Was anyone else painfully shy as a child?

I always thought I was a shy person, 27 and never had a girlfriend (no one I'd call a "girlfriend" in the traditional sense). I was always afraid to ask a girl out, convincing myself that the girl that would come chase me would be the one worth dating. Then, come to find out that when a girl chases me I get all weird and try to maintain a distance. So I just thought I was shy. <enter><enter> Recently found out through my parents that I talked a lot as a kid. Like, more than I thought I did. Apparently they got a lot of notes from teachers for talking constantly and thought I made a lot of friends easily. They told me a story of how they thought I had met someone in my class at a McDonald's, but apparently I just walked up to some kid with his family and started talking and told my parents he was my friend. I'm 100% confident he didn't feel the same way after hearing that story. My parents may be exaggerating though. <enter><enter> Either way looking back it doesn't mean much to me. I'm very reserved nowadays. I feel like years of life has created some anxieties and insecurities that have quieted me down, both in a good/bad way. Now I can see what my shyness for what it is, a defense mechanism. Once I started seeing it for what it is, I could control it a little bit. No I don't think of myself as shy at all, more like selectively talkative. Turning it on when someone gives a vibe I don't trust or have nothing good to say, then turning it off when someone wants to talk about quantum mechanics or relativity, sometimes with the same person who I shut out earlier. <enter><enter> Just crazy to think that I developed this trait I didn't have as a kid, a trait most people would think to be a undesirable one, and turned into some positive personal tool for confronting life. The human brain is pretty crazy.

/r/INTP Thread