Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes

by Jessica Pan

Sam goes along with it, but the depths of my neuroses are a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand why, for example, I prefer dogs to people.

So what were other people out there with jobs and close friends and rich, fulfilling lives doing that I wasn’t? Eventually, and with mounting fear, I realized: they were having new experiences, taking risks, making new connections.

The time had come to break free of my increasingly uncomfortable comfort zone.

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.

“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.

“Nobody waves—but everybody waves back.”

I can’t believe how differently all these encounters actually went compared with how I imagined they would go in my mind.

A big source of my loneliness is not having a close friend I can call and meet for coffee at a moment’s notice and share everything that’s been happening in my life. Or a group of friends to go out with. Nothing big. Not too showy. A small coven I could count on to cast spells on my enemies.

I wanted to be able to write things on Instagram like, “The gang’s all here!” and not just have it be a photo of me with a dozen blueberry muffins and a Sally Rooney novel.

“Hi, it’s me, your casual new best friend.” I have rehearsed stories. I feel friendly. I relax my face. Look at me, I’m fun and easygoing and chill as fuck.

How I do not want to regret not doing the thing—whatever the thing may be—anymore.

It would have been awful. It might have been amazing.

No matter how much we plan, life is a set of unpredictable curveballs, one after the other. I’d love to get better at rolling with them.

Everything in Beijing had seemed so exciting: the charming tiny streets, the street vendors, the cyclists. It’s difficult to maintain that sense of wonder in the city where you are settled.

I am in the party and not in the party. I am Schrödinger’s hostess.