Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

by Jessica Pan

  Yet, he is just as lonely and lost as any of us.

  As we are leaving, Mark says that we should think about what we’ve learned next time we are with our friends or meeting someone new. “Think about a dinner party,” he says. “We take so much time cleaning our house and cooking the food, but then we just let conversations run rampant and stay shallow. But we can go deep. We can edit. We can alter the course of the conversations and make connections for life.”

  At the end of the class, there’s a sigh of relief. It has been a very heightened emotional roller coaster. The class lasted two and a half hours, and I am taking home a treasure trove of secrets to take with me to the grave. But I feel like I’ve been given a new outlook on life. It’s OK to go deep. It’s OK to share our worst failings. In fact, it’s encouraged—and it feels kind of great.

  Most people in the class seem to feel the same way, our faces looking slightly shell-shocked as we are filing out the door. I suddenly stop Chris on the way out.

  “Do you want be friends?” I ask him. All normal social etiquette is out the window.

  “Sure,” he says and writes down his email on a piece of paper.

  I walk home, elated. I picture us meeting up as new future best friends and having long, fulfilling conversations over brunch. It could be the beginning of something beautiful.

  The next morning, in the cold light of day, reality creeps in. What was I thinking? Chris and I could never be friends in real life. I know too much! He lied to his wife about where he was. I know he is ashamed to make less money than she does. We both know the most humiliating things about each other—and literally nothing else. In fact, if he knew he’d see me again, I’m sure he never would have told me any of his secrets.

  I send him an email saying it was nice to meet him, but he doesn’t reply, and I’m relieved. Chris knows it could never work, as well. We had a moment, a strange tennis match of fears and secrets in the middle of the classroom, one that I will remember forever, and it was special, and it made us both feel less alone. But that’s all it could be. I’m starting to really understand the saying “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Our budding friendship is a victim of our coerced oversharing; we can never meet again.

  So this means that Chris is out there in the world, just walking around knowing my deepest insecurities. Knowing that I fret about being broke, inferior, and childless.

  What have I done?

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  A few weeks after the class, I board the Eurostar to Paris to visit Rachel. My window seat is next to an older French man in his seventies. After the relentless chattiness of the past month, I’d planned to just stare out the window or read during the journey, but the peace is being brutally violated by an extremely loud woman in her twenties shouting at her friend.

  “Will’s embarrassed by me because I’m so loud. He thinks I’m mean and rude. But I’m hilarious!” she says, roaring at her friend, who seems to be struck dumb by the verbal onslaught coming at her.

  I search frantically in my bag for my headphones.

  “You know, if Will died, I might be sad, but definitely not as sad as if my ex Steve died. If Steve died, I would be devastated! But if Will died, I’d be fine,” she shouts.

  I turn my bag over and empty all the contents on my fold-down table, still searching for my headphones.

  “Will’s always like, ‘Don’t shout so much in public—it’s about how the people around you feel.’” At this point, she starts gesturing around the train, and I can’t help but think that poor Will sounds like a nice guy. “I do not give a fuck about these people!” she concludes.

  I think back to Stefan saying, “People who lack social anxiety: it’s a sign of psychopathy.”

  Everyone else on the train is studiously staring into dead space, listening to this woman blatantly insult us. I know we can all hear her: I’ve no doubt Queen Victoria can hear her from the afterlife.

  “Turkey is a GREAT place for tanning!” she declares to her friend as I realize I left my headphones on my kitchen table. I may cry.

  I glance at the older man sitting next to me. He’s looking at his tray table, also frozen by the inane conversation dominating our airspace.

  “Me and Will had sex in the kitchen last night, but he’s still too femme for me,” she says. I’m not sure her friend has said a single word in response.

  I risk another look at my neighbor: we are both in hell. If I don’t talk to him, we’re going to have to endure this for the entirety of the journey from London to Paris. I have to save us from that.

  I have to be the hero this train needs.

  I mean, I’m not gonna tell her to keep it down. God no. I’m not a superhero. But I could save one person.

  I look at the man sitting next to me. Stacked on top of his tray table are four books, most of them about Kafka. He’s wearing an old-fashioned beige trench coat. What can I say to him? Going straight into “What tensions do you have with your mother?” feels a little forward. After about five minutes of agonizing on an opener, I turn to him.

  “Are you a professor?” I ask him. Sure, I am stereotyping, but something about his serious coat and smooth hands looked like he struggles more with philosophical dilemmas than laying bricks. He turns to me, surprised.

  “I was,” he says, in heavily accented French.

  I gesture toward his stack of books.

  “Are you a writer?” I ask.

  “Yes, I am tired,” he says. “You could tell?”

  Flustered at the misunderstanding, I nod.

  We fall back into silence. Then I repeat my last question again more clearly, and he tells me that, yes, he is a writer. His name is Claude, and Claude writes about art and art criticism. We keep talking, and he tells me about all the countries he’s lived in: Spain, Brazil, Japan. He travels all over the world to curate exhibitions. He speaks excellent English, but his accent is thick, so I have to concentrate hard to hear him over the blustering conversation in front of us.

