partay, 11-11-2003
When I wrote this for my old online journaly thing (www.spiffariffic.com), I was 20 years old… and still a wallflower in social settings beyond just the handful of people I knew well. Yes, believe it or not, I was a wallflower. And I made a conscious choice to change into the socially fearless person you know today.
I’ve always been described as friendly, gregarious, ebullient… and while I am those things, they seem to disappear the minute I am thrown into a crowd of people I don’t know. I do just fine one on one, or even with a handful of people, but the minute I’m outnumbered by more than 3 or 4 people I start to freeze up. I lurk on the outside and study conversation, head flitting back and forth among the principal speakers, absorbing, analyzing, to figure out when to interject or what to say—worried people won’t like me, afraid I’ll make a fool of myself or be considered rude. I am almost painfully uncomfortable and end up having a pretty crappy (and exhausting) time. And I expect people don’t like me when this happens, ironically enough.
Fuck that shit.
* * *
So, what was I saying? Ah yes—fuck that shit. I have resolved recently that I am not going to waste my life and remain with a tiny handful of friends because I’m shy. No, sir, not me. I’m not going to live my life only to measure it as a long litany of regrets. So Saturday night I went to a post-Halloween party. By myself. A party thrown by someone I hardly knew and whom I suspected I might be annoying. If you’ve known me for very long you know this is just not the sort of thing I typically do, on pain of death, and never ever alone. So go me!
Said party was at the house of a guy (Brian—hi, Brian!) I met on the Baltimore Bloggers email list; he offered up some free G3 All-In-Ones, I pounced. Now, when I picked up the Macs we had a little chat, standing there near my car during a light, prickly drizzle of rain, for probably a good 15 minutes. I was my usual fairly charming self, because A) I felt instantly comfortable around him, and B) he was only one person, not a group. I kept thinking that I should invite him to hang out with me and David sometime… but in the end I lacked the guts.
I don’t want to live my life in a way that I often end sentences with “but in the end I lacked the guts.”
[The view from 2007: I’m so proud of me right now.]
* * *
So, it seemed that that was another dead end unless I resolved to actually be bold and invite him. Which I did, with the help of David Allen’s ineffable organization system, a few weeks later. But the whole process of me ending up at the party was a rather complex chain of events so I’m just gonna list ‘em as bullet points:
* Email Brian dinner invitation; feel pathetic and silly.
* No response. Feel more pathetic and silly.
* Get email from Baltimore Bloggers list about get-together; sign up, as it’s along those lines of meeting new people (even if the person I particularly wanted to contact wasn’t there).
* Go. Miss a turn and, through a really crazy chain of events, end up in Columbia. Get there almost 1.5 hours late.
* Stand awkwardly at hugely crowded table. Wave sheepishly. Only free seat is next to Brian. Nice one, Fate.
* Chat with Brian. Relay my getting-lost story several more times to various Bloggers (“You ended up where? How the hell?”), and work up the nerve to ask if he got my invitation.
* Be all happy, because he did reply (and thought it was a good idea) and I didn’t get it. Explain that I thought he may have thought I was either some freak or just really annoying.
* Swap phone numbers.
* Call a while later, the Monday before Halloween, but get no call back.
* Email. Get told they can’t come to our get-together but that I am invited to their party.
Now, I know this whole thing makes me sound, well, even more pathetic and silly, but at least for once I’m acting and being pathetic and silly rather than sitting and doing nothing and being really pathetic and silly (and lonely, too, and beating myself up over not acting).
But I went. I went by myself to the Blogger get-together at Mick O’Shea’s (even after being lost for over an hour, I was determined not to miss the rest). I went by myself to Brian and Ali’s party. And while I started out quite shy and feeling very, well, exposed as cheesy as that sounds, I made myself work at talking to people and in the end I had a great time.
Yay.
