YOF013: Make a Collage (and am I an extrovert?!)

Here we are - the 13th week of Fun in the year. Since we last spoke I had a birthday, exited my twenties - with some trepidation, some relief.  I was planning to use my birthday as the subject of this week’s podcast but if I’m honest, there was little to say other than, I had a nice time with my best friends, basically on a pub crawl around my beloved Brighton. But that’s a very short episode and I figured you deserved something more substantial. Fortunately, my quest to find something else fun to do this week to tell you about resulted in some interesting self reflection, and that’s really what I want to tell you about. Sure, I made a collage, which was in my jar of fun, a safe option, and something I really should do more often. I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to magazines, which is understandable when the ones I buy can cost up to £10 or so. But cutting them up and making an interesting collage from them makes me feel a bit more justified in my hoarding. Weirdly, my favourite part of making a collage is the cutting. I love the process of flicking through a magazine or catalogue and finding images or words that speak to me. The actual assembly part is much of a muchness. Anyway, back to my revelation. When I pulled ‘make a collage’ from the jar of fun, I was a bit disappointed. I’ve mentioned before about my need for challenge, so I suppose that ws missing. But there was another element: people. Recently, I’ve had some really really fun times with people. Not randoms either, I mean people I consider my very good friends. And whilst I still enjoy my solo cinema trips or an hour spent cutting and sticking for a collage, there’s part of me that is really craving that sense of a shared experience. Improv wouldn’t have been as fun if I didn’t have my accomplice, thank you Rachel. That cottage weekend was fun entirely because of the company I was in. This realisation definitely put me in a bit of a tailspin. Am I questioning my introversion? No, actually. Because I know where my boundaries lie. I know that a shared activity doesn’t mean doing something with strangers - like the Charleston episode. It’s doing things with people I know and love. It also doesn’t mean partying late into the night - groups above 5-6 become substantially more draining for me. It just means making time, regularly, to do things for fun whilst also considering asking a friend or two to come along. I’m very rarely the one to ask someone to ‘do something’ with me. I get the invites, I say yay or nay. That’s been my comfort zone for these 30 years. But now, I’m wondering if embracing my idea of fun means being the inviter, not just the invitee. Which also means getting used to the idea of hearing no, i’m busy. Or no, not for me. Yikes. Is this how extroverts feel? Anyway, that’s all for today - I’m going to send out some invites this weekend to see if I can recruit anyone to partake in a fun activity with me - and I will let you know how I get on. Wish me luck!