Sorry I'm Late - I have shingles

and nearly killed a man named Gregg

Kat would never have dated a Tye

The other week I worked a very fancy book launch at a bar in Soho. The waiters felt bad for me sitting alone with a pile of books in a corner and they kept offering me more and more food, before they handed it out to the guests. It became like a game. “Smoked duck?” “Goat cheese tart?” “Smoked salmon?” I kept deftly saying no and they kept insisting that they were going to break me. They did, eventually. A platter of tiny boreks. Pastry will get me every time.

The author arrived, extremely glamorous, like a British Carrie Bradshaw, in a shiny gown and glossy make-up. I overheard her tell her friend that she felt slightly unwell and she was going to take a Lemsip. Could she take the Lemsip* in her champagne?

“I don’t think you can do that,” the friend said.

The author’s mother arrived and they hugged. They had the exact same body – very slim and they were both wearing long, clingy dresses with heels. Dresses I wouldn’t even dare try on in a dressing room alone because I don’t want to hurt my own feelings.

It made me think about how in my husband’s family, every single member is naturally very thin without ever having to exercise, diet or limit food in any way whatsoever. But then, they also don’t seem to love their food either, at least not in a primal way. Boxes of fancy chocolate from Christmas last until late April. Leftover slices of the good pizza go unclaimed at dinner. The cheeseboard is discarded half full. It’s baffling.

The first thing my mother, a woman who has been on a diet every day of her adult life, said about my gentle, sweet English mother-in-law after meeting her was, “Is she naturally that thin?” and I said, “Sadly, yes,” and my mom said, “I hate her.”

On the night of the book launch, there was a deluge of rain, but many of the guests gathered on the balcony to drink wine under an awning as the heavens poured down.

And then the most insane thing happened.

The author went outside in the rain to join her friends under the awning and she … she … she smoked a cigarette in front of her own mother!

There is no amount of money that you could pay me to smoke a cigarette in front of my mother or in fact, anyone’s mother. First of all, if I did that in front of my mother, she would immediately tell my father.

And if someone said to me, “We will pay you five hundred dollars for you to smoke a cigarette in front of your father and the only stipulation is you can’t tell him that we’re paying you to do it or discuss the money whatsoever. He has to just think you’re doing it because you want to,” I would not do it. The price I would pay is far too high.

I mentioned occasional smoking in my very first book that covers my life in my early twenties and my dad never said a word about it and then years later he introduced me to a doctor colleague of his.

Apropos of nothing, absolutely nothing, he said to her, about me, “Can you believe she smoked cigarettes in college when she has had asthma since she was five?” and his eyes filled with tears, leaving both me and his doctor friend speechless.

The emotion from my father was rare. I mean, this from a man who, when he hugged me goodbye when dropping me off at college 2,000 miles away (me being his youngest child and only daughter) dropped the parting phrase, “Three little words.”

“What?” I had asked. “I love you?”

“Don’t fuck up.”

Anyway, you can see what drove me to smoke those cigarettes.

Back at the book launch in Soho, I was stunned and probably a little bit jealous of the British Carrie Bradshaw. The author thanked her mother in her speech and said they talked every day and were best friends. Imagine being yourself, your whole self, in front of your parents. Wow.

As someone paid for a book, they asked, “Oh, are you American?” and I said yes and she said, “Where are you from?” And I said “Texas” and her eyes lit up.

“That’s why you have big hair and a big smile!” she said.

I looked at her. She looked at me.

“I’m watching the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader documentary on Netflix,” she explained.

As a half-Chinese kid with parents from Southern California, I didn’t know how to explain that I was such a poor specimen of stereotypical Texas. I wanted to present the woman with my high school friend Alison. She had blond hair, blindingly white teeth, blue eyes and a grin as big as Julia Roberts. In our sophomore English class, we had to give a presentation on our favorite word and hers was “pizzazz.” The most important thing to her in the entire world was to be a cheerleader at our high school.

I flicked on the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader documentary for about 30 seconds before I had to switch it off. It was so painfully similar to high school and watching the cheerleader tryouts. The girls would perform a choreographed group dance and then one by one, they would run up and down the school gym as their individual audition. Later that day, the entire school body would vote on who made the team, the only metrics being popularity, beauty and who could do the most backflips.

