“Ask-Backwards” and you shall receive (if you can get over your shyness).

Nan Wray
Nan Wray
Aug 8, 2017 · 16 min read

From an early age I was told I was great listener. I was a flesh and blood confessional for friends, acquaintances, and relative strangers, who were irresistibly drawn to spill their guts.

Bam, bam-bam. Like they were tossing bricks into a bin. I listened, over and over, taking it all in, holding my tongue. My fear of being judged was so entrenched in my being, that confiding my own feelings was unthinkable. I might as well have been tasked with moving a grand piano to the top of the Empire State Building.

Being shy sucked. Big time. My father didn’t really notice, and my mom offered sympathy when I sulked. But that didn’t really help.

What I really needed was socialization, but it was not top of the list of what my parents deemed to be important for childhood development. Instead, we made frequent trips to the library, that, and the pet store. I spent my days alternating between reading and taking care of the store-bought menagerie of pals we had accumulated. Looking back, I suspect my mother’s inability to say no to our requests for furry and scaled companions was as much out of guilt from being frequently away as a desire to acquiesce to our pleading demands.

My father was away in the military most of my childhood, and my mother worked away from home, so I had babysitters, budgies, dogs, cats, lizards, chickens, ducks, rats, and a horse for a short time. Oh, and, yes, and scads of books to fall back on. Nancy Drew, Wizard of Oz, Adventures of Tintin, Austin and Brontë. And what I learned about human interaction was one step removed and distorted, like learning fashion from paper doll’s dress collection.

The one-dimensionality of my knowledge inevitably got me chastised.

“Such a rude child!” a neighbor said to my face when I asked her who she was talking to on the phone. Shocked, I didn’t say a word, and ran out the door and down the street. It was important to me to do things right, and I had failed, utterly, the first time I spent five minutes at someone else’s house.

I avoided her after that, and didn’t get invited to her daughter’s birthday party. It had been my one chance to interact with kids my age outside of school, and I had blown it. I questioned everything about myself, and was filled with self-recrimination, which tapered off to a dull ache of sadness and rejection. I say this not to elicit your sympathy, but to understand how I clawed my way back to the “party.”

I knew something was missing in my understanding of how to fit in, and the journey to rectify it became my life’s work. I began to realize that my passive nature made me a veritable reflecting pool for others. Anyone who interacted with me projected themselves back upon me. I was complicit through lack of opposition.

The self-doubt I had been mired in seeded the idea that anyone who didn’t make a point of drawing me out with a tedious series of questions would belong to the large group of people I believed disliked me at worst, and were indifferent, at best. Honestly, I hid under a chair once to keep from being seen at a backyard get-together. This boulder-like obstacle that was my shyness blocked the entrance to the world outside, and made my realm of the imagination especially important. This drama played out daily.

My parents never invited anyone over, so the living room became a map of my imaginary world with toys frozen in place from the previous day’s play acting. I enacted intricate stories daily on the shag carpeting. I built horse stables from sticks and legos, and took my Barbies on horseback rides all over the close distance of that room.

My adventures on the outside occurred at the stables, where I would get to muck stalls and race my favorite horse up and down the hard clay hills by the bay, with wading birds seagulls for company.

Still, meaningful human encounters were infrequent: a taciturn and demanding ballet mistress presided over me twice a week in a studio where sullen, hollow-cheeked ballet students clacked around in hard toe shoes. At school recess, the rush of kids hammered at my senses—banging, staccato shouts reverberated in my ear drums long after the bell had sounded.

It never occurred to me to misbehave. The last thing I wanted was a whole room of eyes swiveling around to fix on me, silently searching my face and comportment for a twitch of guilt. And yet, in my willingness to follow orders, I became a suspect. Fellow students gazed upon me with their own unique kaleidoscopes of reason and desire, and made up excuses for what I was trying to achieve. They kept their distance.

All the while, my own wants, reasonings, questions and angst continued, unabated and unspoken. The infinite chasm of loneliness gaped at me, serving as my only companion night after night, unless I swatted at it with a book, or held it at bay by engaging in prolonged observations of the intricate surface irregularities of a flesh-and-blood iguana (short-lived), or seeing how long I could stand the incessant kneading of cat’s claws in my chest before crying “uncle” and seeking out another life-form with which to connect.

