because of the wildfires in the woodlands across the border. The sun sets orange then pink then purple night. Another block down the road, another man asks out the window of his parked car: “You got a light?”

“Nah, sorry,” I shrug at him and keep walking.

Then I hear: “What about a man? You got a man?”

I tell you this not to tell you that I get hit on when I’m alone. (Okay, I tell you this only partially to tell you that I get hit on when I’m alone.) More importantly, I tell you this because in that moment, I realized that a solid 99% of the conversations I have with strangers are with men and they’re usually about my body or my boyfriend. None of these conversations do or mean anything real. This is probably my fault.

Not in a it’s how I’ve been dressed way. But in a I should probably talk to more strangers way. I used to. But lately, I’ve been shy.

In The End of the Tour, Jason Segel plays David Foster Wallace and he says: "I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people."

And I think about that a lot when people tell me they have social anxiety.

I’m not saying I don’t understand. After all, I wish I spoke to more strangers. And whenever I do have the opportunity to speak to someone I don’t know, I notice the small and subtle ways that I hide parts of myself. Being in the world with other sentient beings—with their thoughts and opinions—can be paralyzing. In an interdependent world, we are only as free as our conceptions of The Other. If their thoughts and opinions are matters of judgment and shame, we are trapped.

But the opposite is also true. DFW was saying that this shy brand of self-absorption is an act of honoring your mind-made threats over your curiosity about other people. But I’ve got another interpretation: shyness exists because you’re hyperaware of how interactions can change us.

To brush real shoulders is to risk being broken open—which means that you risk being seen, which means that you risk being misunderstood. To talk to a stranger is to meet the chance that the world (and your understanding of it) is not what you think it is.

****

After a few blocks, I make it to the bar and climb the stairs to the venue on the musty second floor. Up on the small stage, the guitar player is pure soul, toiling away on a neck, away from the eye of success. (It’s local music, after all.) But he’s really good. His hair is long and his guitar wails clean. The girls in the crowd reach one finger down and shift the crotch of their denim shorts. They sweat. It’s practically summer.

In the front of the audience is a girl with kitchen-scissor bangs. She dances electric with the evening in her long denim skirt, flinging herself against the air. Flailing is the bodily hope (or fear) of finding something solid. It’s desperation for something outside of the self, even if it’s only air.

I watch her dance and start to feel envious. Ten years ago, I used to dance like that. I used to feel free of what other people were doing or thinking.

Yet when she comes up to me at the end of the night with a flyer, she leaps away before I can even read what’s printed on the paper she handed me.

“What is this?” I ask after her. I want to talk to a stranger. But she’s already gone.

When I do manage to flag her down, she’s nervous. She tells me she’s in the floating circus, then runs away again. I should have remembered from my early 20s: flail-dancing is only play freedom. It’s asking for attention that doesn’t require interaction.

You toss your guitar into the kitchen when we get back home and I unpack the junk food we ordered at 3am. I unwrap the shitty taco and run through what I might say to you before we fall asleep.

I’m still trying to pre-empt what you want from me. I’m afraid that each time I reveal myself to be who I am—actually quite simple, actually quite afraid—I fail your fantasies, which means failing you.

That’s why the borderland of strangers calls to me—they don’t know me, so they don’t require me to be anything but immediate and alive. To them, I can seem brave and interesting and it’s easy to play dance-down-the-street joie de vivre for five minutes. I can’t do it for five years.

I know this is just self-absorption: honoring my mind-made threats over reality. You’ve never expressed anything but delight at getting to know me. You insist that the most rare thing between couples is actual, transparent authenticity.

And this insistence brings up the distinct possibility that through all the years and all the people I’ve known, I’ve only been pretending. Your daily presence makes me question if what I’ve been calling my personality was only performance. No one’s been close enough to tell the difference before. Not even me. You make me fear that I am, after all this time, a stranger to myself.

You ask what’s on my mind and I go quiet.

Perhaps there’s another type of shyness. It’s when you’re so absorbed by other people that it makes it difficult to be with yourself.