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

by Jessica Pan

  Without the distraction of the festival, and without Lily and Vivian, I am suddenly upset at how badly I had performed. All of the confidence that had appeared after my first gig was now gone, evaporated into the sea air. After I had performed at The Moth, I had felt invincible. Since that big moment, so much had happened: I’d made friends with strangers, I’d swum with potential new best friends, I’d fallen deeply in love with my weekly improv class. But I’d also slipped into a gray mood in Budapest that I couldn’t shake, and this week I had come crashing down from the giddy heights of my first-ever comedy gig. Why can’t confidence and optimism come with a lifetime guarantee?

  I need my comedy mentor, even a reluctant one.

  I pull out my phone and text Phil what happened. He replies immediately.

  “Fringe audiences can be tough. Especially if you say you love England,” Phil texts me. “That was never going to be an easy gig. Don’t take it too hard, Jess. You’ve got a late-night Fringe gig out of the way and you’re still alive.”

  Right. He was right. Exactly.

  “Godspeed, Jess. All the best for your next gig.”

  Yeah, OK. Dream on, Phil.

  thirteen

  Introvert into the Woods,

  A Real-Life Interlude

  Leaves crunch under my feet. I’m walking through a forest. Alone. At dawn. My hair is dirty, I’m hungry, I’m dehydrated, and I don’t know where I am.

  I knew it. I began this experiment fearful that the year would end with me in the woods communing with wolves and eating weeds.

  I pick my feet up to move through the thick leaves, looking up at the green canopy of trees above me. The sky is just beginning to lighten. I’m trying not to think about ticks and mosquitoes. Then I hear a rustle that hasn’t come from me.

  I freeze. There aren’t supposed to be other people for miles. That’s what the man had said. The rustle also stops abruptly. I rub my eyes and squint through the forest. Another crunch of leaves.

  “Hello?” I whisper softly, terrified.

  Did you hear the one about the introvert who tried to extrovert for a year and ended up murdered in a forest?

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Willow is a blonde twenty-five-year-old with micro bangs and a septum piercing. She grew up in southeast London: a former wild child who is polyamorous, a libertarian, a wearer of orange lipstick. The one who meets strangers on stopovers in New York and ends up in jazz bars with them at 4 a.m.

  We met while working at an advertising agency a few years ago. She sat behind me, facing the opposite way. Her signature move was swiveling her chair around and nosing her way into all of my work conversations, which was annoying because (a) what a Leo and (b) she always seemed to know so much about everything despite being eight years younger than I am.

  Willow talks to everyone, is up for anything, and says yes to everything, including running a half marathon with zero training on a day when it was so hot that it melted off her orange toenail polish. She’s confident that everything is always going to turn out OK and that people are going to be there for her—and that, miraculously, always seems to be the case, whether it was when she hitchhiked from London to Brussels and slept on strangers’ sofas along the way or traveled through India alone, getting her name tattooed in Hindi on the bottom of her foot by a stranger she’d met who happened to own a tattoo gun. Willow is mystifying to me.

  Willow now lives in Stockholm, but we arrange to catch up over coffee when she’s in town visiting her family. When I tell her about my year—the comedy, the talking to strangers, the traveling alone—her response is disturbingly familiar. “Omigod,” she says, “but you hate all of those things.”

  “I know,” I nod. Willow doesn’t fully understand why I hate these things. In the last three months alone, Willow has said yes to: raves, tequila shots on a Monday, couch-surfing in Copenhagen, and rescue cats. We are completely different—and she was partially one of the reasons I was inspired to start this year of extroverting.

  Once we’ve established that I have essentially agreed to do things I would usually run away from at high speed, Willow suggests that I come camping with her and her friends.

  Despite her casual tone, I suspect a catch.

  “What friends?”

  “Just some women I met recently. One of them has a giant bell tent set up in a forest. We’re driving down from London to escape the city and to . . . have a journey together.”

  “A journey?”

  “Magic mushrooms,” Willow says. “In a forest. At sunset. It’s going to be spiritual.”