And so this is a very long pre-amble to what I hope will be a rewarding pinnacle of shared observation, earned year by year, hour by hour, second by second. The long clamoring to what I perceived as normalcy. I was at the bottom of the dry well, looking up. Why was I there and everyone else was outside playing?

Because of a fucking embroidered pillow, that’s why.

A fucking embroidered pillow that I encountered every time we visited my mother’s parents in their trailer at Balboa beach, back when they existed in that stretch of the coastline. That snarky, fucking pillow that mocked me with it’s pablum:

“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

To add treacle to the bitter sentiment, my mother liked to point it out to me every time we visited, as if it wasn’t already emblazoned onto the backs of my retinas from the first time I ran afoul of its stitched up, bourgeois message. Wasn’t I already a compliant, quiet child? I needed that pillow’s meme like a dead fish needs a party hat.

I might sound mad, but I’m really just appalled at it. The satisfaction is in being able to tell you about it now—finally. Being able to tell you about the gleaning of evidence that this distillation, winnowing and circling back has yielded: a few nascent, crystallized ideas. You probably could go to the self-help section of a bookstore, find some buddhist sayings, and tell me I’m full of shite. Yes, you could, but then you wouldn’t see how the story ends, now would you?

As a newly budded teen, I subjected myself to more than a sufficient amount of pawing from desperately horny teenaged boys in the back seats of souped up beaters, and realized that I needed to get better at communicating. The dreams I had hatched for myself had grown restless in the incubator of my own recesses and ended up like artifacts cast into the archives of the Smithsonian, carefully slipped into tassled silk bags and locked away. I was waiting for someone to find them, and they just kept gathering dust. I eventually figured out that I should just open the drawers myself and present them at the appropriate time, but I had no idea where to even start looking for the keys.

Yes, I actually had a fear of telling people what I wanted. Not because I couldn’t mouth the words, but because I held my unspoken hopes so closely, that to let one loose might be to lose it altogether. It would be the beautiful and broken bird I had nursed to health with so much care, and finally let fly. I would see it gain altitude and merge with a flock of similarly beautiful birds. I would no longer be able to tell them apart. It would no longer be my bird.

Missed opportunities started to pile up. Once in awhile, someone would find one of my dusty drawers in the back of the museum, and the treasure would rush forth in a dizzying rush of dopamine. A professor published one of my student papers, and he hoped I wouldn’t mind. Fizz, pop! A department store rep asked me to model in a runway show. Fizz, pop! A dance teacher wanted me to have a lead part in her next piece. Fizz, pop! A friend invited me to visit her in Hawaii. Fizz, pop! Fizz, pop!

Most of the time my attempts to carve out a life for myself were trial and error. How could it really be satisfying if I was simply running around with a giant keychain between endless rooms? I was accused by family members of trying too many new things and then giving up. After enough time went by I stumbled upon a kind of logic when I decided that I could string a few words together on paper. It must have been all those books I read. Maybe I would take some journalism classes at the community college.

There I was, with my first assignment, staring at a big thick plastic dial-up phone. It taunted me with its impassivity. I had a fresh piece of lined paper on the table next to it, covered in scribbled questions. A total of four. What would I say then? My saliva had turned into some kind of thick film inside my mouth, making swallowing difficult. Couldn’t I ask just four questions? Could I write anything based on the answers? I was obligated to come up with a story for the college newspaper and it wasn’t going to be easy.

The day I surmounted this difficulty in that ordinary little room was life-changing. That’s all I can say. It was the first big notch in the side of that well I was looking up from so many years ago. A little chink that had fallen out from the steep walls, which let me get a handhold. I was determined to climb out.

In the months and years that followed I made many more calls. Each one got a little easier. Initially I felt as if I was flopping around in an ill-fitting jacket and shoes, trying to eke out a dance in front of a full house to the fuzz of a dead record, round and round. I was the jagged piece of glass that had been tossed into the ocean of calls, deadlines, ledes, excuses, yawns, fatigue, all driven by the hamster wheel of the profession. Eventually, things got a little smoother.

Amazingly I had learned to deal with it, and even—gasp!—got used to it in my own way. It never felt natural, or right. I didn’t get a charge from confronting people. I didn’t have the instinct to be a real journalist, that investigated stories that mattered. I suffered the long haul of late night city council meetings, slept in my car for lunch, and feasted on the banter of the office.

