On being scared of the bus and afraid of being seen

Life as a teenager can be hard. I had been quite the confident little kid but as I entered my teenage years it seemed that every insecurity and fear I’d ever felt had been amplified by about one thousand percent. By the time I left home for university at 18—moving from the small country town of Morrinsville to the much larger metropolis of Auckland—the insecurities were at maximum effect.  

I had moved into a youth hostel that was a 1 hour walk from Campus and - due to my impressive procrastination skills - still had no driver’s licence (a problem that persisted to the point where I only gained my full driving licence at the age of 30). Thus began my journey of needing to catch the bus, but I was so unsure of myself that I didn’t quite know how to do it. Sure, I saw people do it all the time, but they seemed to do it so casually and with so little effort or care. I was convinced that when I did it I would look silly and people would laugh, and so I would experience a sense of relief when I found that other people were catching the same bus as me. They could wave down the driver and then I could get on board without any fuss. 

Eventually, however, you have to face these giant obstacles in life and so one day I had to wave down the bus myself. I decided to take the super-casual approach; wave it down with a shrug of my left shoulder. If I did that, then I wouldn’t look silly waving my hand in the air and there would be no chance of embarrassment. But my brilliant strategy failed when the bus driver did not notice my casual shoulder shrug and drove straight past me and on to the next stop. The next time I decided to add a low wave to the shoulder shrug, hanging my hand out ever so slightly at the level of my waist. To my great satisfaction this worked without too much risk of shame. 

Of course this was not the end of bus-catching complications. I also had to find a way to tell the bus to stop at the right place so I could disembark. There were ropes to pull or buttons to push, but I was so conscious of being ‘seen’ that I hoped against hope that someone else would be getting off at the same stop as me and so I could ride on the back of their bus-catching confidence. There were several occasions when we sailed right past my bus stop because I hadn’t mustered up the courage to push the button in time.

Phone calling was also a nightmare for me. For some reason, calling someone who I didn’t know held great fear. I remember ringing a shop to enquire about a book that I needed for my study, and with no exaggeration I can tell you that I sat on my bed with the phone in hand for 45 minutes planning how this conversation was going to go. I wrote out on paper how I would introduce myself and the phrasing of the question. Then I would practice and repeat it, making sure I felt confident, and pre-empting all possible scenarios. Several times I decided it wasn’t working and would scribble it all out to start again. Eventually, after much angst and struggle, and numerous iterations of the question “do you have this book in-store?”,  I made the 30-second phone call and got the answer I needed. There have been many occasions since, in various jobs at different places of employment, where I have sat in my office staring at the phone, willing myself to pick it up and make the call I needed to make. I thought I would outgrow this phase, but I never really have.

Our internal world is a curious place, filled with thoughts, fears, desires and struggles that are often hidden from those around us. In the past week I caught up with an old school friend who I hadn’t seen in 20 years, and I briefly mentioned my struggles with insecurity, shyness and the fear that had gripped me at high-school. I had assumed that this is what she’d remember about me, but it was all news to her; this was not the version of me she remembered. So much of this had been in my own head, and a lot of those around me were probably oblivious to it. And I think this continues to be true in all sorts of ways for all of us. Our lives play out in two intersecting worlds; the world inside our own heads, and the world of interaction with others. Neither of them are truer than the other, and neither sum up all that we are.

In my case, I had become terrified of being seen. I had been gripped by a sense that I didn’t fit and was an outsider to the world around me: I didn’t look right, I wasn’t tall enough, my arms and legs were too short for my body, I wasn’t strong or fit or slim enough, I wasn’t eloquent enough, wasn’t very good at small talk, didn’t have the confidence to make friends easily; the list of ways in which I didn’t measure up seemed too long to count. And so to be ‘seen’ was to be noticed, and to be noticed was to stand out, and to stand out was simply to give people an opportunity to see all of the ways in which I clearly didn’t fit. So when it came to a moment in which someone might ‘see’ me, I tried to dissolve into the background. 

This is not to say that I had no friends. I made many good friends along the way, but they were often forged through the generosity and initiation of others who would draw me in, rather than my own fumbling attempts to connect.

But here I am, an older man than I was before, and I’ve learned some ways to become okay with being seen. I’ve learned that others are typically just as gripped by their own insecurities and fears as I am. I’ve learned that when I hide myself away, I diminish both myself and others, because I do not offer them the dignity of knowing me as I am. I’ve learned that we all wrestle with our demons, and I’m not unusual for doing the same. I’ve learned that I don’t have to dissolve into the background because I have much to offer the world. I’ve learned that if I am to be known, than I need to be seen, and that this is vital in my hope to truly live.

And as a theologian, I’ve learned that God is not interested in naming me as fundamentally depraved, but instead invites me into a sense of place; a ‘being seen’ that lies at the heart of all things. The insight of the Christian sacred text is that the one who we name as God is not just found ‘out there’ somewhere but is found also in the embodied self. God is present to me in the faces of others, and in the face that I see in the mirror. This idea, that theologians have named as imago dei (the image of God) is the grounds of the recapitulation of my identity. And one that includes all of the strangeness that once made me feel like an outsider. The imago dei is not limited to those parts of me which fit within the norms of my socio-cultural context; in fact, my conformity to those norms is often the very thing that distorts my sense of self. Rather, the imago dei affirms all of the quirks and peculiarities that make me unique.

In all honesty, I still struggle to inhabit this truth sometimes. I still look at the phone when it rings and wrestle with what to do. I still find myself overwhelmed when I walk into a room of strangers. I still stumble over my words when I try to make small talk with an acquaintance. I am still tempted to qualify all the things I say for fear of standing out. And yet this is all a part of the beautiful tapestry of my life. Somehow it seems possible that the strangeness, and the struggle to accept my own strangeness, are all swept up into a sense of mysterious (and divine) self-acceptance; the great sense of ‘seen-ness’ that lies at the heart of things.