Shy People - An Exposé — Gráinne Maguire

I think it’s been remiss of me to get this far into newsletters before telling you at least one ghost tale. Readers, this is a true story. I am on my way home from the university bar late one night and my head is already thumping. This is key information, view it like a well-known actor playing a suspiciously minor part in an episode of Midsomer Murders. I repeat, my hangover is on its way. I was living in a shared house that belonged to an elderly widower, his wife having died several years before in the house we were renting. Underline that! Nobody in the house liked me and I was at the time addicted to drunkenly ringing psychic phone lines and in the morning completely forgetting what they’d said. This is not relevant to the story, but I am trying to create the scene.

I make it to bed, head throbbing, already dreading how I will feel the next day. I fall asleep and then BOOM I’m awake! There is the silvery figure of an old woman at the bottom of my bed. I feel compelled to unfold my arm towards her and she places a white disc in my open palm. I pop it into the glass of water by my bed, it fizzes, I drink it and fall back asleep. I wake up the next morning. Reader, I have NO hangover. Explain that Richard Dawkins.

So, what I’m trying to say is, I like ghosts. I actually find it offensive how ghosts are portrayed on TV and films. They move into a house, and suddenly the neighbourhood is ruined, and the property value drops? Not cool. Don’t let your kids play with the little ghost boy? So unfair. And even when a ghost isn't a baddie it’s always their defining feature, it’s never just a part of their identity but not something anybody mentions past the first episode. The most problematic ghost character of all of course being Slimer from Ghostbusters, a vile collaborator who assists in rounding up his fellow ghouls, before they are imprisoned in a tank, all while he gorges himself on pizza. Slimer, your green mucus is the least disgusting thing about you. May we live to see you punished for your crimes.

I’m defensive because I love ghosts. I’ll go as far as saying I respect their style. Ghosts cling to drama. They are perfectly happy to be defined for all eternity by the worst thing to have happened to them. “Please solve my murder, my lover stood me up on my wedding day, my mother poisoned me with an apple.” You never see a ghost with an axe in their head they’d rather not talk about, and good for them. They never ask you how you are doing and they are happy to exclusively talk about themselves. I respect that. That was me up until my mid-thirties. If they have to live through one experience for all eternity, it will be the worst moment of their lives and yes, they will be dragging you into it.

I hope though when I am a ghost, I have a little self-awareness. I think it’s important to address what you’ve done since you died. There’s nothing more undignified than a spectral form trading on past glories. It’s a dark night and you stumble upon the spectre of a Victorian serving girl “I’m Bessie the servant girl...” she lisps. “...dead at only 9 years old and I’m still scrubbing me pots.” Bessie, have some self-respect. Assuming you died in the mid 19th century, that means you’ve been a ghost for at least one hundred and fifty years and yet here you are, still clinging on to your moment in the spotlight. Ghosts are the child stars of the spectral world, banging on about their time on the corporal earth, like it was a brief series arc on “Boy Meets World”.

Ghosts are also very much an English concept. So many houses are haunted here because the English are all so passive aggressive they’d rather live with lodgers from literal hell than ask them outright to leave.

In Ireland we don’t really have ghosts, the nearest we have is banshees. They’re fairy women who will appear outside your window at night wailing and brushing her hair, to let you know a close member of your family is about to die. So that’s a melodramatic woman very comfortable making your granny’s death very much about her.

We don’t really have ghosts in Ireland because old people live so long, it wouldn’t work. An Irish ghost would dramatically enter a room sobbing about her horrible death at the hands of an English soldier only to find a girl she went to school with alive and well, rolling her eyes. “Firstly, the soldier was Welsh, secondly, you died choking on a Foxes glacier mint and thirdly you always caused your own problems Bridgie Flanagan, I’d no sympathy for you in life and I’ve none for you in death.”

This is where we hit on the real problem. Ghosts feed off attention and sympathy which is something Irish people refuse, as a matter of self-respect, to give anyone, especially each other. There is absolutely no way anyone in Ireland is going to be impressed just because some big shot comes wandering back into town, giving the big I am, because their consciousness has survived death. Absolutely no way. We wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Ghost tours in Ireland are just Irish people walking past ghosts and intentionally ignoring them to make a point.