That was what I had needed all along. Good-hearted banter and a lot of it. When it came time for me to switch gears, my ache was for nothing else but the chiding, wads of paper flying around, and the mandate to interact. I would find something like it again, thousands of miles away, in the bowels of a former Florentine convent.

Now, picture me, dear reader, as a paper doll, whizzing across the screen of your computer with the Google Earth globe, from California to Italy. I land quietly, late evening, feet lightly dropping down on the cobblestones of a narrow street near the Arno, on a dark night. There you have it. Fizz, pop! I was alive.

A colleague had casually asked me to join her on her vacation to Germany and Italy. She had asked me. She inadvertently had stumbled upon one of my museum drawers. It was my most fervent and precious desires in life to go to Europe, and it had finally happened. I didn’t care where, and lucked out. That night, with the help of a worn-out Lonely Planet guidebook, we found a restaurant open late, and stumbled inside, into what I called my Narnia.

I will write that into another story, another day. For now, you will know, that I ended up learning Italian and working as a waitress at that very restaurant, talking with—the horror!—four people at a time, not just one. I had graduated, you see, on my own, and had knocked out another chink in the wall. I could see the edge of the top now.

As I became practiced at talking with groups of four or more, I began to realize the fear was gone. But moments of fear gripped me at times, when someone would make an unusual demand such as, “Make us laugh!” I would not cower, but instead manage to fulfill their request somehow. Later, when continuing my socialization “therapy” by working at a hole-in-the-wall upscale eatery near the beach, the fear struck again, when faced with intimidating and unhappy diners. I ran to my boss, completely verklempt.

“Make it better,” he simply said, and pressed his lips together before walking away.

I stared after him, wide eyed and transfixed, as if a gong had been struck in my head. As a child, my mother always took the reins when something went awry, which just created more apprehension on my part the next time an uncomfortable situation presented itself.

This time, maybe for the first time, I actually did make it better. Of course, gratis cakes and dessert wine helped. What really happened that night is that someone had empowered me by handing me the reins. It was a profound moment, and I’m sure my boss had no idea that his mild scolding would have had such an effect.

From that moment on, I felt a thawing of self-doubt, which was gradually replaced by confidence in my own decision making. Another chink out of the wall. I realized that if necessary I could easily summon the courage to stand in front of a room of people and talk—regardless of the subject matter. Not that I would seek that out, mind you, but sometimes it happened spontaneously, and the doing of it gave me pleasure. Not so long ago, the thought of it would make me feel sick.

Now, the attention felt good. All along, I had wanted people to listen to me, and the discomfort of always watching and listening to others had reached the point of saturation, so whether being in an audience at a play, a concert, or seminar, I became increasingly impatient for it to end. I was not a natural loner. I did not prefer my shyness.

Now that I had conquered my most basic of fears (talking with more than one person at a time), I turned my focus to the “how” of it. Yes, I was willing and able to talk, but I had no real conversational skills. I found that I would fall back on the journalistic method of asking too many questions, and interviewing people, instead of teasing out more relaxed banter of easy conversation, where two people are taking turns listening and sharing, and meandering down each other’s streets of memory, pointing out the sights. I tried to make up for it with sincerity, but it wasn’t enough.

You extroverts who come by this fearlessness naturally have no idea what I am talking about. That’s ok. Most people think of shyness as binary. You have introverts and extroverts, and that’s it. I learned over time that I did not want to be an introvert. I began to suspect introversion and extroversion were on a scale, rather than just polar opposites. I knew I would never reach the other end, but wanted to move further along that scale toward it.

The top of the well was glorious, and hoisted myself out. It was time to learn from them.

I was ready to tackle some of the nuances of conversation, but where to start. What made people feel relaxed, what made them tense? How to keep from being a blowhard or a dullard?

How could I observe these people in their natural habitat? I felt newly minted, eager to imprinting on others of my choosing. Wise words from a Dali Lama talk took hold. Take what you like and leave the rest. I tried to rework the limited dialogues I remembered from my childhood, to understand the meaning behind the behaviors that were part of my own building blocks.

So much of what I witnessed in my own family home was like watching a glockenspiel. Once the dialogue from one evening had resolved, it would start up again fresh the next night. A repeat performance with a bit of new polish on it.

And so, I would dismantle the behaviors, study them, and put them back together in my head. My own instincts were not immune to the microscope. I caught myself saying things in a familiarly close-minded way, and resolved to find another way.