Alison tried out for cheerleader every year and cruelly, she was cut from the team our sophomore year, the year they had to dance to N’Sync’s Bye Bye Bye!  She was popular, but she couldn’t do the backhand springs and flips that wow a crowd – she would just run up and down the platform waving her pom poms and grinning so hard. She was white knuckling PIZZAZZ!!!!!

To this day, I’ve never heard howls more primal than Alison’s while she sat in my car and Bye Bye Bye came on the radio that afternoon. Rivers of black mascara streamed down her face as she wailed.

So no, I didn’t need to watch the Dallas Cowboy cheerleader documentary. I saw it in real life, up close. Although, it’s recently been hard to prove it.  

When renewing my American passport at the US Embassy in London, I had to prove I was not merely born in America, but that I had spent significant time there. I explained to the passport officer that I lived there my entire life until I was 22, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He needed concrete evidence. I showed him my college diploma, but that wasn’t enough for him.

“Can you show me proof that you went to high school in America? In Texas?”

How do you prove that? My freshman year boyfriend was named Tye and he drove a blue pick-up truck? People prayed to Jesus at the swim banquet?

It was frightening to be questioned about something that is so obviously true to you, so true in your bones – and yet without an official file on hand to prove it, you’ve got nothing.

I thought about the elderly British man at the bookshop who had asked if we took cash and when I told him, “No, sorry,” he’d muttered under his breath, “Your time here hasn’t blunted that American accent.” And yet, here I was, trying to convince a fellow countryman that I was just like him and failing.

“Okay well… what was your high school mascot?” the passport officer asked me.

I froze. Would this actually count as proof?

I’m from a flat, windy part of Texas where every week of summer, there’s a tornado warning. Where it’s a given that there would be several summer storms – deafeningly loud thunder and hail the size of golfballs. Thunderclaps so loud they will jolt you out of a dead sleep, leaving you gasping at 3am. Moments later, as the heavens beat down on the roof above your head, you will try to be brave as you gingerly pull your duvet back over your body and roll over, trying to convince yourself that you are safe.

Sam’s English friend Shaun cycled across America a few year ago and when he camped near my hometown, he told us, “If I’d grown up with weather like this, I’d be God-fearing, too.”

And so our high school mascot at my high school of 2,000 kids was a sandstorm named Sandie, a nod to the wild winds. We were knowns as “the Sandies” and our football cheer was “Blow, sand, blow!”

I told this to the passport officer and he looked at me with a mixture of awe and disgust.  “There’s no way anyone could make that up,” he said and stamped “Approved” on my application.  

****

A few days after the book launch, my right armpit began to feel…weird. It felt like razor burn but it also ran up over my right shoulder-blade. Had I accidentally been sunburnt there? I kept checking in the mirror and seeing nothing, just kept feeling this weird tingly, burning feeling.

Had I used a new soap? A new deodorant?

For two days, I kept pulling my shirt up and facing backwards in mirrors to study the skin on my back – convinced there would be something there. Nothing.

On Day 3, the burning feeling spread to my right boob.

I started trying to figure out how to book my first mammogram.

As I was getting ready for bed, I decided to check one more time. How could there be burning and no sign of anything? I raised my shirt up in front of our bedroom mirror and there it finally was. A red bumpy rash. In two different spots. All located on my right shoulder blade.

Shingles! I had shingles. In some ways, a relief.  I knew these were the symptoms for shingles without even consulting the internet, probably from a lifetime of always thinking I’m suffering from some rare, weird disease. Except this time I was. I felt vindicated, like the person resting under a gravestone that reads, “I told you I was sick.”  

Immediately I thought, “But I’m not 67!!!! How do I have shingles???” Shingles was something my mom’s friend’s husbands were coming down with. Not women like me, women who had ice blue nails for summer (first manicure in a year!) and a fresh haircut (first haircut in more than a year!), women who still had muscle memory in their quads on how to roller blade.

And yet.

