I often pass myself off as more put-together than I really am, but most nights I sit down after a long social gathering and I beat myself up for all the dumb cheesy things I said, and things I wish I had said differently or didn’t say at all, and how off-balance and weird and twitchy I must look, and how I’m not really making progress on becoming this whole acceptable well-adjusted cool approachable guy that everyone else seems to be already without even trying. I feel like I’ve failed something, or lost at life somehow. I sometimes think everyone else has this secret ingredient to being blended in so smoothly to the inner-circle, like there’s this key or password that no one has told me about, and maybe one day I’ll achieve that code and I can go home in peace without this stomach full of remorseful anxiety over my lack of tact and style, and it’ll be as easy as those wrinkle-free people in fast-talking movies.

But it’s like, no one really keeps score of these things. And everyone actually feels this way about themselves, no matter what they do to compensate or hide it. All of us go home from a night out feeling a hundred pounds heavier and consciously aware of our weirdness. And probably if we were all honest about that, we would be a lot more comfortable inside the tightness of our own skin, because then the script is exposed and the act is dropped and the show is over. If we could all just laugh at ourselves a little bit, then maybe we could really get to know each other for all that messy crusty craziness inside, and actually even like each other, because I’m just as strange as you are, and we could meet there in the stripped down rawness of our guts where we’ve let ourselves out to play. It would probably be more fun that way.

— J