20 Real Struggles For The Painfully Shy

In this day and age, it’s hard to find someone who’s not an exhibitionist. With celebrities leaking naked photos like they’re going out of fashion, and people on the street sporting ever-revealing costumes, it looks like ours is a society completely open, unafraid to share everything with everyone.

For some people, though, the world’s a much different place. Sitting in the corner, or lurking behind the crowd can be found the shy person. Continually trying to avoid the limelight, the timid person can find the contemporary world to a very strange place indeed. If you’re shy, we feel your pain and hopefully after this, everyone else will too.

Realizing You Have A Crush On Someone

Getting on crush on someone when you’re shy is a fate worse than anything else. Too scared to say anything, lest they realize your affection, you’re doomed to suffering your feelings in silence, carrying around the burden of your flame as it slowly torches you from the inside out.

Being Told Not To Be Shy

When you trust someone enough to reveal your worries about being shy, you are pretty much guaranteed this response. Confident people just don’t get being shy but, true to form, you’re too nervous to pull them up on it.

Always Being Described As The Quiet One

In your group of friends, everyone has their own description and when the time rolls around for you to get your title, you know exactly what’s coming. Deep down, you know that you’re not quiet at all but on most occasions, you don’t want to draw attention to yourself and simply suffer in silence.

Having To Present To A Group Of People

School presentations were invented by people with no compassion. While you’re always happy to do the work, you can’t deal with having to address a group of people that you don’t know that well. Normally, your teacher flunks you just because you’re so timid.

Drowning Your Sorrows On The Internet

You praise the day that the internet was created because without it, you’re certain that you would never do anything at all. At the end of a hard day of real talk, you like nothing better than burrowing your head in your laptop and shouting your ideas online.

Trying To Party But Failing

Your friends always invite you to huge parties and from time to time, you feel like you have to accept their invite. When you get to the party, however, you become so tongue tied that you can’t even remember your name and just as soon as you had arrived, you choose to leave.

Awkwardly Idolizing Your Confident Friends

All of your friends seem so confident and extroverted to you and you can’t quite believe how they do it. You try and subtly ask for their help but most of the time, it comes off as really creepy.

Trying To Talk And Not Being Able To

There are times when you have something really interesting to say and so you muster all of your courage and try to put the words together. When you come to speak, though, your mouth is so dry that it clamps shut and once again, you’re forced to keep your thoughts to yourself.

Being Asked Why You’re Shy

For some reason, it’s socially acceptable for people to demand an explanation out of you as to why you’re so shy. You’re naturally outraged by the constant demands but unfortunately, it takes a lot of courage to make people know about it.

Desperately Trying To Flirt

Flirting is horrifying to you and trying to get someone you like to realize it seems genuinely impossible. When your crush doesn’t respond to your brief eye contact, you realize that you’re going to have to actually talk to them and the prospect of doing so fills you with utter fear.

Struggling To Manage Your Nerves

You have no idea why but you feel nervous all of the time. Driving the car? Nervous. Chilling at home? Nervous. Being nervous is such a natural state for you by now that it’s starting to feel weird when you don’t have the nervous shakes.

Opening Your Mouth And Nothing Coming Out

On more than one occasion, you have had to face the embarrassment of nothing coming out when you try to speak. Sometimes, your brain and mouth just don’t match up and when that happens, you just want to crawl into a cave and hide.

Irrationally Avoiding Small Talk

Small talk is the devil in your world and if you could avoid it altogether, you would. You’ve avoided hairdressers for months now just to not have to talk about yourself but by now, you’re in desperate need of a cut.

Awkwardly Searching For Conversation Topics

When you’re alone, you have a whole bunch of thoughts whizzing around in your head but as soon as someone comes to talk to you, your mind goes blank. Trying to talk to someone who catches you off-guard is basically impossible and on a few occasions, you’ve spoken about a weirdly inappropriate topic.

Being Called Out For Being Rude

People that don’t know you don’t understand how shy you get in certain situations and a lot of the time, you’re called out for being rude. When this happens, you get genuinely upset, but trying to explain why you are the way that you are is basically impossible.

Having To Avoid Walking In Alone

When you do have to attend a party, you try and cushion the inevitable entrance that you have to make. You try and synchronize with one of your friends so you can walk in together, but when no-one’s around, you have a bit of a panic.

Dreading Having To Sing Happy Birthday

You just know that, when it comes to singing Happy Birthday, you’re going to mess it up on some level. As soon as you see candles flickering, you look for the nearest escape and to this day, you have not sung the song the whole way through.

Constantly Feeling Nervous

You’re so shy that your body has started to tremble of its own accord. You’re so nervous all of the time that people often liken you to a small rodent but you know that even animals have more guts than you do.

Wearing Baggy Shirts To Cover Yourself Up

You hate drawing attention to yourself so much that when you’re shopping, you make a beeline for the biggest and baggiest clothing you can find. The ideal is a shirt that will swallow you up entirely, so people don’t even see you walking around.

Mentally Preparing Yourself For Roll Call

Having to announce your presence in public is incredibly tough and mornings in school are always the worst. For some reason, you always forget what to say when the teacher calls your name and every day, you have to do a few test runs just to make sure that you will be ok.