I did what I always do when I’m ill: my husband took photos of the rash and I sent them to my dad, who sent them to his best friend Dean in Los Angeles, an infectious disease doctor, and Dean diagnosed me remotely. Shingles. The telltale symptoms being a tingly feeling, a rash and all of it relegated to only one side of my body.

You can only get shingles if you’ve had chickenpox. After you get chickenpox, the virus never actually leaves your body and instead lies dormant in your spinal cord and in a third of people, it appears again several years later, in the form of shingles. So for God only knows what reason, the virus in me has re-awoken this summer of all summers. Maybe it wanted to see the Paris Olympics? I have no idea. It’s been just lying in wait inside me for more than thirty years.

The theory is that, because once an entire community became infected with chickenpox, every member then became immune. This would cause the virus to die out, so to adapt, the virus became latent for years inside its former hosts, only to appear decades later to infect new children (virus hosts) in the community. It’s so clever and so frightening. Chickenpox dates back to ancient times and its own viral ancestors date back to when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

It’s moments like this when you realize, “Oh I thought I was a human doing cultural things like reading library books and going to the National Theatre and reading Mary Oliver poetry and stirring my matcha with a tea whisk from Japan, but all I was really doing was passing time while the virus waited for its moment to reactivate in my body and spread to other virus vectors.”  

I am merely a virus vessel, one of billions of others, to help spread more virus. What do I do for work? I work for the virus.

It reminded me of the first year of Covid, when we all called it coronavirus and we watched it from our homes and every morning I’d wake to text messages from my parent about who the virus had struck that day – the President. Prince Charles. Tom Hanks.

I had stood 6 feet away from our neighbours, a Dutch couple named Hannah and Robert, outside the front of our flat in London. Robert is an actual scientist, and I came to him with my many questions and queries.

“I just feel like it’s malicious. The virus. Like it wants to harm us.”

“It’s not sentient,” Robert said.

“No, I know, but it genuinely feels evil. When you wake up and read Forrest Gump has it. That’s just mean.”

“A virus doesn’t have feelings or a sense of morality,” Robert had said. The combination of Robert being Dutch and a scientist means he has less than zero tolerance for bullshit.

Do you have any Dutch friends? We seem to have a lot and they are all like this, and I love them for it.

***

You can’t give shingles to another person, but your shingles can give someone chickenpox, if they’ve never had it before. Ninety-five percent of adults are immune, but try saying, “I have a rash” in public and watch as people quietly make moves to leave the situation.

In reality, it is two red splotches on my back, each about the size of an apricot.

Our senior year in college, my friends use to drink and play Would You Rather? The one that sticks out the most is, “Would you rather, every time someone touched you, even if it’s just to shake your hand or brush behind you to reach something, you had to either say one of two things. Option A: every time someone touches you, you have to say, “Ohhhh, that feels sooooo gooood,” or Option B: every time someone touches you, you have to shout, “OUCH, YOU’RE HURTING ME!!!!” For the rest of your life.

For hours, we found this the most important question in the world, imagining the most awkward scenarios to use either of them. Shaking hands with your new boss. “Ohhh that feels sooo good.” At the hairdresser. After vigorous CPR. Brushing against someone on the tube: “OUCH YOU’RE HURTING ME!” Giving blood: “Ohhh that feels soooo good.”  

Somehow my life had become a game of: Would you rather, every time you met up with someone have to say, Option A: I have a contagious rash on my back, don’t touch me or come near me OR Option B: Have you had chickenpox? Because if you not, I could kill you.

I’m only a danger to those who haven’t had chickenpox, so mainly babies, small children and recluses on their walkabouts. Before my next shift at the bookshop, I vow to avoid children and also check that everyone I work with has had chickenpox, but of course they have already had chickenpox because we’re all adults.

One by one, they tell me, “Of course” they’ve had it. Until Gregg, the new guy, replies, “I have NOT had chickenpox!”

My friend Lin contracted chickenpox when she was 35, and she was so unwell that her fiancé actually thought she might die before they got married. It knocked her flat for three weeks and she’d gone to the hospital saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong but I think I’m dying.”

Rebecca from the bookshop tells me that her mother got chickenpox as an adult and ended up in the hospital, too.