  Hmm.

  “Aren’t you afraid they could be the kind of mushrooms that kill you?” I ask.

  Willow explains that one of the women, Evie, is married to a mycologist who forages for native magic mushrooms. What about Lyme disease? The ticks are dead now, Willow says. What about getting there? Her dad’s car. Willow has an answer for every concern I throw at her.

  “I think it’ll be good for you,” Willow says. She uses psychedelics for fun, but she also writes about their medicinal use. Willow tells me how psychedelics are being used to treat people with depression and post-traumatic stress and to promote creativity.

  “Steve Jobs took ’shrooms,” she says.

  “And now he’s dead,” I remind her. Willow ignores me. This is typical of our relationship.

  I’ve never taken any drugs. Ever. Between my overprotective Chinese father and catastrophizing Jewish mother, plus that neuroscience course at college, I’d had the fear of God put in me at a young age, and no hippie, dealer, or college hallmate had ever made an offer of drugs that tempted me. Hypothetical hippies, usually, because also, people very rarely offered me drugs, period. Until now.

  “It’ll be good for you to get out of London,” she says. “Get out of your head.”

  I turn her down imperiously, but after we part ways I can’t stop thinking about Willow’s invitation. London has been bothering me lately: polluted, crowded, dirty. I’m still feeling fragile after bombing onstage at the Edinburgh Fringe. In short, I’m restless. To relax, I spend the weekend reading a five-hundred-page book on psychedelics.

  I discover that psilocybin, the naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, can increase the intensity of emotions, cause synesthesia, and distort our sense of time. Users also report feeling temporarily freed from their egos.

  I think back to the weight of the loneliness I’d felt in Budapest. The anxiety of caring what people thought of me onstage in Edinburgh. Freed from my ego? That part sounded downright thrilling.

  But still, magic mushrooms? I didn’t know what to think anymore. After all, I had started this year afraid of strangers and found out that fewer people were out to murder me than I had thought. Christ, I like improv now. I can’t be sure of anything. I cannot always rely on my knee-jerk reactions, because it turns out I am often wrong.

  In the book on psychedelics, I read that bad reactions can and do happen, but they’re rare, usually caused by too much of a substance, or an anxiety-inducing environment, like a crowded nightclub or heaving street party.

  “It’s women only, in a secluded forest, away from the city,” Willow tells me in a message. “That’s why we chose it.”

  Still, I hesitate.

  “You only live once,” Willow writes. I refuse to bow to that sort of rationale. You also only have to die once.

  But after a particularly lackluster day in London, I spend a restless night tossing and turning, listening to sirens and loud street noise. I lie awake worrying about work deadlines and my tax bill. When dawn finally breaks, I sit up and think: I want to go to the forest.

  If I wanted the openness of this year to stick, then maybe I needed to apply this new openness to my real, everyday life.

  “You’re going to find out so much about yourself. The mushrooms dig up your un
conscious desires and needs,” Willow tells me, sounding like a talking woodland creature straight out of a fairy tale who has happened upon me in the forest. I’m just not sure whether she’s the good kind or the kind that’s secretly trying to poison me.

  “I’m so excited for you,” she adds.

  I actively don’t want to know what is buried in my subconscious, but a few days later, I pack a backpack full of cookies, peaches, and bug repellent and meet Willow at her car. Another girl is already there: Kai. She’s leaning against the passenger door and eating a cucumber—straight up chomping on a whole one.

  When Kai finds out that I’ve never done psychedelics before, she takes the cucumber out of her mouth.

  “I’m so excited for you,” she says, putting her hand on my arm and looking searchingly into my face. The regularity with which that phrase keeps coming up is doing nothing for my nerves.

  Kai has the face of a wise but fearsome goddess with long, wild hair. She seems like she could carry you across a river if you lost your limbs in a war or nurse you back to health if you’ve been shot by an arrow. Like the lovechild of Katniss Everdeen and Bear Grylls. I like her immediately.

