The real reason why I'm not fun at parties

(Note: This is a post from my blog I posted some while ago, which I wanted to share with the steemit community. I hope you'll enjoy it! -SR)

09.11.2017 (Berlin, Germany) – I’m going to a party in two days. And while I’m looking at the pile of laundry I should’ve done days ago figuring out if I’ll have something to wear at all (I’m not picky when it comes to these kinds of things but I’m running out of clean shirts) I’m asking myself the following question: Why have I stopped bothering at all?

You see, I’m not someone who’s fun at parties. I don’t drink a lot, I don’t talk a lot, I usually leave early and the conversations I hold with people are probably even more boring for them than they are for me.

But I wasn’t always like this…

I remember days where I would be partying on rooftops, getting drunk with friends, creating the stories that I once loved to tell. I remember meeting random strangers who became my friends soon after and jetting away from party to party. Whether I was in Prague, Belgrade, Ankara, Warsaw, Budapest or anywhere else, I would have a good time, get drunk as fuck (I was able to drink a lot) and enjoy going back home while watching the sunrise.

Yet these days are over…

So, what happened? Well, for starters, I moved from Prague to Berlin and into a new social cycle. In my first year here, I tried to be social and meet people. I went to parties and met people, I’ve been around. However, I can’t remember a single house party in Berlin that I considered even remotely fun. Every single time I tell a story about some party in Belgrade, I talk about how much fun I had and how many exciting people I’ve met and every single time I talk about a party in Berlin, I classify it as lame and not really interesting.

I still can’t answer why I became the boring person at parties and why I’ve felt extremely unmotivated to go to any kind of party I’ve been invited to.

My theory is that I’m missing the right people. Berlin is a city based on social circles that determine one’s status. And since I didn’t have friends of my own at the beginning here I was either x’s roommate or y’s friend or z’s boyfriend, and never an individual. Fact is the only parties I did enjoy were the ones that I was single-handedly invited to and where I was perceived as an individual.

There are only two good stories I can tell about parties that I’ve actually enjoyed and both were cases where I either met the people by chance or people I knew invited only me (and not me as part of a duo) to come over. I’ve also had a Eurovision viewing party which technically counts as three, but it doesn’t count if all the people present are your friends, because that’s guaranteed to be a good time (in most cases at least). Anyways, the only way, in my opinion, to be fun at parties is to break the circle.

And so, I look at myself in the mirror with all of my unfinished thoughts, thinking about all the stories I could tell in two days. Thinking about having fun. Thinking about how I can re-visit that old version of myself that so fearlessly went into social interactions like this. Thinking of my drunk self and how much I loved having a few more drinks than I usually drink today. Thinking about bringing my past into the present.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll be fun in two days. Maybe I’ll have fun. Maybe. Probably not.

S. Radaković