INTRODUCTION
There are two types of people in this world: those who watch Glastonbury on TV as though it’s a horror movie, peering over the top of the blanket as they bear witness to the muddy hell-hole. They sigh from relief at the sheer joy of missing out, because they are so happy to be on their sofas and not there, surrounded by thousands of swaying, loud, drunk people with full bladders and greasy hair.
And then there are those who choose to go to Glastonbury. I am not one of those people.
My friends at university threw me a surprise party in my bedroom for my twenty-second birthday. As soon as everyone jumped out of the dark, I burst into tears. People at the party thought I was touched. Actually, I was horrified. For the fi rst time in months, the tears weren’t because I was in unrequited love with my Spanish language tutor. Good friends, family and some vague acquaintances were sitting on my bed – which was incidentally the very place I usually went to escape from those good friends, family and vague acquaintances.
I had nowhere to hide. They were here for a party. How long until they left?
Eventually, I just turned on all the lights and waited for everyone to take the hint.
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If you’re like me, then you, too, know what it feels like to dread your own birthday parties. You fear giving speeches, team bonding exercises and every single New Year’s Eve.
I feel this way because I’m an introvert. Actually, I’m a shy introvert (more on this later), and any shy introvert worth their salt has invariably done the following: thrown a ringing phone across the room, faked being sick, walked into a networking event and immediately backed out, and pretended not to speak English when approached in a bar. That last one is advanced level, but the most eff ective method of all. The rest are necessary survival skills. We are also gifted at avoiding eye contact to deter people from saying hello with a technique I like to call ‘dead robot eyes’.
I would say 90 per cent of my acquaintances don’t even know that I’m an introvert because I take such pains to hide it. After-work drinks? Sorry, I’m very busy. Lunch at the pub? Can’t, I have plans (eating ramen alone in blissful solitude). Co-workers just think that inside the office I’m distracted, and that outside the office I have both a full social calendar and debilitating face blindness.
Now that I’m older and wiser, on the morning of every birthday I gently wake up my husband Sam and whisper in his ear, ‘If you throw me a party, I will murder you.’ He always nods obligingly, half-asleep. Except he doesn’t really get it, because he’s a different breed altogether – a quiet person who likes going to a busy pub and hanging out at festivals. But he’s grown used to most of our nights out ending with my hissing, ‘Get my coat and meet me by the lifts!’
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while I sprint towards the back exit to escape an approaching tipsy hen party that has just arrived at the bar.
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. But that’s easy. Dogs don’t require small talk, they don’t judge you, and they don’t hum near your desk while you’re trying to work. They don’t ask when you’re going to have kids. Or cough on you. But to Sam, dogs have wild eyes, might put their dirty paws all over you and are ready to strike at any moment, which is exactly how I feel about humans.
I assumed that life as a shy introvert would go on this way for me forever. But then, something unusual happened: I found myself roasting in a sauna, clutching a copy of Men’s Health, wearing a black tracksuit and weeping as I yelled profanities at a spa employee.
And something had to change.
That’s the short version.
Some people are great at talking to strangers, building new relationships and making friends at parties. I’m really good at other things, like loitering palely in dark doorways. Disappearing into sofa corners. Leaving early. Feigning sleep on public transport.
Nearly a third of the population (at least, depending on which study you consult) identifies as introvert, so it’s likely that this could describe you, too. If we’d, say, met at a party that neither of us had flaked on, we could bond over this while hiding in the kitchen near the cheeseboard.
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There are a lot of heated debates about what defi nes an introvert or an extrovert. The main accepted defi nition is that introverts get their energy from being alone, whereas extroverts get their energy from being around other people. But psychologists often discuss two other related parameters: shy versus outgoing. I always assumed that all introverts were shy, but apparently some introverts can be ultra-confident in groups, or capable of smoothly delivering presentations. What makes them introverts is that they just can’t take stimulation and large crowds for extended periods of time.*
But I am shy: I’m afraid of making contact with strangers, being the centre of attention, but I also need time to recharge after being around a lot of people and loathe large crowds. I am, as one article defi ned it, a ‘socially awkward introvert’. A shy introvert or shintrovert, as I shall henceforth refer to myself (which is also a pervert who is very into lower legs).
