Zoe Beaty is 26 and counting. Counting the days until payday (four) and the charges on her overdraft (£40). She's in her mid-twenties and in the midst of a phase where you're not sure if it's ok to eat chicken nuggets in bed at 2am on a Tuesday or if you should really be getting your shit together. This is her weekly column for everyone else who is also 20something and counting…
I get party anxiety for the following reasons: 1) What if no-one shows up. 2) What if only some people show up, then judge me since not many people showed up. 3) What if no one shows up. 4) WHAT IF NO ONE SHOWS UP?
It’s not my birthday for another month, but already the panic-pity-party is underway. I’m not exactly the life and soul - in fact I can be pretty socially anxious, which makes me say and do weird things. Once I told a girl I was half-French for no reason at all other than the fact that she was in an awful attempt at 'common ground'. I had to leave early shouting 'je suis désolé' in a terrible accent.
I used to be all about the spontaneous birthday night out. It worked perfectly as a teen, when we’d start off with pizza, go to the pub and end drinking straight rum in someone’s kitchen. The friends I celebrated with were also the ones I spent every day at school and most evenings with so I knew they’d be around - the only thing we had to worry about was how many packets of crisps we could source and what if we ran out of sausage rolls and was that David snogging Danielle and wasn’t he holding hands with Laura last week?
Now it’s ten years later and, though on the surface nothing has drastically changed - I still know a few ‘David’ types and still consume at least three packets of Walkers on the way home from the pub - now birthdays are a little less ‘straight up rum’ and a bit more ‘straight up fear’.
It’s starts with the planning, which begins excitedly and ends in dense mathematical quandary as I desperately try to source a pub which is not only equidistant to every person I’ve invited to save them travelling too far (less likely to turn up), not too expensive (less likely to stay for more than one) and also not too far up on the National Wanky Pub scale to suit everyone.
Then there’s the invitation sending, which must balance being too soon without being too keen and/or self-involved, and being too late with making sure people probably haven’t already made plans with a perfectly friendly yet nonchalant Facebook message on the event page, which could easily be read in the voice of Nathan Barley. ‘I’ll be in the [nearby-cheap-but-not-too-cheap-only-slightly-wanky] pub from 4pm guys, yeah? Come along if you fancy it, yeah? Keep it foolish.’ The group picture should be anything involving Beyoncé.
And it doesn’t stop once you’ve settled on a pub 20 miles out of your way so that Leanne doesn’t have to get three tubes and sent out your invites. Each day until your casual Sunday afternoon birthday drinking, Facebook will arrange your social life into an unavoidable and, frankly, heart-breaking ratio of popularity. ‘Invited,’ it will read, ‘200’. ‘Going: 11.’
If you strike a seamless balance, in theory, the night is awesome. The university mates that have travelled down from the north to celebrate with you are following your housemates on Twitter by 9pm, work friends are cackling over a third bottle of wine with your ex-colleagues and somehow, that old school friend that popped in solo is uploading an Instagram shot of the ‘best night she’s had in ages’ despite walking in not knowing a soul.
Get it wrong and you’ve got five groups of people who don’t know each other with you as their only common factor. You spend the whole night worrying if your work friends are judging you for having minimal mates outside of work (a very real possibility if, like me, you’ve lived in multiple cities and have close friends in all of them, but just live hundreds of miles away now) and if anyone at all is having a good time.
Usually, I get as far as cautiously mentioning a possible drink to a good few mates, then panic cancelling. In recent years I've gone as far as Las Vegas to avoid my own pity party.
This year, I hope, will be different. I will make a Facebook group and stick to it - no backing out. Please, come along. This year if only a few mates turn up, I'll be grateful to them and try to forget about my crippling ratio. As soon as I can decide on a venue...