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

by Jessica Pan

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. They were actually out there, living in the world instead of staring out at it.

Question: What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs?

The reality of it was this: I felt that my life was passing me by.

I knew what I had to do. I would talk to new people—not small talk but real “And how did your father feel about that?” chats. I would make new friends. I would give speeches. I would travel alone and make friends on the road, I would say yes to social invitations, I would go along to parties, and I would not be the first to leave.

As Nick coaches me through meaningful conversation topics—what do you like about your job, tell me about your family, where’s the most interesting place you’ve been to this year—I realize that I’m a grown woman having a lesson on how to have a conversation. I also realize that I did not know how to have a conversation with new people.

“A few years ago, I was driving through a remote part of Ethiopia, and I kept passing all these mothers and children outside of their mud huts. Everybody I passed stared at me like I was dead: totally blank facial expressions. It was the most uncomfortable I’d ever felt in my life. “But then it occurred to me, while I was sitting there: I was looking at them in exactly the same way they’re looking at me. So I started smiling and waving as I went by—and it was like I flipped a switch. As soon as I started smiling, waving, and looking friendly, they started waving from their windows, grinning at me, and running out of their houses to give me high fives. “That’s the truth of the world, Jessica,” he says, casually full-naming me to let me know something big is coming. “Nobody waves—but everybody waves back.”

keep circulating (I circulate these days) and near the end of the night end up in a conversation with the artist from the street, Roger, who invited me. He steers the conversation toward his paintings. “Art is the only thing that makes sense to me,” he says. “It’s light, texture, and . . .”

No. No no no. I do not want to talk about the virtues of art at this art show. I think: what do I really want to know about this gentle, soft-spoken man? “Roger, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” I ask. I can’t believe I’ve just asked that. I briefly wonder whether he’s going to laugh in my face. Instead, he thinks for a moment, contemplating with his glass of wine. “Well, I burned down the art department at my school when I was a teenager.” Bingo.

Talking to him on a cold, rainy night is much better than sitting in stony silence carefully avoiding eye contact.

We’re told that we can engineer conversations to be more emotional and interesting by understanding that we all have a “Surface Self” and a “Deep Self.” The Surface Self talks about the weather, facts, what we had

for dinner, our plans for the weekend. The Deep Self talks about what these things actually mean to us and how we feel about them.

Deep Self holds on to our fears, our hopes, our loves, our insecurities, our dreams. Surface Self is preoccupied with logistics, facts, details, admin. Deep Self is the wedding vows; Surface Self is the wedding planner. Deep Self likes to stare into your eyes talking about your secret desires, while ...

In another clip, a different man mentions the death of his mother, before he brushes it off and swiftly moves on to soccer. Then he’s abruptly interrupted by a woman who asks him how he feels about the death of his mother, given that it was so soon after her divorce from his father. How was he coping with both those things happening at once? The woman is kind in the video, but she also feels slightly invasive. Mark stops the video. “You might think, ‘Maybe he didn’t want to talk about his mother and it was rude of her to ask,’ but he’s the one who brought her up. He did want to talk about it, but he couldn’t find a way in,” he says. “People are usually very happy to answer personal questions if they feel the person asking them is genuine and kind.”

sharing our vulnerabilities and insecurities is the quickest way to make a real connection with someone. Most people want to boast about their lives, but this leaves people feeling jealous or resentful.

“It’s not that we want others to fail, but we need to know that our own sorrows have echoes in other people’s lives. That’s what connects us. Strength may be impressive, but it’s vulnerability that builds friendships,”

“We think to be interesting we have to be impressive—but sharing our failure connects us more than sharing our success.”

“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.”

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.”

And I know, deep down, that what scares you owns you. I didn’t want to be owned by my fear anymore.

When you believe something about yourself for so long but then finally challenge it, everything feels different.

Research has shown that it is our outer circle of acquaintances, also known as “weak ties,” that brings about the most change in our lives. A “strong tie” is our close friends and family, who are likely to have similar connections and knowledge as us. It is the weak ties, the people we are only loosely connected to, who are actually more influential on our lives. They bring new information, advice, and perspectives: new job prospects, commissions, fresh inspiration, or collaborators that we would otherwise have never discovered.

I make a few rules before each event. Go with an intention. Talk to three people, with Richard’s advice in mind, and aim to really bond or connect with one person. Psychologists also say that it takes time for shy people to warm up, so if you always leave after ten minutes, you’re never giving yourself the chance to actually succeed. Stay for at least an hour. Also, don’t arrive late. This is very hard to do for an event that you’re dragging yourself to, stopping at every distraction along the way, but when you show up in the middle of an event, the crowd feels impenetrable. Arriving five minutes early gives you a moment to ease your nerves and connect with people as they arrive.

But somehow, through getting out of my comfort zone, meeting people, and extroverting hard, I’ve grown to hate bailing on people. It stops relationships in their tracks. It prevents so many new beginnings from turning into something real.

Emma thinks it’s fine to say no to events but we should commit to the ones we’ve said yes to. “I hate flakiness, and I blame the Facebook ‘Maybe’ button,” she tells me. “It’s not OK to say maybe and see if something better comes up. I believe in saying a solid yes or no because it’s polite. Saying no is hard but ultimately makes you a better person. For example, I’ve been invited to lots of parties (which is so nice!), but I am saying no to lots of them because I simply don’t have time. It’s not rude; it’s being honest.”

Improv is one of those things that is so fun to be a part of but excruciating to observe if you aren’t involved. Like extreme PDA on the bus or conversations about astrology. Every Wednesday, for three hours, we were just making shit up. That’s all we were doing. As a team. Before my course, I never worried about the lack of play in my life. Now I don’t want to live in a world without it.

I realize that I did not recognize myself from who I was a few months ago. I’m a little unnerved but elated because now I know: things that seem impossible can suddenly become possible. A big part of this year was the desire to be brave enough to do something that felt so contradictory to the kind of person I thought I was.

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.

“So, rather than where you tell tourists to go, where would YOU go eat lunch right now?”

Dolly senses the urgency and fear in my voice and immediately transforms into my official guide. At a rapid pace, she begins firing off advice, as if I’ve just told her we need to diffuse a bomb and only she can talk me through it. “OK, a good playlist is really important. I’m amazed at dinner parties where there’s no music playing and the overhead lights are on. You need to have all the lamps on, lots of candles, and you need to have a great playlist of music people love,” Dolly says.

“The best thing you can do, my love, is do all of it in advance. Do a cold appetizer, so you can pre-prep it on plates. For your entrée, do something slow-cooked,” she says. “Do something in a tray or pot that you can leave. Don’t do elaborate Ottolenghi side dishes—no one wants that. People just want comfort food, like lasagna. Do NOT do a risotto.”

“Do a cheese board. Just get three cheeses; you don’t need any more—one hard, one blue, and one soft,” Dolly says. I will follow this advice exactly. “Dessert-wise—don’t do any fancy dessert. Just buy the dessert or get really nice ice cream so you don’t have to do anything on the day or be away from your guests.”

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.)

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.

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.

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.