“The pox was so bad that they were inside her lungs and now on x-rays it looks like she has TB.”

Kids in the UK don’t get the chickenpox vaccine, so children just keep getting them and giving them to each other, like they have for centuries. But you can go to a pharmacy and pay privately to get the chickenpox vaccine.

Gregg and I are due to work together in two days. I think about Lin’s grave tale. I think about the pox in Rebecca’s mother’s lungs. I don’t want to kill Gregg. Also, Gregg’s wife is pregnant and I don’t want to kill that child’s father with a rogue brush of my back rash (OUCH YOU’RE HURTING ME!!!).

I tell one of the other booksellers that I personally think Gregg should get vaccinated. Actually, what I do is send a link to a pharmacy that provides the chickenpox vaccine with the words, “GREGG WILL NOT SURVIVE HIS CHILD'S NURSERY YEARS WITHOUT IT!!!”

The bookseller writes back a few hours later, “Good to see you’re being chill about it…”

I like this person but I hate people “with chill.” Specifically, I hate people telling other people to “be chill.”  Chill means you don’t care. Unchill people get things done. Unchill people are the ones you want on planes when you are having an allergic reaction because they have packed two epipens just in case. Unchill people are the ones you want babysitting your kids because they will never let a tick bite turn into full blown Lyme disease – not on their watch. Unchill people are going to be on time for the plane, with snacks and an extra layer in case it gets cold.

Okay, sure, maybe I could just be chill about this. Or maybe I’ll just KILL GREGG?

I get that “unchill / non chill” people merely aren’t as fun as others and we do tend to lose our shit over things other people will shrug their shoulders at. But by the time you tell an unhinged person to chill, it is far too late. The only thing worse than telling them to “just chill” is to punch them in the face, throw tabasco sauce in their eyes and then yell, “JUST CHILL, YOU FOOL!”

“Just chill” is the simplest way to say, “You are irrational, insane and embarrassing.”

A better, original and more effective way came from my friend Rosie over dinner at an Italian restaurant in London. I was talking about – I don’t know what – probably asking why we can go to Mars and grow ears on mice but we can’t cure eczema when one in every five babies has it, and she said, very calmly and not unkindly, “Do you think you might have an undiagnosed anxiety disorder?”

The tone was so calm and the question so shocking that it knocked me out of whatever state I was in. “Hmm, maybe, actually,” I said, taking a breath and a drink of water. I don’t even know if I do have one, but it was the way she said it, calmly but caringly, that it made me realise I was ranting instead of eating the plates of pasta in front of us.

But of course, I’m also so very wrong. Chill people, truly chill people are the best. My god - a slow-talking craftsman who makes his own coasters out of driftwood he finds on his daily morning beach walk? Marry me. Surgeons with steady hands, pilots making smooth emergency landings, sleepy-eyed skateboarders? I long to walk among them.

My best friend in Texas, Jori, is so chill. She has three sons, the first being an accident and the third one being a complete surprise. Her reaction to both, “Oh! Okay!” She is the definition of can-do.

However, this is also a recent conversation we had when I was visiting her in Houston a few months ago.

“Well, at least my car wasn’t stolen this year.”

“Your car was stolen last year?” I asked. She hadn’t mentioned it.

“Yes,” Jori said.

“Were … were the keys in the car when it was stolen?” I asked.

“No comment,” Jori said.

And so the email, the one that said, “Good to see you are being chill about it…” annoyed me because it embarrassed me.

Gmail suggested an AI-generated response based on the email thread, so to save myself from writing an embarrassing non-chill comeback, I clicked send on the first auto-reply:

“Yes, very sad.”

***

Then I get annoyed. Like irrationally angry at Gregg. What do you mean you didn’t get chickenpox as a child? Okay little prince living in a castle in the woods with only royal regal adults as friends? Were you reading your books wearing white gloves?

You mean you didn’t get chickenpox from your two older brothers when you were three and it happened to be the one week the circus was in town and somehow the timing worked out that they still got to go and you had to stay home and miss the circus? And you cried so much that your very first memory of being alive on this earth is sobbing in the bathtub because this pervasive itchy virus has taken you from the things you love most in the world (elephants and cotton candy)?

