Book Review: Jessica Pan's "Sorry I'm Late. I Didn't Want to Come"

I've known for years that there exists a kind of "war between the 'verts" as I call it and it is the basis of books and movies alike. Spend any time on Facebook and you'll find memes about introverts hiding under piles of blankets or extroverts socializing with all the force of a fire hose. Googling the terms comes up with a Wikihow article on "10 Ways to Handle An Introvert." Conversely, their counterparts are to be emulated and Science of People writes about an article on harnessing extroverts. As an introvert myself, I have sometimes had to keep my big mouth shut on a regular basis when told that my kind are unfriendly, uncooperative, and overly sensitive.

I picked up Jessica Pan's Sorry I'm Late. I Didn't Want to Come exclusively for its subtitle: "One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes." Even better, Pan is a shy introvert or, to use her parlance, a "shintrovert." She talks not only about her inclinations towards avoiding unnecessary contact, but also how her fellow commuters, coworkers, or friends isolate themselves through everyday habits. Rather than treating introverts as a strange new tribe who don't speak the language of the common man, readers see how they walk among us like everyone else,

Pan decides to challenge herself to learn lessons from experiments in extroversion and she recruits various and varied mentors to craft these experiments. It begins with someone instructing her to approach strangers on the London Underground and ask a stupid question. ("Does England have a queen and if so, what is her name?") She does so and observes the ways in which leaving herself open to the judgment of strangers has changed a cause of anxiety for her.

She decides to speak in public by doing stand-up and this is an ambitious step for anyone, introvert or not. It comes much earlier in the year than she had hoped and she draws the reader into her fervent preparations. In addition to it being a great story of her overcoming a common phobia, we see that she associates with other brilliant minds who are surprisingly ill at ease,

The chapters can be self-contained but are all thought-provoking. A favorite was of her attending a German wedding and putting into practice her new social habits with less effort than she might have exerted at the beginning.

Any person wanting an utterly relatable memoir of life slightly adapted for the better should turn to this book for your next good read.