by Jessica Pan
One of my guests texts me. He tells me his girlfriend is a gluten-free vegan. I scream.
✽ ✽ ✽
On the day, I oversleep after staying up too late watching Nigella videos to calm down. There is no time to clean the apartment, but I decide that I am not going to care about this. My Dutch neighbors hadn’t cleaned their apartment before they had us over for dinner, and I had reveled in this. It had put me at ease, as if I was family who had just dropped by. (I will tell myself anything to avoid vacuuming the stairs.)
I throw everything lying around (clothes, books, magazines) into the study and close the door. Instead of making my bed, I shut the bedroom door behind me. My cleaning strategy involves lots of closed doors.
I am swiftly chopping root vegetables to roast in the oven when I hear the first buzzer. It’s 2 p.m. Charles, my travel mentor, is standing on my front step with Liz, a girl I met at improv, and Jermaine, a comedian from my course.
Three people with nothing in common but me.
They will have to talk about me.
Hell hath begun.
I usher them upstairs, take their proffered bottles of wine, and put them on the sofa with glasses of prosecco. Our apartment suddenly feels very full and very, very loud. Seven more guests are on their way.
As I’m prepping the vegetables, I overhear Liz talking extensively about her trip to South America. Which is fine. Except she’s explaining the sites of Bolivia to Charles, who has backpacked throughout the country. I think of Dolly’s advice: I need to jump in and save Liz from embarrassment.
“My mother wants to have her ashes sprinkled on this trail in Bolivia—you would love it; it’s gorgeous—” Liz says.
“Charles, haven’t you been to Bolivia?” I shout from the kitchen.
“I have,” he says.
“And haven’t you been on that trail?” I ask.
“Yep,” he says.
“What? Why didn’t you say something?” Liz asks Charles, her hand to her mouth.
I can’t take it. I shout, “Where do you guys want your ashes sprinkled after you die?” from the kitchen.
They both turn to me.
“Because I’d like mine to be in Hawaii!” I say.
I am social lubricant. I am Miss Manners. I am Nigella.
It begins to pour outside, huge sheets of rain. I run around closing the windows. And then the door buzzes again. And again. People just keep coming.
Laura from improv arrives with no umbrella, and her hair is soaking wet. She’s carrying a cake she’s just baked and a bottle of Polish spirits. I take her upstairs to my bedroom and have to actually open the door and let her in so she can blow-dry her hair. Now Laura knows my mode of organization, known as “piles of clothes.” Dammit. But there’s no time to care, because downstairs, in the living room and kitchen area, there are people everywhere.
I run down. Sam is reheating the turkey and whipping up the vegan mashed potatoes. I take a look at my sweet potatoes covered in butter, sugar, and marshmallows. The marshmallows have failed to form that camp-fire-y, charred glaze and are instead completely melted, the white dissolving into clumps among the orange sweet potatoes.
“It looks like I spit my toothpaste out in it,” Sam says.
I want to kill him. But there are too many witnesses.
Finally, when all the food is hot and on the table, I stand, bare feet planted (so casual, so calm) and assess my guests. Toni and her husband, Rob, are on the sofa; Liz is yelling about rugby; the others are engrossed in a conversation about onesies. A few girls from improv are discussing our former class.
“Hey!” I say.
No one turns around.
“Hello! Hey! Hey! Hey!” I shout, waving a fork in the air. A few heads turn toward me. Toni is merrily still shouting at Liz in the corner.
“TONI!” I yell.
The room goes silent. Oh no. I have turned into a schoolteacher.
“Plates are here, silverware is here, and please help yourself!” I gesture toward the table. Is that how it’s done? Is this how you do this? I’ve never done this before.
“We have turkey, we have stuffing, we have something called Coca-Cola ham.” As soon as I utter the words “Coca-Cola ham” the room immediately “oohs” and “ahhs” with glee. It’s like casting a spell.
“Charles, I made the stuffing with gluten-free bread,” I say. Casually but with a clear: Look at me, the perfect hostess. So prepared. So accommodating.
“Amazing. Quick question: are the sausages also gluten-free?” he asks.
“Why would sausages have gluten in them?”
There’s a beat as we both realize: the sausages definitely have gluten in them (the casing), and he won’t be able to eat the stuffing, which is my worst batch ever due to the rock-hard bread I’d purchased at the gluten-free bakery.
After everyone has helped themselves to the food, the twelve of us sit in a circle with our plates of food on our laps. This is the moment I had been waiting for. The moment I wasn’t sure I could make happen.
My favorite American tradition is when everyone at the Thanksgiving table goes around and says something they are grateful for. After living in the cynical UK, I’ve realized how earnest and deeply American this is. But it’s so in line with everything I’ve learned from this year: opening up to people and diving into Deep Talk.
I remember, right at the beginning of all this, what the School of Life teacher Mark had said: about how we plan dinner parties so meticulously, we make the food, we clean the house (sort of), we buy the booze, but we don’t take any care with the conversation. This was my attempt to try a little. I didn’t want only the normal, polite small talk or the biting humor to hide all emotions.