I don’t know if shintroverts are born or made, but for me, my tendencies began to show very early on. I grew up in a small town in Texas where I skipped birthday parties, faked illnesses to avoid school presentations and spent many nights journaling about a parallel universe where interacting with multiple people and occasionally being the centre of attention wasn’t my worst nightmare.
As a kid, I didn’t understand why I felt so differently about life from my extroverted immediate family. My father is Chinese and my mother is Jewish–American and they both love two things deeply: Chinese food and chatting to new
* For more on this, please see A Note on Introversion on p. 329.
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people. Meanwhile, my two older brothers were always inviting big groups of their friends over to our house, where they’d linger for hours. I originally thought they were all just better at pretending to like the things I hated. Later, I was confounded: why did they love meeting big groups of new people and socializing for hours and throwing big birthday parties when I didn’t? I thought that there was something deeply wrong with me.
Still, growing up in a small town, I dreamt of a bigger life full of new experiences. But it wasn’t a life I could envisage for myself there. I wanted an entirely clean slate. A new place where I could reinvent myself, free from anyone who knew me. I tried Beijing, then Australia, and eventually London, where I live now.
But one thing remained constant during these travels: no matter how far-flung the lands, I remained essentially the same. A shintrovert. Dumplings, shrimp on the barbie, scones and cream. Shintrovert eating in the corner. The Forbidden City, Sydney Opera House, Tower of London. Shintrovert hovering in doorways. I’d thought that maybe foreign lands would shake the introversion out of me but, like my eczema, it thrived in all climates.
And then came the ‘Quiet Revolution’, sparked by Susan Cain’s bestselling book in 2012. Within its pages, I read that one out of every two or three people is an introvert. That there was nothing wrong with us. That introverts, to paraphrase, concentrate well, relish solitude, dislike small talk, love one-on-one conversations, avoid public speaking. Shy, sensitive homebody, you say? Damn right I am!
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I was enormously relieved to read these things and decided to embrace this side of myself. This is who I was. Rather than beating myself up for the person I wasn’t, I chose to celebrate the person I was. After all, my disposition is one reason I became a writer, and it meant that I had very close relationships with my small group of friends during this time.
Then in the space of a year, it all went wrong. I became unemployed and my closest friends moved away. My career had stagnated, I was lonely, I lost the desire to run; I had no idea what to do next in my life. In truth, I wanted to pull my old trick and hop on a plane and begin a new life, perhaps this time as someone named Francesca de Lussy. But it was abundantly clear that I didn’t have the personality, confidence or hat collection to pull this off.
I had a lot of time to sit around and ponder: what did I really want from life? Really, I wanted a job, some new friends who I felt truly connected to and more confidence. Was that so much to ask? Surely not. So what were other people out there with jobs and close friends and rich, fulfi lling 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.
I once overheard my former colleague Willow talking about her trip to New York. Willow had stopped to pet a woman’s dog in Prospect Park: she ended up spending the day with the woman, going to a jazz club with her until 4 a.m. and later landing her dream job through one of her new friend’s connections. She’d met her boyfriend in a queue for
the toilet at a festival. She discovered she had hypoglycaemia by talking to a doctor at a party. Her entire life has been shaped by these random encounters. All because she chooses to talk and listen to people she has just met, rather than run away from them at full-speed muttering, ‘I don’t speak English!’
What might happen if I flung open the doors of my life? Would it change for the better?
Although I had accepted who I was, at this juncture in my life it was not making me happy. I had taken my introvert status as a licence to wall myself off from others.
Although I savoured my introvert world, part of me wondered what I might be missing out on. When you defi ne something or someone, you inevitably limit it. Or her. The way I saw myself became a self-fulfi lling prophecy: ‘Speeches? I don’t give speeches’ or, ‘Parties? I don’t throw parties.’ I accepted who I was but I was also too scared to challenge my fears, go out and have the experiences that I craved.
During my bachelor’s degree in psychology, I took a neuroscience course, partly because I was so interested in the interplay between nature and nurture. But now that I was an adult, how much could I change as a result of new experiences?
The famous Shakespeare quote is, ‘To thine own self be true’. Yes. But I didn’t want to be tethered to my insecurities and anxieties for eternity. I didn’t want to stay stunted. We’re humans. We have the capacity for growth and change.
