I don't think I was even a wallflower

I don’t think I was even a wallflower, I was more akin to the pebbledash behind. As a child I had always been very shy, and never really grew out of it. Even today I sometimes feel the paralysis, struck dumb or stuck to the spot. I remember my first week of primary school and to this day I break my own heart with the memory.

When it was break time, we were ushered out into the yard and everyone found a group of friends or made lifelong friendships there and then, and enjoyed twenty minutes of freedom. It is the hallmark of childhood, the ability to seamlessly join a group or a game, to feel no fear of rejection or how a person will react to your presence, not that it is scrutinised by children in a playground on their first day. It was different for me. When I left the school building, I didn’t go any further than ten feet from the door. I stopped at the windowsill to our classroom and stood there by myself, watching everyone in the school have a good time but me.

I didn’t know anyone. Nobody in our class knew anyone, but it didn’t matter to them. I stood there for twenty minutes, outside my classroom window, with the door safely nearby, completely removed from the social aspect of life. I don’t really know if I was shy or just scared, or if I just plain didn’t understand what I was supposed to do. I guess it was all three. I did the same thing the next day and the day after that. Thankfully on the fourth day, our class teacher spotted me standing in my usual spot. She came over and talked to me, and convinced me to go and join the rest of my class. To be honest I can’t remember the rest of that memory, or much of the rest of that school year. I do remember though, that I didn’t stand there by myself any more.

As a four year old I couldn’t force myself to be social, much as I wanted to, and as a teenager, much as I tried, it never seemed to work. I believe that growing up in a small town, going to primary school and making a shy name for myself, and then going to secondary school in the same town, my reputation preceded me, and I had to work very hard to establish a social footing in the lives of my friends and classmates.
As the years went on, I eventually became better able to talk to people and eventually became friends with a small number of people. I remember a short time before I really had anyone that I could say was a good friend, a teacher told us to write down the sentence, “My best friend is…” and to finish the sentence. I was dumbstruck.

I looked around me to see people writing calmly the name of their neighbour or their partner in crime, and all I could do was to panic. I realised there and then that I didn’t have a best friend, and certainly nobody would call me a best friend. So after searching the room for faces I could pass off as friendly, I settled on my neighbour. “My best friend is Seán”. Seán wasn’t even remotely friendly with me at this point. I felt a fraud, and I felt he might see that I had written down his name, or that the teacher would realise that we were not best friends at all and that I might get in trouble. In the panic, I had accidentally written on my copybook while it was upside down. The teacher collected and corrected them, and threw mine back at me screaming my obvious mistake at me. “Luckily”, I thought, as I stooped down to pick up my battered work, “luckily she didn’t notice that I’d lied on the assignment”. And I think that that was the first time that I felt that life was difficult. Having just been scolded, a child’s response should not be to feel embarrassed about who his best friend is or isn’t.

Perhaps I chose Seán because he was sitting next to me, or perhaps I chose him because he was quite popular. Maybe I thought that by attaching my name to his on a piece of paper, that popularity might rub off on me and I might get in with him. Of course it couldn’t because I was embarrassed even for him to see I had chosen him as a best friend.