by Jessica Pan
Then, one fateful night, I attended an awards ceremony at work. The bosses introduced the award for the person who stayed the latest, the person who spent their weekends at the office. The person who had “sold their soul for the job,” they explained. It was dubbed the Midnight Oil Award. They opened the envelope and called out my name. As I made my way toward the makeshift stage, various male coworkers slapped me on the back and congratulated me for having no life. I gritted my teeth, forced a smile, and accepted the award.
It was engraved with my name. Later, as I carried it home, it felt like a cursed artifact, like Frodo’s ring, except less all-powerful and shiny and more a weight, a symbol of my failure. Failure, because I was so not interested in my job or what I was doing with my life. Failure to be the sort of person I admired, someone who tried new things and took chances and who avoided the easy option.
Also like Frodo’s ring, the trophy was impossible to destroy by throwing it in the trash or a fire. I’d seen the film trailers—I assumed it would just find me again. I placed it in the least dignified place I could find. “Fuck you,” I whispered softly to the trophy as I closed it in a cupboard, leaving it to rot next to half a dozen recyclable bags and a bottle of drain cleaner.
Back at work the next day, I learned that a coworker named Dave had won the Midnight Oil Award the previous year. Here’s the thing about Dave: he always looked miserable. He ate the same sandwich every single day. At the office Christmas party, both of us sitting in a corner, he’d drunkenly confessed to me that he’d do anything to leave, if he only knew how.
I studied Dave. And then I did something really stupid that felt really, really good. I quit my job.
With no backup position, I began to call myself a freelancer. In my case, “freelancer” was a euphemism for wandering around the apartment in my pajamas and becoming overly excited when I’d see stray cats in my backyard. I was still writing blog posts about shoes, but now I was doing it for less money while sitting on our sunken blue sofa. As I watched people going by on their morning commutes, it struck me that I lived in a city of nine million people and spoke to only two every day: Sam and a barista.
The barista wasn’t a chatty guy. And Sam had his own life outside the four walls of our home: a job he liked, coworkers he bonded with, an evening running club, and best friends that he met up with to watch soccer. He had a separate world, and I had only him. Every morning when he left for work, I’d slide my head under the covers, not wanting to face another gray day completely alone. No one was expecting me anywhere. My brother texted me: “I haven’t heard from you in a while—I have no idea what’s going on with you. Are you happy?”
This last question shattered me. I couldn’t tell my family, who were so far away, that I was in a deep hole and I didn’t know how to get out. I couldn’t even admit it to Sam. Or myself.
On a cold, wintry day, I woke up at 11 a.m. after spending the previous night googling “black holes,” “Do I have attention deficit disorder?” and “Were Mick Jagger and David Bowie friends?” until the small hours. I had also emailed Rachel, who now lived across the Channel, to confess that I definitely probably might have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder because I seemed to flit from one task to another yet things never seemed to get done. I was messy, I was forgetful, I had trouble concentrating.
Rachel wrote back saying, “I don’t know . . . everything you’ve said sounds a lot more like depression to me. Inability to concentrate is actually one of the symptoms of depression. Maybe you should talk to someone . . .”
What did she mean, everything I’d said? I glanced back at my previous email. My sign-off was, “I look forward to nothing.”
I quickly closed my computer.
When we’re young, we think our lives will be creative and vibrant and full. But little by little, I was backing myself into a corner, and my only way forward increasingly felt like a long, dark hallway with all the doors slammed shut. Except, of course, in the age of unfettered social media access, they were actually glass doors and I could peer inside at every one of my glamorous contemporaries living their best photogenic lives with fifteen to twenty of their closest friends.
I had essentially created a fortress around myself, stacked high with books and a sign on the wall that said, “I DON’T NEED YOU ANYWAY!”
But I did. Rachel could see it. I needed to see it, too. The time had come to break free of my increasingly uncomfortable comfort zone. I knew that I wasn’t depressed because of being an introvert. I was an introvert who happened to be depressed. I hated who I had become. I wanted to start over.
Instead, I joined a gym.
That may not sound like a solution to the problem I actually had, and before you start thinking that this is a story about how losing weight changed my life, cured my depression, and made me a millionaire, I should probably warn you that it’s not. It’s a story about my first tentative steps into the outside world. To slowly rejoin society. To get out of the house. The first steps I would take as a shintrovert trying not to shintrovert anymore. But it’s also a story about something far more important: subterfuge. And some light planking.
I was lured in because the gym offered free membership if you attended three fitness classes a week and won their in-house fitness and weight loss challenge. Looking around, I saw that the women in this gym were super fit. They had sleek ponytails. They seemed satisfied. Women who had probably fulfilled their own parents’ dreams by becoming doctor-lawyer-bankers, not women whose asses had melded to fit the shape of their sofa cushions as they wrote blog posts about different ways to lace your boots. Not women who celebrated clean hair days. For these women, every day was a clean hair day.
If I completed and won the gym challenge, I’d have free membership and immediately join a group of people who seemed to have their lives together. Maybe even make a friend or two. I’d also be fitter and possibly happier (endorphins, better at lifting furniture, fancy shampoo in the changing rooms, etc.).