  The last to arrive is Janet. A slim woman in a red business-casual dress and gladiator sandals shouldering a big backpack and pulling a massive suitcase behind her.

  We all get into Willow’s car: Kai takes the front seat, because even wise earth goddesses call shotgun if they arrive first. This leaves Janet and me in the back, her giant bag between us.

  It starts almost immediately.

  Janet starts talking as we pull onto the main road, and she does not stop for the entire trip. By the end, I know the status of: her ex-boyfriend, her job, the job she wants to have, the two jobs she interviewed for last week that she didn’t get, the man who lives in her building who is teaching her to how to drive, the text that that man sent her before she left for a vacation (“Enjoy the sun!”), what this text might mean, the personal trainer she went on one date with, how she seduced him with her eyes, the YouTube video that taught her how to seduce him with only her eyes, how many children her sister has, that it’s been four months since she’s had sex, that she hates her roommate, that she loves the gym, and that she loves Jordan Peterson.

  Ordinarily, I like people who overshare. They can demolish awkward silences and create intimacy out of thin air. But not like this. In a group of strangers, there will always be one person you don’t like. I don’t make the rules. It’s a law. Janet’s Law.

  Janet begins shouting about how her vagina needs a good workout and how she’s going to secretly take her IUD out so she can have a baby, probably with her unsuspecting ex-boyfriend. I can’t take any more. Don’t get me wrong; this is actually the most interesting thing she’s said on the entire car ride. But I can’t handle it. It’s breaking my brain.

  “Can we have some road trip music?” I ask Willow feebly as Janet gasps for air between thoughts. Willow puts on “Tropical Brainstorm” by Kirsty MacColl, and for a few blissful minutes there is respite.

  Magic mushrooms are illegal in most countries. Which is fine because we drove to Portugal that evening, where they are legal. Not sure if you knew this, but if you try really hard, you can drive to Portugal from London in just a few hours, which is what we did. Portugal looks exactly like a British forest, though.

  “I have to pee!” Janet bellows, ten minutes later.

  After we hit up a rest area, the conversation gets deeper as we stretch our legs in the parking lot. Kai, Janet, and I are all in our early thirties. Another law, this one called Fear-Mongering Fertility Biological Clock Panic Law, means we will inevitably discuss whether and when we are having children (though not with each other). This one goes a bit differently than usual, though.

  “When I took ayahuasca in Peru, I had a vision of myself at thirty-five holding a perfect baby girl,” Kai says, “so I just trust that the universe is going to take care of everything.”

  I have nothing to say to this, as I rarely trust the universe with anything. Instead, I blurt out the first thing that pops into my head from a recent article I’d read.

  “Pregnancy reprograms your brain,” I say.

  Kai smiles at me, calmly.

  “Tonight is going to reprogram your brain.” She pats me on the back, and it’s only vaguely threatening.

  Back in the car, Janet takes a deep breath and plunges back in, this time about the occasions when her dad will and won’t eat meat. I have a very strong memory and am upset that I will carry this information with me until the end of my days.

  As we get deeper and deeper into the countryside (closer to Portugal), I look out the window and think, “I trust that the universe will take care of everything.”

  Soon, the scenery becomes green, thick, foliage-y, magical. We’re all staring out the windows, taking it in.

  “This is forest as fuck!” Janet shouts in my face. Then she repeats it, for her Instagram story.

  We pull into a clearing, and Willow drives through tall grass until she reaches a parked truck. Evie, a Portuguese native, is waiting for us.

  “Welcome,” Evie says and hugs each of us, one by one. She is dressed exactly like Cheryl Strayed in Wild: shorts and those signature boots. She gives off Mother Earth vibes.

  It’s cool, quiet, and dark under the canopy of leaves. Eerily beautiful—the sort of place melancholy teenagers would go to lose their virginity in an indie film. We are walking through thick, dry leaves, dappled light filtering through the green canopy above us, and there’s not another soul around. Through the gaps in the trees, I can see only see more forest.

  “We have a hundred acres,” Evie says. “We’re all alone out here.”