After coming to terms with how I feared saying “no”, I realized I had to learn to ask for what I wanted. Then, I needed to learn the how of it. This was the next imperative.

Learning how to make excuses was important in getting through this stage, but applying this knowledge was fraught with the risk of insulting the other’s intelligence. Excessive fidgeting and looking at the door for an escape are telltale signs.

But then there are those who ignore it completely. One of my pet peeves is the natural salesman who just doesn’t care. They insist, sweetly. You decline. They whine and implore. Unless they are offering to pay for dinner or tickets to a destination of your choosing, I always realize I have forgotten to call someone back.

My mother’s dinner table admonitions (“Just try it”) when I didn’t want to take a bit of beef tongue come to mind. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I would tell myself. She had worked so hard to make dinner. I didn’t want to insult her. I knew it would taste awful. It smelled thick and dead. It revolted me. I loved my mother’s cooking most of the time, but she experimented often, and tried to save money, and I wasn’t always keen on the result. At least she cooked. I have since learned to go to great lengths at times to hide my pickiness where food is concerned in order not to be singled out or hurt anyone’s feelings.

And so, after evolving a strategy to avoid having to decline what I didn’t want, how would I go about asking for what I did want, in a way that wouldn’t force the ask-ee to say “no”?

I happily look to dogs and their handlers for wisdom. In order to get a dog to learn something new (what is being asked of them), successful trainers will start out by rewarding the dog for something it wants to do anyway, and then attaching a signal to that behavior, and repeating this until the dog makes the connection. Then, when the trainer asks via the signal, the dog is happy to perform the behavior. It has learned quickly.

If you ask a dog to do something it does not want to do (such as step away from a partially masticated bone), it may be a lot harder for the dog to learn this task, as the dog really doesn’t want to do it. Getting the dog to back away from something it naturally dislikes would be the time to attach a signal to that behavior. Then you can call upon this behavior for other things, like backing away from a coveted treat.

And so, onto humans and the topic of this writing: what I call the backwards “ask.”

Let’s say you need a ride somewhere. Ok, easy. You are in a public place, with people nearby. (I will assume you are not shy.) You simply ask the person next to you for a ride. This person’s answer will depend on their mood, what they have planned that day, and how they perceive you. Likely you will get turned down. They might feel a twinge of discomfort doing so, but probably won’t lose sleep over it.

Now let’s change tactics. Instead of asking for a ride, you ask for their advice on the best way to get from point A to point B, whether it’s to walk, get an Uber, catch a bus, or try to find someone willing to give you a ride, and what’s at stake for you. The mood is completely different from the previous “ask” because you are not placing any demands upon them except for information. They consider your options, and can’t help but appreciate you didn’t put them on the spot. This makes you a relatively considerate person, right? As a result, they are relaxed and feel more inclined to help you. You do not assume they will help, or even expect it. They can actually offer to help of their own volition. They benefit by surprising and delighting you with their gesture, and can feel like they have done a good deed. After all, it was their idea.

This may sound like totally selfish con artist manipulation. Yes, that is a valid supposition. What it also happens to be is considerate. It’s allowing them to decide whether to help you without having to say “no” and seem like a schmuk. Conversely, if they do decide to help, it gives them satisfaction of doing it on their own terms. Their offer to give you a ride makes them altruistic. Had you asked them to do it and they begrudgingly agreed, they might have felt a little put out, thinking they had better things to do.

If we apply this same logic to the childhood dinner table, it would be like having a smörgåsbord laid out and being able to choose what I want without the pressure of having to decline a particular item. What’s not to like about that?

Maybe this strategy seems like a lot of trouble to go through just to ask someone a question. Perhaps….not. As I learned many years ago in journalism, it takes practice to get used to a new behavior, but the result is so worthwhile. Asking “backwards” is not really that hard, especially because not every question requires it. Just as if you are getting out the good china for a special guest, utilize your special “ask” for people you care about.

With a little practice, the “ask backwards” style of requesting favors could become second nature. I’m still working on my own method, and finding that friends seems more relaxed around me, and happy to help—when they have the chance.

Fizz, pop!

Nan Wray

Written by

Dog lover, Basic Income supporter, lapsed writer, illustrator and designer, nature advocate, thinker and uke strummer.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade