The Worst Girls’ Night Of My Life · Storyflo

The Worst Girls’ Night Of My Life · Storyflo

The following is a true (and embarrassing) story. You can find others in this genre here.

I haven’t been on many girls’ nights in my life. This is partly because my OCD has, for most of my adult life, made me reluctant to go out and do things without my family (and yes, I am working on it) but also because (probably for good reason) groups of women have not been eager to include me. I’ve done quite a few one-on-one drinks with individual women, but the amount of times I’ve gone on a “girls’ night,” past college, is genuinely less than five.

This true story is about the worst of those five.

I met Jessica after my feet gave out at the Union Street Fair in San Francisco, having reached a level of wear and tear I can only describe as “mangled.” I was wearing five-inch wooden platform heels (most likely from Guess or Bebe), not anticipating that I would be standing, walking and drinking copious amounts of warm vodka for at least five hours. Jessica, a cool older girl (I was twenty-one, she was twenty-seven) hung out with me inside her mostly empty office building while I tried to bandage my feet up with cocktail napkins.

That day at the Union Street Fair, I was still in college, living across the country, and was only there to visit my boyfriend (now husband) Nick, who had graduated before me and moved out to San Francisco for work. Nick knew Jessica through friends. When I arrived in San Francisco that week, I was a neon magenta bodycon dresses in a sea of Patagonia vests and dirty looks. Sometimes I knew I looked a bit ridiculous, like when we went to a Stanford football game tailgate, and I showed up in a blue and yellow corset with low-rise skinny jeans and stripper heels. (To make matters worse: yellow and blue were the colors of the opposing team. Nick quickly rushed me to the Stanford gift shop to buy me a giant Stanford T-shirt.)

With plans of moving to San Francisco as soon as I graduated, I knew it wouldn’t be hard to alter my attire to fit in. (Surely, I could afford a white T-shirt and jeans!) But I didn’t really want to. I hated the anti-fashion component of being a woman in San Francisco, I liked looking like a C-list Kardashian-inspired club rat, and as much as I wanted people to like me, I had hope that I could accomplish this without changing my style or my personality. As I hung out with Jessica that day, bandaging my feet in her office, I kept expecting her to say something about how out of place I looked, or even just ask me if I was cold. (I was, but did not want to be asked if I was.) But she didn’t. She liked me, and I couldn’t figure out why.

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