If you’re like me, then you’re probably loud, obnoxious, openly awkward and downright weird when you’re with your three (or fewer) friends. Your definition of fun is doing anything that allows you to set free your wild spirit that you’ve been suppressing inside of you for the majority of your day (or life). But you hate parties.

Don’t get me wrong, parties are fun; as long as there’s a maximum of six people and the main event is watching TV or Netflix and playing video games, everything should be fine. But what happens when there’s a huge event at someone’s house or at some nightclub somewhere that everybody is going to? If you’re like me, then you’ll probably have one of the most pointless nights of your life.

You like being around people, and you like being crazy and having a good time, so why is going to a party not your ideal night out? Well, being with your few friends is different from being with your friends who are with their friends who are with their friends, especially if you don’t know any of them and if you haven’t really reached that stage yet (and probably never will, by choice) when you’ve become a beautiful social butterfly; you’re probably more comfortable being in an unsocial cocoon in the corner somewhere. But at a large party, even the corner isn’t the safe place of solitude that you’re used to, and you’ll quickly find that out once you find yourself separated from your friends and trapped by other people’s bodies, which are dangerously close to coming into contact with yours.

The worst part isn’t even when you risk your life and sense of direction by fighting through a swarm of people (who, by the way, are probably gigantic compared to you because they’re either naturally tall or are wearing high heels, or, God forbid, both, and you’re either wearing flats or half-inch heels). Even after you’ve faced your fears and claw your way through this menacing crowd, you realize that you can’t even find your friends, or anyone who you think you saw them talking to. You end up being alone, completely lost, and you have too much self-respect to put yourself through that crowd again just to find some lousy friends who ditched you anyway. (They’re not usually lousy, and you know it’s not completely their fault, but at this point you’re just pissed that you got dragged here in the first place and you’re finding reasons to hate everything.)

So you just make your way to the bar or refreshment table, just to find out that the drinks taste like something that got brewed in your father’s toilet, and the snacks are surrounded by strangers, and you’ve had enough of people for one night. So you—the valiant, hungry warrior who lost her comrades in a dangerous jungle full of monsters— decides to make a perilous journey to the bathroom, where you can go and hide.

Too bad the bathroom is occupied by even more strangers, all of whom are checking the mirror, texting someone or chatting with one of the other four people in there (which, by the way, is way too high a number of people to be in a bathroom). You could just ignore them and hide in a stall anyway, but if there’s anyone who’s more afraid of being judged by strangers than you when you’re all alone, you have yet to meet them. By this point you’ve tried texting all of your friends several times, and none of them have responded, even though it’s been fifteen minutes.

At this point you would leave, but you carpooled with one of your friends, and even if you have the resolve to walk home, you’re afraid of having to explain why you left to your friends the next day and making a complete fool of yourself. You’ve probably made up several other trivial excuses to avoid walking home, too, because you know it’s way too far away and your feet are already hurting from your God-awful shoes.

Eventually, you do find your friends, and you end up quietly following them around for the rest of the night, never allowing yourself to lose track of them. And when you finally get home, you breathe a sigh of relief and go straight to bed, leaving your horrible memories and regrets for the morning after.