And once I realized that, a small voice inside me said, ‘Screw this bullshit!’ I’d been using the introvert label as an excuse to hide from the world.
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Up until that point, I’d been clinging to my shintrovert status, and it had made it almost impossible for me to have those things I secretly yearned for – a career I cared about, new meaningful relationships, fi lled-with-laughter friendships and experiences that I hadn’t planned out in excruciating detail.
I was an introvert in a hole, not in a hole because I was an introvert. There are plenty of happy introverts, who are living their best lives, but I wanted to emerge from that hole – I believed a larger life than the one I currently had would ultimately make me happier.
But to do that? Something had to change.
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?
Would it offer up a world of life-changing experiences?
Or would she wind up in the woods, eating weeds and only communing with wolves until she died of malnutrition, alone but kind of happy that she never had to engage in small talk about Bitcoin ever again?
Here goes nothing.
I met my husband, an Englishman, in Beijing, where we fell in love the most probable way two shy people can: at work, fl irting on instant messenger, two desks apart, never making eye contact. Sam and I both worked at the same magazine and it was the fi rst time I’d ever felt completely and totally at ease with someone who I was also attracted to. After eventually speaking to each other in person, we moved to Australia together and then eventually got married and moved to a tiny flat in Islington, north London.
I’d spent nearly three years getting used to Beijing, a city where the locals always tell you what they think about you. The local teahouse owner? He thought I was too fat. My landlady? She thought I was too thin. My fruitseller? He thought I did not drink enough hot water. Actually, they all thought that.
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Locals would also ask how much money I made as a magazine editor (not very much), or why I wore fl imsy fl ip-flops in a big dirty city (I was young and stupid), or why I was looking so haggard (have you seen Beijing’s pollution records lately?). But at least I always knew where I stood.
After that, I assumed it would be a breeze to assimilate in England, a country without a language barrier. Plus, I had a few old friends there, and I’d be with Sam. After the chaos of my three years in China, I was in awe of London: all the green space! The orderly queues! The toilets with toilet seats! I stared at all the types of chocolate bars and crisps in a big Sainsbury’s and felt pure euphoria. I wanted to walk around the city with open arms. I wanted London to love me the way that I loved it.
London did not love me.
Instead, London (well, a Londoner) stole my wallet and my visa and thus my right to work in the UK. If London was trying to punish me, it was doing it in a really passiveaggressive way, because not having my visa also meant that I couldn’t leave the country. It had imprisoned me but it would not let me work.
And that was just the beginning. A woman would thank me on the train for moving my bag and I was almost certain that what she was really saying was ‘Too fucking right.’ A man would squeeze by me on the escalator, and the pitch of his ‘May I . . . ?’ would nearly reduce me to tears. People would ask me if I wanted to do something and I had no idea if it was an order, a helpful suggestion or sarcasm.
And friends? I’d struggle to make new friends in the easiest of places, never mind in London. People prefer to keep to themselves, especially in public. This was wonderful at fi rst. No one ever approached me to chat. I was left alone. I once tripped and fell in a crowded street in broad daylight. I began the ‘I’m fi ne, I’m fi ne, honestly’ protest. But no one had stopped. I lay on the ground, impressed. These people were better introverts than I was!
Because I couldn’t work without my UK visa, I spent my days partaking of Britain’s best cultural invention – TV marathons of Come Dine With Me, where I was excited to learn that most British dinner parties end with a poached pear and everyone secretly bad-mouthing the host while perched on the edge of her bed.
After a few months, I got my visa back and did the mature thing and got a job at a marketing agency writing blog posts for a shoe brand. My specialty was writing guides for what shoes to wear in what weather – the kind of decision most people have mastered by age seven.
Before I knew it, Sam and I had spent a few years in London. And during that time, all the friends I did have in London left. You may think that’s an exaggeration. It is not. Rachel, my best friend from university, moved to Paris. Ellie, a good friend from China, moved back to Beijing. English colleagues I bonded with scattered to the countryside or the suburbs. London became an increasingly lonely place. The streets had become familiar, but they were, as ever, fi lled with strangers. I buried myself at work, under blog posts and client meetings and shoes.