  I can’t help looking at his left hand. On his pinky, there’s a delicate ring with a red jewel. Just looking at it makes me sad. It doesn’t look like it was originally his. Something about it makes me think that there’s sorrow behind it.

  Somehow, we do alight on the tensions with his mother, but unintentionally. He starts talking about her when I ask him where he grew up. Then he stops. I wait.

  “The thing about my mother is . . .” he pauses and looks at me. Then deems me worthy to be told. “Well,” he says. “This . . . this is a story!” and he punctuates the air with his finger.

  He tells me that he didn’t know his mother was Jewish, that she kept it a secret during the war because she was afraid of the Nazis, and he only found out that he was Jewish after she died. He doesn’t know who his father is.

  Holy shit.

  Claude and I talk nonstop for the entire train journey to Paris. He tells me about how he met his wife in Italy, many years ago. He is friendly, and he laughs a lot, telling me about where to go in Paris and how Bordeaux is beautiful but too bourgeois to live in.

  We disembark together and walk along the platform. I can see Rachel waiting for me near the turnstiles, and I see her face as she clocks that I am walking toward her with a seventy-something man. I stare at her, as if to say, “Be cool.” Her eyes widen as we approach her together.

  “Claude, meet my friend Rachel,” I say. They shake hands and speak a little French to each other before Claude bids us good day and disappears into the train station.

  Rachel looks at me, confused.

  “I’ve started talking to strangers,” I tell her.

  “OK, but do you have to talk to FRENCH strangers? Jesus Christ. That’s next level,” Rachel says, leading me out of the station.

  As we walk out, I feel overcome with that excited rush that comes from reuniting with a close f
riend you haven’t seen in months. It’s a relief not to have to try so hard or worry about what to say, because you’re talking so quickly to catch up on everything you’ve both missed.

  Ten minutes later, Rachel is shushing me on the Metro for being too loud.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  I’m told that the older we get, the easier talking to strangers will become. With age, we grow more confident and less involved with what other people think of us. On a crowded bus one day, an older woman sitting down near me smacks my elbow and barks, “Open the window—I’m hot!”

  I’m giddy just imagining the shit I’ll get up to when I’m eighty.

  On the phone, Nick had told me that he thinks that society, in which individuals are more isolated than ever before, would be happier if people talked to each other and made small connections when it’s easy to. When you’re both waiting in the same line for twenty minutes; when the plane is delayed, you’re stuck at the gate, you’ve already listened to four podcasts, and you’re admiring the shoes of the woman sitting next to you and want to tell her about something you just heard on NPR but feel weird about it; when you want to ask the person eating lunch on a park bench where they got their delicious-smelling curry—maybe just do it. Most people will enjoy it.

  And if you’re game to really talk, head into Deep Self territory. But don’t, say, grab a book out of someone’s hands and say, “So, when was the last time you cried in front of someone else?” (Trust me on that one. Although this question has been tested by Nick and will get you into fertile Deep Talk territory real fast.)

  I had spoken with people I never imagined I could. Strangers. French people. I mingled at parties where I knew no one. Talked to painters on the street. I could play and win vulnerability tennis. I had humiliated myself on the Underground. Crucially (and slightly antiprogress), I feel stronger for knowing you don’t have to talk to everyone (threatening people at bus stops, anyone who makes you uncomfortable, people who think Turkey is mainly good for tanning, etc.). But mostly, I can’t believe how differently all these encounters actually went compared with how I imagined they would go in my mind.

  I’m not completely cured of social anxiety, but at least I now know I can talk to people if I really wanted to or needed to. It is no longer impossible.

  I’m also shocked to discover that talking to strangers turns out to be one of the cheapest, easiest ways to feel good and get a hit of dopamine when you’re feeling low, invisible, or lost in your own world. When Claude and I parted ways at the Gare du Nord, he said, “I never do this, but I wish I did. This journey passed like a dream.” (He’s French, so he’s allowed to say things like this.)

  Although, when I tell people how I asked strangers on the Underground who the Queen is, they look visibly upset: at me (for asking the question), at being forced to hear about the excruciating awkwardness I put other people through (angry at me, again), and at those men, subjects of Queen Victoria. Were they time travelers or just idiots? Or were they intentionally messing with me? On that, no one is certain.

  three

  Shaking in the Spotlight

  or

  Stage Fright

  For a very few dark months in my twenties, I was a TV reporter in Beijing. I was the worst TV reporter at the network and, I also suspect, in the world. The reason I suspect this is because my producer told me so, multiple times. This was not the only reason I disliked my producer. She called herself Sophia—I don’t know her real name because it’s common practice for Chinese people to give themselves Western names (and for foreigners to give themselves Chinese names, thereby resulting in a system where everyone seems to have the wrong name). She had declared herself Sophia, which annoyed me, because (a) Sophia was a great name that I would have loved to pick for my own real name and (b) I had given myself a particular Chinese name that a friend later told me was the equivalent of calling myself Angelina Jolie and now it was too late to change it.

