Shyness as selfish

I recently heard someone say that shyness is inherently selfish, because if you're shy you're overly concerned about what other people think about you, as though you're so fucking special that people are paying attention to every single little detail about you.

Thing is, empirical evidence suggests that for a huge chunk of my life, they were. In elementary school and middle school and early high school, my peers tormented me for so many tiny stupid things that you'd think would go unnoticed. Because my jeans were the same shade of blue as the jeans of an uncool guy in the class. Because the lines on my forehead form a sort of square when I furrow my brow. Because, if I wear the waistband of my pants at my waist (this is the 80s), it is very close to my ribs (because I'm shortwaisted). Because I walk quickly. Because my mother also walks quickly. Because my mother's prettier than I am. Because I was seen walking around on the driveway of my parents' house in a pair of heels (testing if I could walk in them). Because I was seen standing next to the principal of the other high school while we were both waiting to cross a street. Because I was seen alone on the playground. Because I was seen talking to a boy named Mike on the playground. Because I finished the math worksheet before any of the other girls in the class. Because I did a cannonball into the swimming pool, even though everyone else was doing cannonballs and to this day I have no idea why they singled me out. Because I generally have good posture. Because I was smiling. Because I wasn't smiling. Because I uttered a five-syllable word (even though two of the syllables were just morphemes making it into an adverb).

From preschool to probably the middle of high school - a good 10 years of my life - I would randomly get tormented for strange bizarre miniscule things like this. I couldn't anticipate what would get me tormented - I felt like every aspect of my life was up to scrutiny and if I broken any of the unspoken rules I'd be punished, and empirical evidence backed this up. If this happened now I might call the tormenter on it - "Why are you so obsessed with what colour my socks are? You really need to get a hobby!" - but as a kid I was surrounded by this every day so I had no idea that it wasn't normal. So you can see why I might be painfully shy.

I'm only just beginning to recover from this, and what it took to recover was 10 years of being treated with basic human respect to outweigh the 10 years of being constantly scrutinized. And that I was only able to achieve by having been fortunate enough to develop a few solid friendships that are independent of my environment (so I don't necessarily need to make friends with classmates/coworkers/neighbours), and by moving away from family and the place where I grew up to a busy neighbourhood in a big city where everyone is busy with their own lives. People who live in small towns, or in the town where they grew up, or surrounded by relatives, or who need to have friendships in their neighbourhood or workplace, might still find themselves subject to this scrutiny, or might be more strongly affected by this scrutiny whether or not it exists.