And you, Gregg, are a 35-year-old man living in busy, dirty, crowded, germy London and you’ve never had chickenpox?

Okay, Gregg. Grow up, Gregg.

***

At the bookshop, we offer a gift subscription service, where if you pay less than £200, we will select, wrap and mail a new book to the giftee every month.

To try to avoid disappointment, we send off questionnaires to the gift recipient to gauge their taste. We ask questions like “Who are your favorite authors?” and “Are there any genres or authors you definitely don’t want to receive?” to try to choose a book they’ll actually enjoy.

We also ask a far more important question: “Are there any subjects you’d like to avoid?” One person wrote, “Grief / parent loss” which, same (I want to read Crying in H Mart, but I find that I simply cannot) and another wrote “Anything with cancer.” Someone else wrote, “Cricket, maybe?”

I identify with the person who wrote, “No sci fi or horror or anything too dark” but I want to be the person who wrote, “No, I’m game for anything :) .”

It’s so tricky to select the right book to read at the right time, especially for yourself.

Everyone I knew kept saying, “You’re too young to get shingles.” Then they eye me up and say, “They say it can happen if you’ve been really stressed.”

I have a theory that if you took any given person and said, “You have shingles. It can be caused by stress. Have you been under any stress lately?” that every single person would think about their life and their daily struggles and say, “I have. Yes.”

Had I been through undue stress that month? I…had. Sort of. But I had also been drugging myself to sleep and was convinced that since I was sleeping (with the drugs), then I couldn’t really be stressed because to me stress is almost always sleep deprivation and insomnia.

But it got me anyway. (Why? Because this is a fact about unchill people: they get shingles).  

As for the stress, I think I will share more about that in the book I’m working on. They say “write from scar, not the wound” and it’s very much still a wound, a wound that blew open the dormant varicella virus and gave me a rash with tiny pinprick blisters on my right shoulder blade. A wound that is itchy and sore and means I take an antiviral pill 5 times a day, including at 3am.

So for various reasons, I’ve been having a sad summer and when I’m in certain depressed moods, I can only reread books I’ve read before when I’m sad. I can’t watch new TV shows or films. I can’t handle new information or sorrow, even fictional. I don’t want a single surprise or reveal.

I was scouring my bookshelves and I couldn’t find anything that felt like the right read to pull me out of my darkness. I’d read Heartburn too many times, Sedaris doesn’t hit the way it used to, and any novels with any kind of death or sadness or illness were eliminated. Funny novels didn’t feel right, either.

Then I saw Solutions and Other Problems, an illustrated sad, but funny book by Allie Brosh. I had read this a few years ago, in another very anxious time in my life, but couldn’t remember it well.

At my favorite coffeeshop, I like to sit and drink my coffee on the benches outside. There’s a house across the street that I love staring into and I often imagine living there – glass windows, huge kitchen, gated walls.

A few times a month, I see a Dalmatian wander inside or mosey out, living the life I covet. I am very jealous of this Dalmatian.

On this particular day, I sit outside the coffeeshop and open up the Allie Brosh book. I can’t explain what the book is about because it’s honestly impossible to explain but at Chapter 2, I am laughing. And then I am crying. Then I’m turning pages of Chapter 2 while cry-laughing. It is very funny. But suddenly I am sobbing. And then sobbing harder because I was sad, but also relieved that I could still laugh. On that particular day, I didn’t know I could still laugh.

I was just caught in this loop of laughing at the pages of this strange funny book and crying so hard, and it is a gift that during this time, not a single person walked by to see me. When I finally close the book for the morning, I look up to see the Dalmatian, this wealthy Dalmatian, walking into his gated brick house.

Be well. I’ll be here, Typhoid Mary – not holding babies, not hugging anyone, not swimming, not wearing a backless dress, not touching Gregg, not even allowed in the bookshop.

Instead I will be sitting on benches outside, like a blister in the sun, reading and cry-laughing.

But do not touch me. I am still contagious.

*Lemsip is like a dissolvable tablet of Tylenol and Sudafed combined

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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