Shyness displays itself differently in me. I think it's more an awkwardness.
I think the shyness one feels in childhood is often overcome with time. There are children who hide behind their parents' legs, but you don't see grown-ups hiding behind people. It just doesn't happen. I mean, not that often. People develop social skills over time.
What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.
Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
It's so much easier for me to get up and be someone else than expressing my own thoughts and feelings. There's definitely something about creating a cloak of a character that helped me deal with my shyness.