  We all have stories from the past that we don’t tell other people, usually about embarrassing jobs, or awful roommates, or terrible people we slept with in low moments. High school boyfriends who secretly thought they were werewolves (that one might be just me, but, Andy, I’ll never forget you). Humiliating crushes we had (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid). That time when we took up playing the harp. Honestly, what were we thinking? we ask ourselves now, with the clarity of hindsight.

  I rarely talk about my time as a TV reporter, and when I do, it often sounds like I was in prison: “I got out, but please don’t ask anything about what happened or how I got there.”

  That’s because not only was I really, really bad at my job, but also I was terrified of it.

  The broadcasting company I worked for was brand new and short of reporters who spoke English. I had limited life skills, but I did speak English. My only other qualification was that I’d just graduated from journalism school (it was in Australia, but I still think it counts). I’d always wanted to travel and write and experience new things, and journalism seemed like the best way in—even if it meant I’d have to interview strangers, talk on the phone, and push myself out of my comfort zone a lot of the time. If I had to do something for my job that gave me anxiety, I could usually make myself do it—I think nearly everyone in the world has experienced that. But my shyness was suited to the part where I got to sit down and write my articles.

  But now I was going for TV. I had secret hopes of making a live show called This Chinese Life in a not-so-subtle effort to become the Ira Glass of northeast Asia.

  That is not what happened.

  When I accepted the job, I willfully ignored the fact that I had shied away from every single opportunity to be in the spotlight in my life: I faked being sick for school plays, avoided anything that involved presentations, refused to raise my hand in class, even when I knew the answer. Always.

  While many people might be fine with raising their hand in an average-sized class, standing in the spotlight in front of a larger audience is daunting for a lot of us. Public speaking is an incredibly common fear—though introverts are significantly more likely than extroverts to suffer. Typically, we are more sensitive to new stimuli and to our environments, so when faced with an unnerving task like speaking in front of a large group of others, introverts are more likely to have a faster heart rate or increased blood pressure.

  But whatever! That was Old Jess. She didn’t have a blazer. She wasn’t living in Beijing. New Jess wanted to be a TV reporter, and by God, she would.

  Except I would metaphorically black out whenever that little red light showed the camera was on. I’d break out into a cold sweat. My heart would pound loudly in my ears. My brain would stall, and I would become an anxious, self-conscious mess of nerves. I’d start speaking so fast that I stuttered. Sophia would yell at me in my earpiece from behind the camera: you’re talking too fast, stop moving your hands, why are you nodding your head like you’re a rapper, stop looking so scared, don’t cry because your makeup will run, OK, we need more makeup.

  Can you give yourself PTSD from watching yourself on camera? If so, I was well on my way. From what I’ve seen, I looked like I’d been kidnapped, dipped in a vat of bronzer, and made to read from a teleprompter at gunpoint.

  Despite my efforts to practice more, I just couldn’t seem to get better. I froze all the time. I was too nervous. I was too sweaty. I lacked motor skills. I became a deer in headlights, except they were studio lights and people were yelling at me to stay in front of them, instead of safely scurrying off into the forest.

  All the other reporters or news anchors there seemed to be ultraconfident, beautiful naturals on camera. They exemplified the idea that your vocation should match your natural skill set. Not me, who had found a job I was apparently genetically predisposed to screw up at every opportunity.

  To get through the days, I would shove all these doubts and miseries down into a m
ental box called “Fodder for Therapy,” but there were cracks in that box. There always are. You think you’re fine until you’re sitting on the steps behind work, watching old Beijing locals dancing in the square across the street, and Coldplay’s “Fix You” comes on shuffle and suddenly you’re crying off two pounds of foundation.

  After living together in Australia, both of our visas had expired, so Sam moved back to London, and I moved back to Beijing. We were dating long-distance, which was terrible. And my coworkers were talented, natural performers whom I couldn’t relate to, and I lived with a girl I barely knew and her cat, which I was allergic to. With no one to talk to, I’d listen to podcasts instead. My favorite was The Moth, true stories told live by regular humans like me. I liked that they weren’t seasoned performers. They were just onstage, telling their true story. It was my coping mechanism: lying in bed laughing and crying while listening to these strangers’ stories.

  Back at work, my anxiety on camera meant I was unnatural and awkward, but while I was trying to get better, I’d get yelled at, which made me even more nervous. The fear came from the spotlight, even if the spotlight was just a camera. It was something about staring down the barrel and knowing my face would be projected into people’s homes, people who would also be wondering why I was so bad at this. I wanted to be good at this job, but I walked into the office with deep dread every single day.

  Eventually, I quit my job at the TV station. The day I left, I ran out of the studio, clutching the five blazers I kept at my desk. It was exactly how I imagined a real prison break would feel. I moved to London and married Sam, trying to forget about the whole ordeal.

  I vowed never to put myself in the spotlight again. This is healthy, I told myself: we mature and realize we cannot be all the things we had hoped we would be.

  ✽ ✽ ✽