Before Leah, I was unfathomably shy. I don’t know where it started; my social anxiety, but the rabble, the bright and cheerful storm of considering people terrified me. I didn’t want to participate. I didn’t want to contribute. I dressed in dark or earthtone clothes, almost to camouflage me with the walls, the crowds, anything I could disappear into without being seen. I wore my hair long so my bangs could obscure my eyes, especially when I kept my gaze at the ground. If I could get away with wearing a hood over my head, I would, cloaking myself in as much anonymity as I could find myself. High school especially was a wilderness to me, a black forest of predators with a wide and varied food chain. Socialization was the drive for us all back then, setting social norms and adhering to them, sometimes with a rigidity that made them as brittle as glass. So in that jungle, many would get ravaged, one way or another, from different pursuers, for any kind of deviancy from some unspoken, shifting abstract mean that floated aloft like an invisible spectrum of light.
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