  Deep in the forest, it feels magical to be engulfed by nature. We walk for about ten minutes until we reach a clearing, where there is a giant tent and a man building a fire. Toby, Evie’s husband, comes over to say hello. He’s the one who foraged the mushrooms we’re going to take tonight. He hands her the goods, wishes us luck, and tells us that since there is no one around for miles, we should be safe. And then he drives off.

  We set our bags down, and Janet announces she wants to change into her psychedelic onesie.

  Willow wanders off and starts twirling in the forest; Kai is assuming yoga poses on some fallen logs.

  “I’m being bitten by mosquitoes!” I yell out to them.

  “Mosquitoes have to eat, too!” Willow calls back, pirouetting into a pile of leaves.

  I blink and suddenly remember a troubling quote from the TV show 30 Rock: “Never follow a hippie to a second location.”

  It’s too late for me.

  Later that night, settled in our campsite, Kai says we should all take a seat inside the tent, sit in a circle, and state our intentions and fears.

  Janet, wearing her shaman feather headdress, starts burning sage and waves it around my body to ward off bad spirits. I can’t believe I’m witnessing this. The smoke surrounds me, and I cough. Does Janet not know that she is the bad spirit? She leans across and starts rubbing oil on my forehead as we form our circle.

  Kai goes first, talking about how she’s had a rough year, transitioning into a new career. Evie resents her family and wants a release. Willow is doubting her recent move to Stockholm and wants clarity on the decision. Janet says, mysteriously, “We are purging what no longer serves us,” with no further explanation.

  It falls silent. They slowly turn to me.

  “I’m . . .” My mind is rattling. What I really want to say is that I’ve opened up my world to new experiences and new people, but I’m not sure whether I am truly learning from them. Or what I was supposed to be learning. Part of me still feels lost and anxious, despite all the challenges I’ve invited into my life this year, and I don’t know whether I’m ever going to be the sort of person I hoped I could be.

  Instead I say, “I�
��m scared of a lot of things, which has been holding me back in my life. . . . I guess Willow invited me here because I’m a closed-off person . . .”

  “No, I invited you because you want to understand your social anxiety. To open up your mind. Psychedelics have been proven to help with that,” Willow says. “Plus, I love you, and I wanted to share this experience with you,” she adds.

  “Oh,” I say. Frankly, I’m touched.

  “I’m still kind of amazed you came,” Willow says. “I never thought you’d say yes.” Me neither. I reach out to grab Willow’s hand just as Janet claps her hands together. “All right! Let’s do this!” she shouts, standing up.

  We take seats outside in a circle around the fire as the sun begins to set. Evie hands me a small mushroom, wrapped in plastic wrap. I stare at it in my hands, my mind already whirring. I don’t want to kill the peaceful vibe in the forest, but I’m apprehensive. I remind myself: a mycologist picked these. His friends have already eaten from this very batch, and they are fine. Supposedly.

  I look at Willow. She smiles, reassuringly.

  Kai unwraps her mushroom. She starts to eat it. Willow does the same. I look around me. At the trees. At the big sky above. I unwrap it. It’s been dehydrated, picked months ago from this very forest in Portugal, and is now a hard stub. My first thought is that it looks like the nub of an umbilical cord. Why? Why does my brain go here? How can I trust it on magic mushrooms?

  Before thinking too hard, I break off a piece of the stub in my hand and chew it.

  It’s tough but tastes like something you’d want sprinkled over your spaghetti Bolognese.

  The sun is just beginning to set. The chatter slowly dies down, and as the sun sinks below the horizon, the stars emerge big and bright in the clear sky. It is stunning. They are winking, and I feel very, very small.

  Janet has started talking again.

  I lean back, staring at the sky, silently fuming at her inane chatter. Why can’t we just be quiet for one minute and look at the stars? Why do I have to know that her dad is lactose intolerant, her aunt has celiac disease, and she ate pineapple for breakfast? Are you allowed to shush someone you just met? Or trap their voice in a shell and throw it into the sea?