Cyber Shyness - Author L. E. Henderson

Stupid finger. Press publish already.

Right before I post a tweet, a blog entry, or a Facebook comment, my finger stalls at the publish button and I have this conversation.

In the world of emotion, I am standing on a promontory, the wind in my face, looking down into a valley thousands of feet below. Soon, I know, I will have to jump, hoping for a net at the bottom. I have jumped before and lived. Why does it never get easier?

I consider myself confident, so why all the hesitation?

After all, introverts are supposed to thrive on computers. Everyone knows that shyness curls up and goes to sleep at the edge of cyberspace.

My mind cycles through a list of possible causes: bipolar disorder; bullies; genetics; repressed alien abduction.

No matter. I need to deal with this.

I already have dealt with it, in part. I am better at sharing my ideas than I used to be. I began writing another blog years ago, inspired by the idea of writing an on-line journal.

But a conflict arose when I went for a visit with a friend and I found out that he had been reading it. I was not mad exactly. Just stunned. I had no idea he even knew about my blog.

I knew that, in theory, faceless cyber-people might stumble onto my blog and take a look. But this was a realperson. It was one thing for me to write a blog, but for a person, a real person, to read it? What madness was that?

I asked my husband why he was so eager to tell all his friends about my blog, and why he had never told me he told them.

When the friend overheard the tense tone of the conversation, he apologized for reading my blog and promised never to do it again.

At that point I realized how silly I was being. The whole point of a blog was for people to read it. If I wanted to record my thoughts privately, I could, but I had chosen to blog.

Thus, I gathered courage and continued bravely to blog with full knowledge that someone might actually read my writing, until my brother said to me, “I like you blog,” he laughed, “but you only write about yourself. You are so self-indulgent.”

I remembered then why I had been afraid for people to read my blog in the first place: critical commentary.

In my next blog post, I penned a devastating diatribe, defending the right of those who wrote journals to include the word “I” in their entries, and denouncing the sorts of people who disapproved. But afterwards, I felt spent. The word “self-indulgent” had sunk its tentacles into my brain. And my brother, failing to recognize that he was the subject of my rant, thought it was my best post yet.

My first blog sank into a remote nebula of cyberspace and vanished.

But fear of criticism is common, so I wonder how many others suffer from anxiety over on-line self-revelation and how many have used the term “cyber-shyness.” I was using it in my mind and, as far as I knew, I had invented it. For fun I Googled the term. As I suspected, others are using it. It may not have made it to Miriam-Webster yet, but it is a useful word that lets me know I am not alone.

Shyness apparently does not stop at on-line interactions. Shyness is democratic and egalitarian, and will thrive anywhere. Embracing all genders and ethnicities, it does not discriminate. A shy person can be shy around a cat. In fact, at one time, long ago, I was shy around computers.

It started in early childhood when I watched a Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk foiled a dangerous robot by presenting it with a logical contradiction. The robot was so confused, its head exploded.

This made a strong impression on me. It taught me that computers were fragile creatures that could not handle illogic in any form.

The slightest logical contradiction could trigger one into hysterical cries of “Does not compute! Does not compute!” and there would be no way to calm it down, except to maybe throw logically consistent syllogisms at it, and I knew from Star Trek where failure to do that could lead.

Of course, the robot in Star Trek was a bad computer, but I was sure that there must be many nice ones that did not deserve to explode. As a result, I always felt shy around my personal computer when we finally got one.

Playing video games familiarized me with computers and eased my anxieties, although sometimes I played games where you entered words to tell the avatar what to do, such as “Climb tree” or “Look apple.” Now and then the program would fail to understand a command and present me with “???”.

I always had the impulse to apologize.

But since I never confused any of my computers enough to explode them, my comfort with them increased, at least until “World of Warcraft.”

I had friends who were heavily into the game and were eager to share its wonders with me. They knew I loved video games, so I should naturally love \”World of Warcraft.\”

It was like a real world with real people, a daring and highly acclaimed massively multiplayer adventure. What was not to love?

When I first played the game, I did like it. The graphics were colorful and engaging. I enjoyed exploring the pretty landscape and was warming toward the game until a sword-bearing warrior challenged me to a duel.

I froze. The pressure. I worried that saying no might seem rude, but did I really want to duel? I was at level one, and even the bunnies were pinning me to the ground. Besides, I was a pacifist, at least when it came to real people. But this was not a real person. Except he kind of was.

A quandary. My ethical code was not made to bend to this situation. But I could worry about that later.

For now I had to deal with the reality that a real person, armed and hostile, was romping around in my virtual playground; if I stuck around, he might want to discuss sports or cell phone plans. I looked around for virtual furniture to hide behind but, finding none, I decided to end my experiment with W.O.W. and sought solace in my new Zelda game, Twilight Princess.

When my baffled friends asked why I had abandoned W.O.W. I searched myself for an answer that would make sense to them, but the only one that came to mind was the truth: “World of Warcraft” was too socially intense.

A lot has changed since. I started my current blog and stayed with it. My blog has been rewarding, and I love talking to my friends on-line. I think that shyness never fully goes away, but my gratitude toward all those who have encouraged me outweighs it. I want people to read my blog now and, rather than swatting them away, I do everything I can to encourage it.

I remember my fears like snapshots; there was the time I avoided opening a personal Facebook account for fear of exposure, a time when Twitter seemed daunting; a time when web-based freelancing was unthinkable.

From the time I was afraid for anyone to read my blog, I have come a long way.

But right before I post anything, there is still always that moment where I freeze. I wonder why, after over 60 blog posts and almost 35,000 views, my feeling of jumping off a precipice never goes away.

I have no perfect answer, but I take comfort in the thought that, although I might be unable to control how I feel, I can control what I do. Every time I have been afraid to post. And every time I have posted anyway.

Maybe the anxiety will always be there. Maybe there will always be a moment where I freeze. And maybe that will be okay.

Or maybe one day I will become so enlightened, I can post a blog without enduring an hour of anxious misery as I wait for someone to “like” it on Facebook. Maybe one day I will even summon the considerable social graces needed to play “World of Warcraft.”

Until then, I shall accept my fate with stoic dignity, as I sit here with my hand poised above the “publish” button having weird conversations with my finger.

Stupid finger. Press publish. What are you waiting for?

The moon to fall. The earth to wrench itself from orbit. The terraforming of Mars.

Dispense with the poetry already. Be a nice finger and just hit ‘publish,’ why don’t you?

Hit publish now. Before your illogic destroys me. Before I become so confused, I explode.