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

by Jessica Pan

Everyone in London is so busy and tired from work, family, dating, and sending/receiving dick pics. I’m beginning to feel nostalgic for small-town Texas. With literally nothing else going on, within ten minutes you can get twenty people to meet you in a parking lot to light a can of body spray on fire.

What’s interesting to me is why do so many other people cower at the idea of doing improv or watching it? “My worst nightmare,” my extroverted friend had told me. Live, made-up theater: this is really people’s worst nightmare? This is what is keeping people up at night?

everyone says they hate the idea of participating in improv because you have to make it up as you go, you can’t plan ahead, you can freeze

But I think people really can’t stand it for another reason. And it’s this:

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.

Most people who go through emotional upheaval and survive end up saying things like, “But now I can do anything!”

I was still being a neurotic shit about this?

I’m learning this is how life works: we nearly die, and ten minutes later we’re throwing tantrums about getting a speeding ticket on our way back from the hospital.

I’d read somewhere that you can gain perspective by imagining yourself talking to yourself on your own deathbed.

For me, Deathbed Jess always looks suspiciously like my Chinese grandmother, and when I lean closer to her as she beckons me, she always whispers, “Go . . . to . . . medical school.”

I had eluded la-la land. Or la-la land had eluded me. Maybe you can’t find it when you are looking for it. Maybe that is a key feature of the place. I had tried to book a ticket there, and that’s the only surefire way never to arrive.

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.