It feels like you are being analyzed under a microscope, your inner world exposed for all to see and criticize. Even though you are having a harmless conversation, you feel like you're naked in the shower room. Social events are informal interviews where people evaluate your worth as a companion. You tend to carry around this sense of general unworthiness everywhere, and it sometimes translates to over-compensation in areas where you feel anonymous or detached (for example, over the internet).

You dread real life social situations like you would dread climbing into a shark tank. You treat strangers as if they're grizzly bears. You're all too aware of first impressions, and of the gradual progression of any relationship -- whether you grow closer or farther apart -- except you analyze this on a micro-scale level. Every action is a potential forward/backward step between you and others. You seem to care too much about meaning as much to people as they mean to you.

Before you speak, you first evaluate if what you're about to say is worthy of being spoke. You listen to other people's drivel instead because they have a hair-trigger and your barrel's jammed.

You keep a small circle of friends you've known for years because awkward people make other people feel awkward, and so getting other people on your side and showing them what a great person you are through this mist of pressure is frustratingly difficult. Your shyness becomes self-perpetuating, and you feel you'll never break the cycle, that your life is just a series of awkward silences and fumbled words.

So you finally give up the struggle. You accept that you're a quiet person, most probably introverted and a little self-absorbed. You accept that you're a flawed person, like everybody else, and that you will make mistakes, like everybody else. You become comfortable with silences because you don't really notice them. Your negative thoughts release their grip and you can breathe again.

You learn to accept who you are, and, though you are still inwardly focused, you try to be more perceptive of others. You notice that everybody makes mistakes, people say stupid things, some are shy, some are confident, others are annoyingly over-confident. You see that most people are wrapped up in their own worlds, and are very forgiving, that they tend to disregard your worst bits and focus on your best, and they respond in-kind and are friendly.

I've heard people say shyness is a coward's pride. Possibly. Not in my case. But I'm no psychologist. I'm sure there are many sources of shyness, this is just my experience of it, and the slow transition I've been making out of it.

From my experience, it all came down to some kind of underlying inferiority that I carried around. The second I started to tackle that, I started to feel naturally confident. I still struggle, but it's a long journey uprooting years of negative self-talk.