This is the moment. Sam and I had cooked for two days. We had defrosted the twelve-pound turkey in shifts. We had destroyed our kitchen and nearly our marriage.
But we’d also brought all of these people together, all strangers to one another. I’d met them or received guidance from them during this past year. I had not known most of them a year ago, and if I had never attempted all this extroverting, none of them would be here right now, in this moment.
The rain was pouring. The candles were lit. I had hygge-d the hell out of the evening.
“There are two rules at Thanksgiving,” I say. “Eat as much as you can and everyone says one thing they’re grateful for.” I spot Charles, my American comrade in the corner, not eating gluten.
“Charles, why don’t you go first?” I suggest. (Command.)
“I’m grateful for old friends,” he says, raising his glass to Sam. “And to meeting new people and good food.”
Next it’s Toni’s turn.
“I am grateful to live in a country with universal health care,” she says. (Toni briefly lived in America and is obsessed with the NHS.) A few people say they are thankful for the food we’ve provided.
The circle reaches me. My moment. I look around at these faces that I didn’t know a year ago.
“I’m thankful that I met most of you this year and that I did a lot of scary things that led me to a lot of amazing people,” I say. “I invited each of you because I want to know you better, but you are all already really special to me. You changed my year in a positive way. You changed me.”
I did it. I let myself be vulnerable.
It’s Rob’s turn.
“I am . . . thankful Nigella discovered how good Coca-Cola tastes with ham,” he says. I let him off the hook because Rob is British and he can’t do sincere in public.
The final person to go is Jermaine.
“You guys already used up all the good ones,” he says. “I’m thankful for . . . doors. It would be terribly drafty without them,” he says. And I can’t argue with that. I am also grateful for doors; right now they are hiding all my mess.
I study Jermain
e, my knife and fork still hovering in the air. Will he also say something real?
“But also I’m grateful to be here with all of you. You come to parties and sometimes they’re fun and sometimes they’re full of weirdos, but I think this is a great group of fun weirdos,” he says. He downs his beer to drown out his public kindness.
Fun weirdos. The man sums it up perfectly.
Six Brits, a Romanian, a Polish man, an American, an Australian, one South African, and a northern Irishwoman come together.
And the food! The pescatarian ate two platefuls of ham. And the gluten-free vegan? I clocked her eating the pumpkin pie. See, this is what Thanksgiving is really about: breaking our diets and our ethics so we can partake in Coca-Cola ham.
As soon as the main course is over, I’m up clearing plates and head back to the kitchen alone. I turn up the music, switch on my own playlist, and start blasting Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.”
As I arrange the Dolly-guided cheeseboard, I sing the lyrics, reveling in the lines about how Marvin overcame his shyness at parties so that he could start properly grooving on the dance floor. Marvin Gaye must have been an introvert. He did, after all, write the anthem for introverts going to an extrovert’s party.
Then I realize. I’m standing in the kitchen, alone with a cheeseboard, with my music on and a party going on outside that was my party. This is the dream. I am being social, but there are still moments to be alone. I am in the party and not in the party. I am Schrödinger’s hostess. I have unlocked the code to having it all. I have my music, my favorite food, and my handpicked guests, but I get to leave the room whenever I want.
I grab the cake Laura brought, whipped cream, and Nigella’s burned chocolate brownies (I certainly wasn’t going to eat them), vanilla ice cream, paper plates, and lay it all out with the cheeseboard with gluten-free crackers and normal crackers.
I put a poached pear in the corner because I can’t resist. I need to pay tribute to the show that had kept me company when I first moved to London. And that had inspired me to do this next bit.
“Do we want to play a game?” I ask, tentatively, to the group.
There’s ambivalence in the air. Some blank stares.
Everyone wants to play the game, but no one wants to be the first to admit it. I have improv people in my home—and you’re telling me they don’t want to play a game?
Also, I had heard Toni earlier telling the group how much she hated games. She had poisoned the well.
I introduce the group to a game that my Venezuelan roommate in Australia had introduced to me at a Christmas house party: papelitos, meaning “little pieces of paper” in Spanish. Everyone writes down five movies on the little pieces of paper, we throw them into a bowl, and then we have to get our teammate to guess the movie. We go through three rounds of guessing: one round with word descriptions only, one round where you are only allowed to say one word, and one round of charades.
Everyone starts writing their movies on the pieces of paper. It’s all going according to plan.
“Organized fun is lame!” Toni yells drunkenly from the corner.
Oh no. Oh no, you don’t.
I take a seat next to her and put my hand gently on her arm. I lean in closely.
“Enjoy the money; I hope it makes you very happy. Dear Lord, what a sad little life. You ruined my night completely so you could have the money, and I hope you spend it on getting some lessons in grace and decorum because . . .”
No, I don’t.
Instead, I say:
“Toni. Please. For the love of Thanksgiving. Do not heckle the game.”
She nods, slightly scared.
This is my Come Dine with Me, and this is my lame activity, and by God we will do it.
I pair her with her husband, and we agree that he will do all of the acting and looking stupid, and she will do all of the guessing. This appeases her.
The game begins. I’ve been grouped with Sylvia (gluten-free vegan) and Jermaine.