It's so boring being dead in Ireland that they resort to pathetic things, like writing autobiographies for lazy celebrities, talking to American tourists and if they’re really desperate enough - giving drunk students Alka Seltzers.

Things that have annoyed me this week: SHY PEOPLE

It’s been a tough year. For over 12 months, people have only spoken to their two remaining friends about either Drag Race or their complete and total personal despair, with no in between. The muffling sound of two pairs of masks and a plate of Perspex in shops, cafes and pubs have meant people haven’t been able to stay match fit. Now with the world reopening, everyone wants to get out of the house and we are facing a small-talk international Code Red. We’re about to enter DRONE WARFARE.

Shy people, we have indulged you long enough. For the sake of humanity, you are going to have to start pulling your conversational weight or we will not make it to autumn.

Let's state a few harsh facts. Shyness is a con. We are all SHY, some of us just make an effort. No one faces a room full of strangers and thinks “oh goodie, a night of conversation about the weather - brilliant!”. Social situations are hard for us all. Shy people are just sneaks who realised early on that playing the shy card is the great social get out of jail free card, a perennial note for the teacher. There is a baby on board alright, and it’s you.

Shy people are Switzerland, superior little Switzerland not taking a side during the war and minding everyone’s gold.

There is a quietly implied moral superiority about shyness. They look at us gaudy, big mouths, keeping the conversation train on the tracks; like a rich person who says, “I could never do a 9-5 job, but I have such respect for people who can”.

And the smugness. They’re sensitive and special. They read books, not like us loud bores who bother them by asking how they know the host. They could never litter their delicate minds with such detritus! Their personalities need to be coaxed out, like a little mythical creature of the forest with soothing sounds and nibbles.

The truly worst are the shy people who give you nothing and as you gasp trying to fill up the chasms of silence in your conversation out of politeness, pause, shake their head and bemusedly call you “mad!” Oh I’m sorry, are you not entertained?

“Oh you’re being too hard on all these little princes and wistful Ophelias, Gráinne”, I hear you tut. Shyness is real, it’s practically a mental health issue, how can you be so dismissive of someone else’s lived experience. Well thank you so much for asking. Do you know why I can call time on their crap? Because I am a shy person, BITCHES!

That’s right, I’m a mother f@$ing introvert. I am terrible at small-talk. I once brought up the Israel/Palestine situation at a Christmas party. Another time, a co-worker casually mentioned liking the Little Women film and I heard myself go into detail about an essay I read about how the real Beth hadn’t made peace with dying and did she think Louisa May Alcott’s version was an act of betrayal or trauma? Where were we while I dragged the conversation down that dark path? Waiting to be served in a NIGHTCLUB.

I know it’s hard, you can’t practice small-talk with yourself. You grow up and all the things you’re rewarded for at school, like spotting the homosexual undertones in Shakespeare’s Othello are out, while all the things that got you in trouble, like waffling, talking, and lying are rewarded. I know only too well the bliss of realising the person you’re making painful small-talk with is too drunk to remember anything, the relief that none of this counts or will be remembered - it’s an introvert’s snow day. I hate flirting (or sexy lying as I call it), and find it humiliating to everyone concerned when anyone tries to flirt with me. It’s like accidently spotting someone’s bank balance. Introverts, the salt to loud mouths’ caramel, I believe in. But you know what else I believe in? Socialism.

Small-talk is conversational socialism, and I will pull your weight in this collective. I will plough this field, even if the crops fail. I’m a poet not a farmer but I will persevere. You may not enjoy my small-talk, maybe you’ll see the fear behind my eyes but you will, I hope, respect the journey I have forced us both on.

Yes, loud people are annoying but you can at least trust them out there in plain sight. They can't keep secrets and they need constant praise and compliments. Shy introverts are sneaky. If you are looking for a serial killer, you want a big old attention seeking one who will post you their confession in a self-addressed envelope so they can tell everyone how they did it. You don’t want a shy one, just doing it for the craft.

So this summer, we do not have time for your simpering. Put your phone down, step away from the well you’ve been melancholiously contemplating your reflection in and ask someone what they are watching on Netflix like an adult human.