I was confident about winning the competition, because it’s easy to win things like this when you have nothing else going on in your life. And I was right. Week by week, the competition pool shrunk as people dropped out, failing to attend the requisite three classes.
And by the final week, it came down to two possible winners. Me and a woman named Portia.
Regrettably, I developed a deep resentment of Portia.
I had pinned my entire future on this stupid contest, and now I had to beat her. I began to ponder the cold, hard facts: the final weigh-in was in one week. The contest was based only on percentage of body weight lost. What determines how much we weigh, when you get right down to it? Fat, muscle, bone. And water.
Here is another totally normal fact that I came across during one of my nocturnal googling sprees: wrestlers and boxers regularly drop ten to fifteen pounds of water in a few days to “make weight” in their categories.
I promptly tumbled down a black hole of wrestling and boxing blogs, written exclusively by and for guys named Brandon. These blogs provided detailed how-tos on dropping water weight fast. There were simple tricks, like drinking black coffee (a diuretic), and slightly more extreme things, like taking caffeine pills and chugging dandelion tea. But I could drink coffee, right? Normal people do that. I drank coffee every day already.
Since the very first time I’d flopped onto the sofa in despair about Portia, Sam had been patient with me and my mission. This lasted right up to the day before the final weigh-in, when I was explaining how showering the day of the competition was a rookie mistake because the body absorbs water through the skin. That could lead to gaining two pounds. That shower could be the difference between victory and failure.
“You signed up for this contest to get healthy and happy, and now all you’re talking about is vanquishing someone named Portia, the benefits of caffeine pills, and why you’re not going to shower anymore.”
; “I’m just not going to shower tomorrow!” I shouted back. “And I didn’t end up buying caffeine pills. That would be lunacy.”
I went back to my wrestling blogs, where I discovered the most universally endorsed strategy: the sauna.
But this wasn’t to be some toxin-flushing, Scandinavian feel-good spa trip. The sauna served one purpose: to roast that water out of your body. To maximize the sweat, the Brandons advised staying fully clothed.
I like saunas. I could go to the sauna. Couldn’t a woman just go to the sauna without it being a crime? Couldn’t a woman drink black coffee and not shower and go to the sauna? Of course! I told myself. Of course she could. A woman could easily do all of these things on a totally normal day.
Clearly, Sam had been right. I’d forgotten about why I’d joined, too consumed with beating Portia. I mean, part of me knew it was shady as hell to do these things. I didn’t like who I was becoming—but I’d felt like a loser for more than a year and was desperate for a win. I was reaching for rock bottom.
The day of the final weigh-in, I stepped into the sauna. I took a seat on the hot wooden planks, fully dressed in a black long-sleeve T-shirt, black sweatpants, and wool socks. The dry heat engulfed my body. Outfitted like a ninja who is really into self-care, I closed my eyes and leaned back.
I thought about the wrestling blogs that had led me here. Just like me, my amateur wrestler heroes knew how to sacrifice to get what they wanted. I thought about how they would completely understand that sitting in a sauna and sweating for a few minutes was worth it if it meant getting your life back on track and saving money on your gym membership.
It was getting pretty unbearable inside the sauna, but I had already done the hard part—choosing to be a duplicitous motherfucker. All I had to do now was endure fifteen minutes of heat. Just close my eyes and wait it out. I could do this. I could be stoic in this heat, like a desert beetle.
It was hard to be too Zen, though, because the receptionist was not living up to my high hopes. She kept coming to check on me, deeply suspicious of my behavior. She’d fling open the sauna door, letting out all my hot air, and I kept jumping up and slamming it shut again, indicating with my hands that we could talk to each other through the thin glass pane. We repeated this routine a few times—her opening the door, me slamming it shut in her face to keep the heat in.
“Why are you wearing clothes? That’s crazy! You should take off your clothes!” she shouted at me through the glass. By this point, my clothes were drenched in sweat.
“No. This is what I want!” I said to her, offering no further explanation. I crossed my arms. The third time, I finally shouted, “Jesus Christ! Please just go away!” Dumbfounded, she left me in peace.
I settled down again. My mouth was parched. I couldn’t drink water, because that would defeat the purpose of this visit, but I was already so thirsty. I checked the clock every thirty seconds. Five minutes passed; it felt like an hour. I reached for the magazines in the corner to distract myself, only to find that every single one was about men’s fitness.
I flipped lethargically through the pages of one and landed on a summer feature about how to stay safe during outdoor hikes. I absentmindedly skimmed a fact box about heat stroke: “Brought on by oversweating, dehydration, and overheating, heat stroke can cause brain damage and/or death.” Uh, what was that?
My mouth went even drier than it already was. I hadn’t had any water that day. I was sweating profusely inside a very hot sauna. I had created the perfect conditions for heat stroke. On purpose. Was I going to give myself heat stroke? Was I having a heat stroke right now? What is heat stroke?
