Bag of nerves

When I lived in a bed-sit in Paddington, London, in the early 1970s, when I was twenty something, I encount-ered the most nervous woman I've ever met. I never did find out what was bugging her.

I can't remember how I met Tanya, but one evening she came round to my bed-sit, and from the moment she arrived she was physically trembling. I said she seemed nervous and did she want to tell me why?

She said it was too painful to talk about and she'd rather not say. I tried hard to get her to relax. I thought if she relaxed a bit, she would open up. We had a few cups of coffee, and we chatted, and she told me she was a nurse. She was still trembling, still unwilling to say why, but it was clear she wanted to go to bed with me.

I said I wouldn't feel right having sex when she was plainly very agitated about something. Maybe she thought sex would be somehow reassuring or soothing, but I wasn't happy about it. I felt I would be taking advantage of someone in a state of desperation.

I thought she might try to seduce me by kissing me or taking her clothes off, but she didn't. She accepted my reluctance and eventually said goodnight and left.

I was none the wiser about her extreme nervousness, and still am as I never saw her again. She vanished as mysteriously as we had met.

Sometimes I try to fill in the blanks. Had she been attacked? Raped? Bullied? Humiliated in some way? Deeply shocked by something? Had she witnessed a horrific car crash or a violent death? I'll never know. But something had had a very dramatic, very disturbing effect on her.

Forty years on I'm still puzzled by that lingering question mark of an evening.

It doesn't take much

My self-confidence has always been shaky. It's not something that comes naturally to me, it's something I have to nurture and work at.

Some people seem to just ooze self-confidence. They like nothing better than to burst into some social gathering and start chatting away to complete strangers as if they've been friends for years.

I'm not like that at all. I have to constantly psych myself up, overcome my inhibitions, calm my nervousness, let myself go a little. I have to push aside my self-consciousness and my extreme self-censoring impulse, take a leap of faith and surrender to the moment.

Most of the time I manage a convincing display of easy confidence. But it's all built on quicksand. It doesn't take much for that confidence to dissolve into inarticulate awkwardness. If someone's ignoring me, or scoffing at my opinions, or misconstruing me, or being harsh with me, my immediate instinct is to freeze, to shut down and say nothing until I feel more secure and appreciated. My instinct is not to fight back to bolster my self-confidence but to retreat into my shell.

People sometimes wonder why I'm not more combative, why I don't simply give as good as I get when someone mistreats me. Why don't I just go in with all guns blazing and tell them to take a running jump? Isn't it a bit pathetic merely to crumple and limp away?

But I really don't have the emotional toughness for serious battles with people. On the rare occasions when I've tried it, I only end up feeling exhausted, furious and torn-apart. It isn't in any way cathartic.

So I tend to just lick my wounds and slink off into a corner to be alone with my injured feelings. And to restore my laboriously-honed self-confidence yet again.

I'm really not as nonchalant as I might appear. Believe me, it's all smoke and mirrors.

PS: This deeply personal post is dedicated to the very lovely Kylie Tai