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Then, one fateful night, I attended an awards ceremony at work. The bosses introduced the award for the person who stayed the latest; the person who spent their weekends at the office. The person who had ‘sold their soul for the job’, they explained. It was dubbed the Midnight Oil Award. They opened the envelope and called out my name. As I made my way towards the makeshift stage, various male colleagues slapped me on the back and congratulated me for having no life. I gritted my teeth, forced a smile and accepted the award. It was engraved with my name. Later, as I carried it home, it felt like a cursed artefact, like Frodo’s ring, except less allpowerful and shiny and more a weight, a symbol of my failure. Failure, because I was so not interested in my job or what I was doing with my life. Failure to be the sort of person I admired, someone who tried new things and took chances and who avoided the easy option.
Also like Frodo’s ring, the trophy was impossible to destroy by dumping it in the bin or a fi re. I’d seen the fi lm trailers – I assumed it would just fi nd me again. I placed it in the least dignified place I could think of. ‘Fuck you,’ I whispered softly to the trophy as I closed it in a cabinet, leaving it to rot next to half a dozen bags-for-life and a bottle of drain cleaner. Back at work the next day, I learned that a colleague named Dave had won the Midnight Oil Award the previous year. Here’s the thing about Dave: he always looked miserable. He ate the same sandwich every single day. At the office Christmas party, both of us sitting in a corner, he’d drunkenly confessed to me that he’d do anything to leave, if he only knew how.
I studied Dave. And then I did something really stupid that felt really, really good. I quit my job.
With no back-up position, I began to call myself a freelancer. In my case, ‘freelancer’ was a euphemism for wandering around the flat in my pyjamas and becoming overly excited when I spotted cats in the garden. I was still writing blog posts about shoes, but now I was doing it for less money while sitting on our sunken blue sofa. As I watched people going by on their morning commutes, it struck me that I lived in a city of nine million people and only spoke to two every day: Sam and a barista.
The barista wasn’t a chatty guy. And Sam had his own life outside the four walls of our home: a job he liked, colleagues he bonded with, an evening running club and best friends that he met up with to watch football. He had a separate world and I only had him. Every morning when he left for work, I’d slide my head under the covers, not wanting to face another grey day completely alone. No one was expecting me anywhere. My brother texted me: ‘I haven’t heard from you in a while – I have no idea what’s going on with you. Are you happy?’
This last question shattered me. I couldn’t tell my family, who were so far away, that I was in a deep hole and I didn’t know how to get out. I couldn’t even admit it to Sam. Or myself.
On a cold wintry day, I woke up at 11 a.m. after spending the previous night googling ‘black holes’, ‘do I have attention deficit disorder’ and ‘were Mick Jagger and David Bowie friends?’ until the small hours. I had also emailed Rachel,
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who now lived across the Channel, to confess that I definitely probably might have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder because I seemed to fl it from one task to another, yet things never seemed to get done. I was messy, I was forgetful, I had trouble concentrating.
Rachel wrote back saying, ‘I don’t know . . . everything you’ve said sounds a lot more like depression to me. Inability to concentrate is actually one of the symptoms of depression. Maybe you should talk to someone . . .’
What did she mean, everything I’d said ? I glanced back at my previous email. My sign-off was, ‘I look forward to nothing.’
I quickly closed my computer.
When we’re young, we think our lives will be creative and vibrant and full. But little by little, I was backing myself into a corner and my only way forward increasingly felt like a long, dark hallway with all the doors slammed shut. Except, of course, in the age of unfettered social media access, they were actually glass doors and I could peer inside at every one of my glamorous contemporaries living their best photogenic lives with fifteen to twenty of their closest friends.
I had essentially created a fortress around myself, stacked high with books and a sign on the wall that said, ‘I DON’T NEED YOU ANYWAY!’
But I did. Rachel could see it. I needed to see it, too. The time had come to break free of my increasingly uncomfortable comfort zone. I knew that I wasn’t depressed because of being an introvert. I was an introvert who happened to be depressed. I hated who I had become. I wanted to start over.
So I joined a gym.
