Soooo, ummm, thank you, humans

If I were in school in these modern scientific times, I would be labeled with some kind of official diagnosis rather than just the quaint terms “shy” and “awkward.” Someone with skills would teach me how to be a real kid.

I learned the hard way, like the way Dad taught me to swim. I learned to dog paddle, then he tossed me off the end of the dock in a trial by water to make my way to shore. Apparently I could add “scrappy” to my list descriptives.

If you saw a movie character modeled after junior-high me, you would think the actor and director were just taking this shy-awkward bit too far overboard.

You’d be talking to the screen like, “Nobody is that shy and awkward. Seriously. Tell that ninny of an actress to stop clutching her books to her chest so desperately and look somewhere besides at people’s shoes. Nobody can negotiate travel down a crowded, rowdy school hallway looking at people’s feet. Does she think she has sonar? Does this actress smile? Ever? Can she? I’m gonna Google her and see if there’s any photos of her smiling or — what the what? Is her face twitching now? Why is she going with a twitching face? Didn’t that kid just say hi to her? Let’s watch something else.”

But that was me, and that was my life. My brain at its primal core thought nervousness about people interaction felt like fear, therefore I feared people, therefore people are scary.

I decided somewhere in those painful years to figure out how to fit in, and I did. It was that scrappy gene kicking in to help save my life. Of course, after about a year of that I decided fitting in was overrated, but I kept enough of the social skills to be functional in polite society.

I tell you all this so you will understand that about the last job in the world anyone would’ve expected me to have is newspaper reporter. Reporters get assignments like this: call these people, ask them several intelligent questions, write an article presenting reader-people with all this information, and we’ll publish those words for everybody to read.

Somewhere inside me is junior-high me who hears: call these total strangers, make actual words come out of your mouth — please, please, please try to sound intelligent while you’re at it — write an article in which you pretend you’re qualified to tell reader-strangers about this topic that’s way out of your wheelhouse, and we’ll print these words for everybody, strangers too, to read, like they’re looking at you. Everybody is looking at you. They know you exist. What if you made a mistake? They will eat you alive.

Junior-high me spends a lot of time huddled in a dark corner of my brain, books clutched to her chest, humming flatly and rocking herself until the social terrors drop to the level of face twitching and jumping skittishly every time someone’s feet look like they’re walking my way.

You want to know what keeps me going?

The vast majority of strangers I talk to are kind people.

They are helpful and generous with their time and knowledge. They are enthusiastic about their topic. They earnestly want give me the best of what they know. They are patient. They are often grateful to have a chance to share.

I’ve talked to people about why they volunteer, how to lay tiles, what their event is, how their child is doing in a struggle to get healthy, how our lives will be affected by new legislation, what drives them to do what they do.

I start about 90 percent of my interviews with the painfully awkward and unintelligent phrase “Soooo, ummm …” and they still spend 10, 20, 60 minutes of their lives giving me the best of themselves on the off-chance I will be able to give that readers.

Humans can be so awesome.

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I ended up having a good week at [email protected].