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

by Jessica Pan

But I think people really can’t stand it for another reason. And it’s this: while watching a regional comedy troupe acting out an Uber journey through Nudist Narnia, they observe the performers’ joyous, earnest expressions. The audience sees how genuinely happy and safe they feel in their whimsy. And they think the same thing I do: Your vigor for life appalls me.

Because I’d rather do stand-up comedy than wonder “What if?” for the rest of my life. I’d rather do stand-up comedy than be insecure forever. I’d rather do stand-up comedy than look back and wish that I had been braver.

No one really seems to be here to actually become a comedian professionally—they are here to try on a different part of their personality, to meet new people, to escape the safe, boring clutches of normal life. We have each looked at our status quo and decided: something needs to change.

to me, the failure is much more embarrassing if you try.

We love to watch someone give it 100 percent, even if they’re bad. What we can’t bear to watch is someone give it 10 percent,” Kate says. “Then we’re thinking, Why should I watch you?”

“That’s what so great about it. Someone being shit at being shit is just shit. But someone trying really hard and then being shit is amazing,”

That’s how Kate has always talked about the audience: we are going to war, and they are the enemy. We have to control them. And if they defy us, we must subdue them.

“Once you’re onstage, you have the power. You can tell the audience to do something, practically anything, and if you say it with confidence . . . they’ll just do it. They won’t question why.”

“I want you treat this like a one-year-old’s birthday party. If you see anything remotely competent, you clap and cheer,”

self-confidence doesn’t find us: we have to push ourselves to do something hard and live through it, and then confidence will eventually follow.

over the course of the year, I’d simply found that it was easy to get into Deep Talk with other women.

it just seemed like every time I took that leap into the uncomfortable unknown, women would leap right in after me.

I am so impressed by how open Paul is with me.

I remember it happening most often when I’d wake up on a Saturday morning, the full weekend stretching out ahead of me, no plans, no one to see, no one waiting for me. Loneliness seemed to hit me hardest when I felt aimless, not gripped by any initiative or purpose. It also struck hard because I lived abroad, away from close friends or family.

It’s taken me a long time to really believe, to know, that loneliness is circumstantial. We move to a new city. We start a new job. We travel alone. Our families move away. We don’t know how to connect with loved ones anymore. We lose touch with friends. It is not a damning indictment of how lovable we are.

There’s this feeling that we should be self-sufficient, islands on our own, but secretly, introvert or extrovert, we all crave finding “our people” and physically hanging out with each other.

Sometimes it’s good to ask Deep Questions, and sometimes it’s better just to be quiet. To live and let live.

When in life do we have the time and room and space for this kind of surprise and adventure? Hardly ever.

There are standardized versions of every vacation spot—we leave home looking for a new adventure and return having enjoyed a near-identical vacation to everyone else we know,

If I’m going to succeed at this, I will have to pretend I am Jason Bourne, thrust into a city with a mission.

It’s difficult to maintain that sense of wonder in the city where you are settled.

This trip happened. These days were real. This is life. Stop acting like it’s a rehearsal. Stop railing against goulash. I don’t get a second chance.

Every place I’ve ever loved, like Beijing or Melbourne, I’ve known intimately.

So the transformation was complete. I used to be afraid of talking to strangers, and now look at me: I’m bullying them.

I make a beeline for the restroom to talk to myself. I am like Clark Kent, except all I do is yell at myself in the mirror and emerge the exact same person.

I cannot always rely on my knee-jerk reactions, because it turns out I am often wrong.

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.

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.

More than any other time in my entire life, I am not in control. By choice. And I’m OK.

Staying closed off and saying no to things, merely because I was scared, was no longer useful to me.

Recently, I watched a documentary about the first Norwegian woman to climb actual Everest. She tells the host, “I have that feeling, and I can still use it. I can go and get that feeling if I need it.”

“Before I host, I work out the different connections between different people. Sometimes hosts need to act like the social lubricant.

our personalities are not fixed or exclusively determined by nature or nurture; instead, they can change as a result of action.

“What you do can remake who you are—and

the self-care trend has extroverts pursuing introvert activities to help them relax and reflect—so why shouldn’t we introverts do the same?

Why had it taken me so long to believe that even when these things don’t go perfectly, we can still survive?

But once you have these friends, you get to keep them. Even if they move to, say, Paris or Portland, they’re still yours.

Finding my voice and challenging myself to do intimidating things made me feel more confident. This is priceless in a world that can be scary, maddening, and unfair. When there are fewer things we are scared of and fewer things that can control us, this can only be a good thing.

to quote Carl Jung, “There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert—such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.”