That may not sound like a solution to the problem I actually had, and before you start thinking that this is a story about how losing weight changed my life, cured my depression and made me a millionaire, I should probably warn you that it’s not. It’s a story about my fi rst, tentative steps into the outside world. To slowly rejoin society. To get out of the house. The fi rst steps I would take as a shintrovert trying not to shintrovert any more. But it’s also a story about something far more important: subterfuge. And some light planking.
I was lured in because the gym offered free membership if you attended three fitness classes a week and won their inhouse fitness and weight-loss challenge. Looking around, I saw that the women in this gym were super fit. They had sleek ponytails. They seemed satisfied. Women who had probably fulfi lled their own parents’ dreams by becoming doctor-lawyer-bankers, not women whose arses had melded to fit the shape of their sofa cushions as they wrote blog posts about different ways to lace your boots. Not women who celebrated clean hair days.
If I completed and won the gym challenge, I’d have free membership and immediately join a group of people who seemed to have their lives together. Maybe even make a friend or two. I’d also be fitter and possibly happier (endorphins, better at lifting furniture, fancy shampoo in the changing rooms, etc.).
I was confident about winning the competition, because it’s easy to win things like this when you have nothing else going on in your life. And I was right. Week by week, the
sorry i’m late, i didn’t want to come competition pool shrunk as people dropped out, failing to attend the requisite three classes.
And by the fi nal week, it came down to two possible winners. Me and a woman named Portia.
Regrettably, I developed a deep resentment of Portia. I had pinned my entire future on this stupid contest and now I had to beat her. I began to ponder the cold, hard facts: the fi nal weigh-in was in one week. The contest was based only on percentage of body weight lost. What determines how much we weigh, when you get right down to it? Fat, muscle, bone. And water.
Here is another, totally normal fact that I came across during one of my nocturnal googling sprees: wrestlers and boxers regularly drop 10–15 pounds of water in a few days to ‘make weight’ in their categories.
I promptly tumbled down a black hole of wrestling and boxing blogs, written exclusively by and for guys named Brandon. These blogs provided detailed how-tos on dropping water-weight fast. There were simple tricks, like drinking black coffee (a diuretic), and slightly more extreme things, like taking caffeine pills and mainlining dandelion tea. But I could drink coffee, right? Normal people do that. I drank coffee every day already.
Since the very fi rst time I’d flopped on to the sofa in despair about Portia, Sam had been patient with me and my mission. This lasted right up to the day before the fi nal weigh-in, when I was explaining how showering the day of the competition was a rookie mistake because the body absorbs water through the skin. That could lead to gaining a
kilo. That shower could be the difference between victory and failure.
‘You signed up for this contest to get healthy and happy and now all you’re talking about is vanquishing someone named Portia, the benefits of caffeine pills and why you’re not going to shower any more.’
‘I’m just not going to shower tomorrow !’ I shouted back. ‘And I didn’t end up buying caffeine pills. That would be lunacy.’
I went back to my wrestling blogs, where I discovered the most universally endorsed strategy: the sauna.
But this wasn’t to be some toxin-flushing, Scandinavian, feel-good spa trip. The sauna served one purpose: to roast that water out of your body. To maximize the sweat, the Brandons advised staying fully clothed.
I like saunas. I could go to the sauna. Couldn’t a woman just go to the sauna without it being a crime? Couldn’t a woman drink black coffee and not shower and go to the sauna? Of course! I told myself. Of course she could. A woman could easily do all of these things on a totally normal day.
Clearly, Sam had been right. I’d forgotten about why I’d joined, too consumed with beating Portia. I mean, part of me knew it was shady as hell to do these things. I didn’t like who I was becoming – but I’d felt like a loser for more than a year and was desperate for a win. I was reaching for rock bottom.
The day of the fi nal weigh-in, I stepped into the sauna. I took a seat on the hot wooden planks, fully dressed in a black long-sleeve T-shirt, black sweat pants and woolly socks. The
sorry i’m late, i didn’t want to come dry heat engulfed my body. Outfitted like a ninja who is really into self-care, I closed my eyes and leaned back.
I thought about the wrestling blogs that had led me here. Just like me, my amateur wrestler heroes knew how to sacrifice to get what they wanted. I thought about how they would completely understand that sitting in a sauna and sweating for a few minutes was worth it if it meant getting your life back on track and saving money on your gym membership.
