Merry Existential Dread

Years ago, I read a book by Ellen Degeneres, called My Point and I do have one. A collection of short funny essays one of which was called “Letter a friend”. The letter is an apology for a series of incidents at a party that started with her mistakenly getting two underage relatives drunk and ended up with her in the bathroom shaving the dog after an unfortunate gum mishap.

I love this story so much. Mostly because I have never felt so seen. The whole thing steamed from a bit of social anxiety and made up for that by, let’s face it acting a little bit weird. For some reason, I can deal with international artists and managers and be perfectly professional and cope with an actual crisis like a champion but put me in a social situation with even the nicest people and I get wildly uncomfortable. So, you can imagine the existential dread that comes with the words “Office Christmas Party”.

Knowing this, I thought it best to prepare myself. One of my best friends knows this about me and can spot me going into compensation mode and will always dive in and save the day or at an absolute minimum make me feel like it wasn’t as bad as I’m sure it was. Together we have scared perfectly lovely English tourists away from their poolside lounge chairs but that is a whole story that we don’t have time for here. The week of the party came and my friend who already has more on than most normal humans, had a particularly big week and couldn’t make it to the party. It will be totally fine I thought.

Some people cope with feeling a bit anxious by being well-prepared. For example, they might have picked their outfit well in advance and not left getting their nails done till an hour before they had to leave but not me. I emptied my extensive wardrobe after lunch on the day of the party. Now it was a theme party. The dress that I picked didn’t fit the theme at all but it was the only one that didn’t make me look in the mirror and cry so that’s what we were going with. It’s important to the story to say, like many of my clothes, I got it ages ago but had never worn it before. Thankfully when I arrived at the servo to get petrol I realised that I still had the tag on the dress which I quickly ripped off. I thought to myself, thank god I spotted it, that would have been embarrassing.

That seemed to be the last normal moment I had that evening. I don’t know if it was a result of me hurriedly pulling off the tag or just that I hadn’t worn the dress previously and hadn’t done up the clasp on the back correctly but as I was having a pleasant and perfectly normal chat with the cashier at the service station, I leaned down to get a chocolate and the whole top of my dress came away from my body. He, bless him, said something to try and make me feel less awkward and I replied in a way that made it infinitely more awkward. Classic.

I got in the car so thankful that hadn’t happened at the actual party. I pulled myself together. Picked up two of my workmates and headed off to the event glad to put that moment of awkwardness behind me. Of course true to form when I arrived at the party as soon as there was a momentary pause in the conversation, I told that story word for word to the head of HR. Thankfully she is lovely.

So as I paired the next morning’s coffee with a minor completely self-induced panic and wondered how to explain the whole incident in my resignation letter, my friend called and asked me to lunch. I related the whole story and she laughed so hard I thought she was going to fall off her chair. Oddly enough, that was just what I needed. Have fun at your own awkward social event and take solace in that it wasn’t this bad.