Getting Too High at a Party Where Everyone is Too Cool for Me

I promise I wash my hands after pissing!

I went back to Toronto for three weeks in May. That was perhaps the most social three weeks of my life. I spent time with family, old friends, new friends, attended and hosted parties, picked up a new lover, tried (and failed) to pick up an old friend, smoked way too many cigarettes and took way too many edibles. Even though Toronto is a thriving, bustling city of some three million or so people, returning to your hometown always feels like visiting a city of ghosts, with memories haunting every bar, cafe, park, and intersection. Despite the fact I lived there until I was twenty-two, in many ways it feels like I wasn’t fully an adult until I moved away. Returning made me regress, or so it felt; I was more tetchy and petulant than usual, I revived old habits, and I clung onto old sadnesses as if they were stress toys. Even though the city is so much bigger than where I am now, I felt stifled in many ways, unable to fit comfortably into the mould that Toronto Ash had existed in. Perhaps that is a natural part of growing up, I don’t know, but I am a Cancer after all, nostalgia is my natural state, and, as you might know if you have read my Substack before, I have never gotten over anything in my entire life. Toronto felt like an amalgamation of that; I was plagued not only by memories of people I knew but also by versions of myself which seemed to litter the city and which, for various reasons, made me uncomfortable.

I was at a party hosted by a dear friend while I was there and I was in the odd position of not knowing any of the other guests. Most of them I had heard stories about, Cool Girls who worked in the arts and DJed or made ceramics or ran mysterious collectives. People with unusual but flattering hairstyles and the kind of outfits that made them look chic and cosmopolitan but would probably make me look mentally ill. In a tight dress and slicked back ponytail I felt conventional and slutty, but not slutty in a good way, slutty in a sort of sad, desperate way. Everyone felt niche and fringe, ethnically and sexually ambiguous in a way which made me feel overdressed and under-nuanced. Even my oddly specific MA felt conventional and clunky, and I would have been mortified if anyone there had seen my Spotify activity.

To make myself feel more at ease I downed an off brand BuzzBall, half a bottle of wine and took 30mg of an edible. Unsurprisingly, this made me feel worse.

Sitting on the living room floor, trying to remember how people sat normally, paranoid I was staring at strangers, I made conversation with one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. I then became nervous that I was laughing too loudly, then that I was being obnoxious in other ways, so I opted for nodding intermittently and saying ‘mhm’ in a way that I hoped made me sound serious and thoughtful and not mentally impaired. I was also caught in the strange conundrum of forgetting, or perhaps I actually haven’t ever properly learned, how to naturally wind down a conversation with someone. There was only so many times I could say I was popping to the toilet without them thinking I was doing coke or, worse, had a UTI.

At one of these inopportune bathroom trips I stood looking at myself in the mirror, my vision contracting and expanding, trying to make an ‘objective’ assessment of how I might come across to the other guests. The main pro was that I was there because I am good friends with the hostess. I mean I was there to help her set up, that’s like platinum level friendship, right? And the hostess is a cool person so therefore I must have something going for me, right? I briefly counted the fact that I am Wasian to be an asset before remembering that most of the other guests were either mixed or Asian themselves. In that way, at least, I fit in, which was, in and of itself, a rather refreshing thought as I spend so much of my time in very White, or non-Asian spaces by demographic happenstance.

It wasn’t that the weed was making me feel like a bad person or a liability, it was more that it was making it difficult to remember A) how people normally act and B) dredging up age old insecurities about my general worth as a person and what actual entertainment value I might be able to provide. It was like every time I made someone laugh I became paranoid I was doing something wrong, or else I was worried that social awkwardness was making me put my customer service persona on, a persona which in the north of England works when you sound like I do because people think you’re being chirpy and polite and Canadian, but amongst other Canadians probably comes across as either condescending or dimwitted. So now on top of worrying that I sound demented, dim, or conventional, I also had to worry that I was coming across as a fake bitch.

Then I realised I had been in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror for a long time which made me feel even more socially awkward as I envisioned the queue of people outside the door who thought that either the Boursin had seriously disagreed with me or I had passed out from all the coke they imagined I was doing. I would be forced to make an announcement that I wasn’t shitting myself and I wasn’t on gear, I just kept forgetting how to end conversations so nipping to the toilet felt like a natural segue. Then by making a speech about it I was making it way more awkward so someone would start booing and asking ‘who invited her?’ And they would start throwing tomatoes at me.

I opened the door with great trepidation only to find the corridor was empty and that the song which had been playing when I entered the washroom was still on so I actually couldn’t have been away for more than a couple minutes which is a very normal length of time to be in the toilet for, right? Right? Or was it too short? What if they thought I hadn’t washed my hands (because I hadn’t! all I had done was stand and overthink so there was really no reason for me to wash my hands) and if someone noticed my hands were dry and a rumour spread that I didn’t wash my hands after pissing there would be consternation and disgust that I was the one that helped set out and prepare the food and that everyone had been eating horrible disgusting grapes and samosas all evening. I quickly opened the fridge door to take out a bottle of wine, thinking that at least the condensation would help give the illusion that my hands weren’t totally dry and were they to come under scrutiny perhaps these allegations could be entirely avoided.

Later in the evening I was asked to be in control of flipping the records over or replacing them. Listening to vinyls at a party with this crowd didn’t seem affected, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. As I picked my way, barefoot with blisters on my toes from trying to break in a new pair of heels, through the islands of guests sat on the carpet, I overheard snatches of conversations about people I didn’t know and places I was only vaguely familiar with, I was struck by the familiar conviction that I might not exist, that I am either a product of some mass psychosis or else part of some sort of psy-op Truman Show situation. Obviously I am aware these are the dim, predictable products of a stoned mind but in the moment they were very convincing. I was also nervous that the opaque material under the sheer fabric of my skirt had ridden up and that my ass was on display for the entire party.

I left the party soon after, convinced I had been acting the least normal anyone had ever acted before and that I had somehow pioneered a new form of freakishness that was both off putting and deeply, deeply boring.