It was getting pretty unbearable inside the sauna, but I had already done the hard part – choosing to be a duplicitous motherfucker. All I had to do now was endure fifteen minutes of heat. Just close my eyes and wait it out. I could do this. I could be stoic in this heat, like a desert beetle.
It was hard to be too Zen, though, because the receptionist was not living up to my high hopes. She kept coming to check on me, deeply suspicious of my behaviour. She’d fl ing open the sauna door, letting out all my hot air, and I kept jumping up and slamming it shut again, indicating with my hands that we could talk to each other through the thin glass pane. We repeated this routine a few times – her opening the door, me slamming it shut in her face to keep the heat in.
‘Why are you wearing clothes? That’s crazy! You should take off your clothes!’ she shouted at me through the glass. By this point, my clothes were drenched in sweat.
‘No. This is what I want!’ I said to her, offering no further explanation. I crossed my arms. The third time, I fi nally shouted, ‘Jesus Christ! Please just go away!’ Dumbfounded, she left me in peace.
I settled down again. My mouth was parched. I couldn’t drink water, because that would defeat the purpose of this visit, but I was already so thirsty. I checked the clock every thirty seconds. Five minutes passed; it felt like an hour. I reached for the magazines in the corner to distract myself, only to fi nd that every single one was about men’s fitness.
I fl ipped lethargically through the pages of one and landed on a summer feature about how to stay safe during outdoor hikes. I absent-mindedly skimmed a fact box about heat stroke: ‘Brought on by over-sweating, dehydration and overheating, heat stroke can cause brain damage and/or death.’ Uh, what was that?
My mouth went even drier than it already was. I hadn’t had any water that day. I was sweating profusely inside a very hot sauna. I had created the perfect conditions for heat stroke. On purpose. Was I going to give myself heat stroke? Was I having a heat stroke right now? What is heat stroke?
I panicked. I was going to die in this sauna. I instantly saw my obituary: ‘She gave herself heat stroke while trying to win free gym membership in north London.’ They would tell my parents that I had died dressed like an assassin, reading a guide to 8-minute abs.
I was still slow-cooking, but something deep inside me went cold. I had completely lost it. I wasn’t losing my marbles; my marbles were long gone.
I opened the sauna door.
Later, at a cafe drinking water, I stared listlessly into space. I drank more water. I went home and lay on my sofa, because that’s all I had the energy to do.
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What had happened to me? Jobless, friendless and now sanity-less.*
The fact that my Come-to-Jesus, rock bottom moment was in a sauna reading Men’s Health isn’t really something I’m proud of. I had completely lost perspective. I no longer knew where my natural introversion ended and my depression and loneliness began. After all, I had once been a happy introvert, but I had managed to wedge myself into a hole, through fear, insecurity and stagnation.
That day, I took stock of the facts: my life was small, and I wanted to see if I enjoyed it being bigger. And bigger, I knew deep down, meant opening my world up, specifically to other people. Lots of them. I had read so many articles about how hard it is to make friends in your thirties, and I knew it would probably be even worse for people like me. My modus operandi in friendship was either a) you’re my best friend and I tell you all of my intimate secrets, or b) you’re a stranger, dangerous and unknown, ready to strike at any moment.
I looked out of the cafe 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.
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 give
* Yes, of course I won the weight-loss challenge. Portia was not deranged enough to go to those lengths. Only me and the Brandons of the world are.
speeches. I would travel alone and make new friends on the road, I would say yes to social invitations, I would go along to parties, and I would not be the fi rst to leave.
And if I survived all of that, I would attempt the Everest of shy person trials: I would perform stand-up. Instead of a ‘choose your own adventure’ journey, this is a choose your own nightmare.
Finally, to fully atone for turning those lights on early at my twenty-second birthday party surprise, I’d throw a dinner party and invite some of the people I met along the way and not kick them all out after an hour. I would entertain, I would small talk, I would celebrate.
It would be like jogging: very sweaty and uncomfortable, with moments of heart-pounding agony, but possibly good for me in the long term.
In other words, I would extrovert. I gave myself a year.
The man sitting next to me is good-looking. Tall, dark and handsome. Kind, blue eyes. Plaid shirt. Jeans, rolled up.
