Caridad Ferrer
You’ve got a bad case of the Jekyll and Hydes. I mean, sans the whole split-personality thing, it pretty much nails you, doesn’t it? C’mon, let’s examine the evidence.
There’s the side that’s crazy shy (let’s refer to this as the Jekyll half) and born into a family that Just Doesn’t Get It. They don’t even know how to spell shy. Your dad is the life of the party; your mother is a natural attention (read: “man”) magnet; your brother could sell ice to an Eskimo, and your sister’s idea of a good time is going into a room where she doesn’t know a single soul. And that’s just your immediate family. The rest of the relatives? They aren’t any better, most of them falling under some variation on a theme of Extreme Extrovert.
Pfft.
To you, shoving bamboo shoots under your fingernails sounds like a better alternative to small talk.
So to say they don’t understand what you mean when you say you’re feeling shy is putting it mildly. They think it’s a silly pretense, especially when you balk at being paraded in public like a trained monkey, playing the Bach Invention that won you that piano competition or reciting the poem that your fifth-grade teacher insisted on entering in the Dade County Youth Fair, and which won first place. Which brings us to the second reason why they have a hard time understanding your reactions. After all, why on earth do you enter competitions if you don’t want the attention, right?
Which brings us to Hyde. That side of your personality is as competitive as Jekyll is shy. But explaining that you love competition—that you love competing against yourself as much as you love competing against others—is usually met with blank stares. They don’t get that you’re simply incapable of taking on a pursuit if you don’t intend to become the best you personally can. Which has the unexpected side benefit of allowing you to fake it—people will think you’re totally outgoing and confident.
No wonder people don’t get it. You hardly get it yourself.
On the one hand you’ve got Hyde saying, “Come on, dude. Those people out there—they’re not doing anything you can’t do. Let’s go!” while Jekyll’s all, “Oh, I don’t know, it’s getting pretty crazy out there, isn’t it? Hey, look—a nice dark corner!”
Welcome to the battle you’re going to wage for the rest of your life. The Jekyll in you will pull away from the spotlight, so scared of being made a fool of that you’ll work yourself into an anxious, stomach-churning lather, while your Hyde side will force you to overcome the nausea and just get on with it, already. Jekyll’s going to win for a long time—the anxiety will rise to levels such that you’ll abandon a lot of your dreams, finding it easier to retreat and blend into the wallpaper, even as Hyde writhes inside you, furious that you’re such a monumental wuss.
Don’t look at it as being a wuss—look at it as…hibernation. Because I promise, there will come a time when you’ll bust out, voluntarily, in full, glorious Technicolor. You’ll be an engaging (or so you’ve been told) presence on panels, win prestigious writing awards before your peers, and even step out onto a competitive ballroom dance floor.
And Hyde’ll be right there, helping you enjoy the spotlight.
Caridad Ferrer is a first-generation Cuban-American, whose YA debut, Adiós to My Old Life, was a Romance Writers of America’s 2007 RITA winner and was named to the 2009 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults list, awarded by the American Library Association. Her latest young adult novel, When the Stars Go Blue, a contemporary retelling of Bizet’s Carmen, was recently honored as the first-place YA Novel: English Language at the 2011 International Latino Book Awards.