Helen Rivas-Rose
Shyness: A Painfully Shy Life by Maine writer Helen Rivas-Rose

Helen Rivas-Rose

Helen Rivas-Rose began writing as a way to describe her crippling shyness and found writing was the tool by which she could liberate herself. Over the course of fifteen years, Rivas-Rose learned new and better ways to describe her shy life in order to make clear the distressful isolation severe shyness causes. Her memoir and self-help guide Brave: A Painfully Shy Life was first finalist in Self-Help: Motivational category and a finalist in the "Narrative: Non-Fiction" category of the 2015 USA Best Book Awards. This year Rivas-Rose spearheaded the 501(c)3 Severe Shyness Support (S3) to provide schools with techniques to help shy children and to educate adults about painful shyness through a public awareness campaign.