The competition gets heated. In one round, I’m trying to get Jermaine to guess the movie About a Boy. I think about the single-word hint.
“Teenagerhood,” I say—and everyone loses their minds.
“That’s not a real word!” they protest, pulling out their phones to check.
Guess what, suckers? It is. It is the condition of being a teenager, and it is horrible.
Didn’t matter, though, because Jermaine did not guess the movie correctly.
During papelitos, there’s a lot of impassioned yelling, a lot of acting, a tight contest for the winner.
This, as it turns out, is all you need for a good time: invite friends, make them take off their shoes, stuff them with turkey and booze, and then make them act out Die Hard with a Vengeance.
Laura brings out her bottle of Polish hazelnut spirits. She pours shots and then adds whole milk to each one, as is tradition. We pass them around and down them. It tastes like taking a shot of a Ferrero Rocher.
And I realize I’m actually enjoying myself. In fact, before I know it, the afternoon is over. Eventually, people begin to gather their coats to go.
Finally, the last group leaves: Toni, Rob, and Jermaine. I hug them, and they head down our stairs and close the door behind them.
I’m making way back up my own stairs when I hear:
“That was GREAT!” Jermaine says in the stairwell. Jermaine! It feels like the equivalent of him being in a taxi and giving me a nine out of ten on Come Dine with Me. (Literally no one gets a ten.)
I collapse on the sofa next to the window.
✽ ✽ ✽
I discovered that afternoon parties are the best because by 8:30 p.m. I was drinking decaf coffee and eating the rest of the pumpkin pie by myself while watching Friends Thanksgiving reruns on the sofa with Sam.
I gathered ten (mostly) strangers for an elaborate meal in my home. Watching from afar, I saw new friendships forming. All of these people were a part of my year, but now they were also in each other’s lives, even if just for this one afternoon. The twelve of us had a shared experience.
Like the moment when Jermaine made faux-love to a plate of ham to get his team to guess Fifty Shades of Grey. We all have to have that burned into our brains forever.
It turns out that hosting is actually great if you’re socially awkward because it makes the night feel like a blur and you always have something to do. Plus you can always go and hide in your own bedroom—it’s not weird if you climb into bed and under the covers. Well, not as weird as if you climbed under someone else’s bed covers at someone else’s house.
sixteen
Introvert. Extrovert. Convert?
Conclusion
I’m having a drink at a bar in my neighborhood in London with my new friend Christie. I’d met her at a networking event I’d said yes to, instead of skipping out on, this year. Christie waves to someone she sees across the room. I look over—it’s the comedian Sara Barron.
She starts when she sees me.
“This is my friend Jess,” Christie says to Sara.
It takes Sara a second to recognize me—the woman scarred by her Edinburgh comedy gig who had sought out her help in recovery.
“But you said you didn’t have any friends!” Sara exclaims, teasing but surprised. I nod.
“That was before,” I say.
✽ ✽ ✽
The day after my dinner party, I come across an eerie sentence written by a psychologist in the Guardian: “A disagreeable introvert is not necessarily constrained to a life of unhappiness.”
Even in my darkest moment on my sofa, I’m not sure I thought I was “constrained to a life of unhappiness.”
Actually, maybe I did. Or, at least, I feared it. A little.
Sometimes I feared it a lot.
It was that fear, fear that if I never changed I wo
uld never know what it was like to live a bigger life, that propelled me through this year, pushing me out of the house, onto the stage, into people’s homes, and into strangers’ conversations.
I didn’t even necessarily think I’d like a bigger life.
But I wanted to know what it was like. To be able to make a choice about what kind of life I had.
It’s generally agreed that introversion is a natural trait. Some personality studies say that introversion is physiologically or even genetically based, while others report that introversion is only 40–50 percent heritable. But that line in the Guardian was written by a psychologist, Brian R. Little, who argues that our personalities are not fixed or exclusively determined by nature or nurture; instead, they can change as a result of action.
His research has uncovered the value in our “personal projects,” from the trivial (walking the dog) to the formidable (climbing Everest) to the interpersonal (trying to become a better listener). In his book, he writes, “What you do can remake who you are—and it’s a revelation that turns previous ideas about human personality on their heads.”
He says that we have “free personality traits.” Free traits describe a behavior or quality we take on when we need it (i.e., an introvert being more social when her work requires it or a shy person acting incredibly confident as the maid of honor at her best friend’s wedding).
I think about being onstage at Union Chapel, in the spotlight, after all those years hiding from it. Watching myself in the video at my first stand-up comedy gig, controlled and confident. Walking into a room where I knew barely anyone and striking up a conversation with Paul. Trying on all of these free traits when I needed them to get through the year.
I met so many other introverts who were acting as extroverts over the course of these challenges. It surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. We all have to give presentations and talk to strangers and be social sometimes if we want to succeed professionally. Richard, the charisma coach, figured it out early on. So did many of the journalists I met while networking. So had Benji, the psychiatrist who had also become a successful comedian. He had told me he was tired of being held hostage to his introversion and shyness (and he wound up being the pescatarian who ate ham at my apartment on Thanksgiving).