We glance sideways towards each other and lock eyes. I take a deep breath.
‘I live far away from my parents, and they think I’m happier than I am, and I can’t bear for them to know that sometimes I literally don’t know what I’m doing with my life,’ I say to him.
He blinks. And then says, ‘I haven’t seen my family in ten months, and I just realized that I don’t miss them and I’m afraid that makes me a bad person.’
My turn again.
‘I fear I’ll never make enough money,’ I say. ‘No matter what, it seems like after I pay my tax bill, I have no money left over. Ever. I fear I’ll always struggle with this.’
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Your turn, buddy.
‘I feel inferior to my wife because she earns considerably more money than I do,’ he says.
He was really going for it.
‘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 that I can tell anything to and it makes me sad,’ I say, my voice slightly shaking.
‘I fi nd it very difficult to make new, genuine friends. That’s why I’ve come tonight. I told my wife I had a work thing –she doesn’t know I’m here.’
A bell rings.
Chris and I both signed up for the same workshop. The advertisement promised the class would teach us how to make better connections with other people. Neither of us knew this meant confessing humiliating, personal secrets to strangers. They didn’t mention that in the brochure.
‘If what you’re saying makes you feel like a loser, you’re doing it right!’ shouts our group leader Mark encouragingly.
Chris and I nod at each other in agreement, as we sink lower into our seats.
Nailed it.
A defi ning feature of extroverts is that they like being around other people. And presumably, interacting with them. Talking to them, even. It’s a lot to take in.
If, like me, you only know a handful of people, then it stands to reason that most of these ‘other people’ you interact with will be strangers. And so here’s the fi rst massive
stumbling block in my year of extroverting: I am afraid of talking to strangers.
In London, I learned quickly that if you talk to a stranger in public, they look at you like you’ve slapped them in the face: shocked and aggrieved. Betrayed as well, because you have broken the social contract that we all agreed to follow in public: no one exists but you. More than one British person has told me that only Americans and unhinged people talk to strangers. Or, given the reputation of northerners, the whole of Yorkshire. But then, of course, there is still the excruciating hell of everyone eavesdropping on your awkward conversation.
A few years ago, I found a box of badges at my local cafe in London. I picked one up. It read: ‘I Talk to Strangers’. I chucked it back immediately, afraid someone had seen me holding it. It might as well have said: ‘I Eat Spiders’.
For me, talking to strangers is something you do as a last resort: lost in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, dead phone, broken leg, typhoon – and really, only if these things happen all at once.
I know it’s not only me who feels this way. During rush hour in cities, we all stand squashed on public transport, essentially spooning, in total silence. Sure, I’ll shove my face into your armpit, but talk to you? Never.
I went back for one of those ‘I Talk to Strangers’ badges, though. It occurred to me that ‘chatty tourist’ would be a great Halloween costume with which to frighten Londoners.
Anyway, I forgot about the badge for years, until I read an article that surprised me: apparently, when people are forced to talk to strangers, it makes them happier.
sorry i’m late, i didn’t want to come
Around that time, on a flight from New York to London, I found myself sitting in a three-person row with two men. I immediately went into default shut-off mode: I put on my headphones and stared straight ahead. Don’t talk to me, I’m not here. And it seemed to work, because they turned to each other instead. Pretty soon, they were exchanging barbecue recipes, then pouring out their souls and showing each other family pictures on their phones. By the time we touched down at Heathrow, one had invited the other to his birthday party that Friday.
This was astonishing to me. If that’s what had come of a six-hour fl ight, how much was I missing by ignoring the dozens, if not hundreds, of strangers I saw every day? Was I missing out on life-changing recipes, birthday parties and sympathetic shoulders to cry on?
Extroverts like spending time with other people, so my fi rst step is to try and get comfortable talking to those other people. The mere idea makes my palms start itching.
And what if I was very bad at it?
Would I be ostracized from English society for ever and banished to an island full of the unhinged and the chatty: Americans, those people outside Oxford Street station trying to save your soul, car salesmen, seven-year-old children and men in bars with lethally high confidence levels?
Because that seems unfair: I really don’t want to go there, either.
On day one, I decide it’s best to start as I mean to go on: faceplanting straight into my fi rst potentially life-ruining experiment.