I panicked. I was going to die in this sauna. I instantly saw my obituary: “She gave herself heat stroke while trying to win a free gym membership in north London.” They would tell my parents that I had died dressed like an assassin, reading a guide to eight-minute abs.
I was still slow-cooking, but something deep inside me went cold. I had completely lost it. I wasn’t losing my marbles; my marbles were long gone.
I opened the sauna door.
Later, at a café drinking water, I stared listlessly into space. I drank more water. I went home and lay on my sofa, because that’s all I had the energy to do.
What had happened to me? Jobless, friendless, and now sanity-less.2
The fact that my come-to-Jesus, rock-bottom moment was in a sauna reading Men’s Health isn’t really something I’m proud of. I had completely lost perspective. I no longer knew where my natural introversion ended and my depression and loneliness began. After all, I had once been a happy introvert, but I had managed to wedge myself into a hole, through fear, insecurity, and stagnation.
That day, I took stock of the facts: my life was small, and I wanted to see whether I enjoyed it being bigger. And bigger, I knew deep down, meant opening my world up, specifically to other people. Lots of them. I had read so many articles about how hard it is to make friends in your thirties, and I knew it would probably be even worse for people like me. My modus operandi in friendship was either (a) you’re my best friend and I tell you all of my intimate secrets or (b) you’re a stranger, dangerous and unknown, ready to strike at any moment.
I looked out of the café window at the world rolling by without me. I missed my friends, dispersed across the world. I missed feeling excited about things. The reality of it was this: I felt that my life was passing me by.
I knew what I had to do.
I would talk to new people—not small talk but real “And how did your father feel about that?” chats. I would make new friends. I would give speeches. I would travel alone and make friends on the road, I would say yes to social invitations, I would go along to parties, and I would not be the first to leave.
And if I survived all of that, I would attempt the Everest of shy person trials: I would perform stand-up. Instead of a “choose your own adventure” journey, this is a choose your own nightmare.
Finally, to fully atone for turning those lights on early at my twenty-second birthday surprise party, I’d throw a dinner party and invite some of the people I met along the way and not kick them all out after an hour. I would entertain, I would host, I would celebrate.
It would be like jogging: very sweaty and uncomfortable, with moments of heart-pounding agony, but possibly good for me in the long term.
In other words, I would extrovert.
I gave myself a year.
* * *
2. Yes, of course I won the weight loss challenge. Portia was not deranged enough to go to those lengths. Only me and the Brandons of the world are.
two
Talking to Strangers
or
New People
The man sitting next to me is good-looking. Tall, dark, and handsome. Kind blue eyes. Plaid shirt. Jeans, rolled up.
We glance sideways toward each other and lock eyes. I take a deep breath.
“I live far away from my parents, and they think I’m happier than I am, and I can’t bear for them to know that sometimes I literally don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” I say to him.
He blinks. And then says, “I haven’t seen my family in ten months, and I just realized that I don’t miss them, and I’m afraid that makes me a bad person.”
My turn again.
“I fear I’ll never make enough money,” I say. “No matter what, it seems like after I pay my tax bill, I have no money left over. Ever. I fear I’ll always struggle with this.”
Your turn, buddy.
“I feel inferior to my wife, because she earns considerably more money than I do,” he says.
He was really going for it.
“All of my closest friends have moved away or we’ve grown apart, and I’m afraid I’m never going to have a new close friend who I can tell anything to, and it makes me sad,” I say, my voice slightly shaking.
“I find it very difficult to make new, genuine friends. That’s why I’ve come tonight. I told my wife I had a work thing—she doesn’t know I’m here.”
A bell rings.
Chris and I both signed up for the same workshop. The advertisement promised the class would teach us how to make better connections with other people. Neither of us knew this meant confessing humiliating, personal secrets to strangers. They didn’t mention that in the brochure.
“If what you’re saying makes you feel like a loser, you’re doing it right!” shouts our group leader, Mark, encouragingly.
Chris and I nod at each other in agreement, as we sink lower into our chairs.
Nailed it.
✽ ✽ ✽
A defining feature of extroverts is that they like being around other people. And, presumably, interacting with them. Talking to them, even. It’s a lot to take in.
If, like me, you know only a handful of people, then it stands to reason that most of these “other people” you interact with will be strangers. And so here’s the first massive stumbling block in my year of extroverting: I am afraid of talking to strangers.
In London, I learned quickly that if you talk to a stranger in public, they look at you like you’ve slapped them in the face: shocked and aggrieved. Betrayed as well, because you have broken the social contract that we all agreed to follow in public: no one exists but you. More than one British person has told me that only Americans and unhinged people talk to strangers. Or, given the reputation of northerners, the whole of Yorkshire. But then, of course, there is still the excruciating hell of everyone eavesdropping on your awkward conversation.
A few years ago, I found a box of buttons at my local café in London. I picked one up. It read: “I Talk to Strangers.” I threw it back immediately, afraid someone had seen me holding it. It might as well have said: “I Eat Spiders.”
For me, talking to strangers is something you do as a last resort: lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, dead phone, broken leg, typhoon—and, really, only if these things happen all at once.
