Is it social anxiety or are you chatting with a nun?

In which I confront my lifelong inability to make small talk and learn a valuable life lesson after accidentally saying "assman" to a nun.

A couple years ago, around this exact glorious time of year, as spring was springing, the sun shining, the magnolias and cherry trees blossoming around Philadelphia in such drunken disarray that the city resembled a hungover bridesmaid the morning after a wedding, floral wreath still pinned and sprayed in place, a harsh chemical cloud lingering over a face of melted makeup but charming despite that, beautiful even if you squinted a bit, I found myself with a rare, equally glorious hour to kill. I was waiting on my kids outside an art class, so options for activities were limited. First, I thought I’d catch up on the news, but then I noticed the day was daying, as the kids say, and figured I’d take a walk, get “my steps in” like a nice, regular veering-into- middle-age mom.

Instead, I encountered an elderly nun, used the phrase “assman” and dined on that shame for many a dark hour.

The worst part is this is all absolutely true.

Image from my favorite modeling gig because it was so cinematic, and you can see what I mean about performing without having to talk. Shot by Nikola Tamindzic for The Village Voice (RIP). Styling: Fabrizio Babino Make-up: Virginia Bradley Hair: Gregory Alan Models: Isabella David and Julia Standefer

True but also the kind of awkward interaction that is mostly, blessedly in the past thanks in large part to two eye-opening incidents. There’s the nun and the assman one, in which I think of myself as the villain. In the other, I think any reasonable person would agree I was the victim.

The victim as in I got stuck behind a chatty Trump supporter on the serpentine five-and-a-half-hour line to vote that stretched down a full Philly city block in 2020. By the the end of our exchange, I was ready to trade our democracy to not have the images she shared with me in my head, so, don’t worry. I won't share any details with you here. We never exchanged names, either, but ex-Trump Lady confessed straight off the bat, along with her Republican leanings, that she was, in fact, voting for Biden. And I used to have so few boundaries and I got so paranoid she might change her mind if I iced her, I let her regale me with increasingly gruesome stories about her medical woes. Finally, after nearly six hours, ex-Trump Lady swished away behind the voting curtain without so much as a goodbye, and I was free.

That day changed me.

But then so did the assman day.

It was truly the sum of these two incidents that made me want to come to terms at last with my social anxiety. I won't go too far into the origins of my issues with social anxiety as this story is about the time I accidentally terrorized a lady of the cloth… if you can call a nun that? I don’t know anything about religion, having experienced a godless childhood, but I will also briefly share that I come from a rootless, mixed-up cultural background— French dad, Haitian stepmom, New Yorker mother who moved us to the belle-obsessed South at a young, impressionable age but old enough to leave me gasping for the gritty Northeast where having an attitude was a compliment.

It was not in the South, but I thought that was how Chris Bradshaw meant his assessment of my “attitude and a half” character on the 7th grade basketball court where I was kicking his ass at hoops, so I thanked him.

It genuinely scarred my soul when he told the other boys how I responded, and they hooted. I got the memo: in the South, girls were supposed to be sweet. The other was unthinkable.

Anyway, I know my mixed-up upbringing has a great deal, if not everything, to do with my social anxiety.

“You smile too much,” my French family would tell me on vacations. I’d adjust and get, “You sulk too much” from the southern belles in gym class, which tracks. I hated our regulation gym uniforms.

Later in college, I once read UVA’s guidebook for foreign exchange students and that was the very first time any one had every told me you’re not supposed to answer honestly when people ask you how you’re doing. In America, a “good” or a “fine” will suffice.

It was a revelation.

So origins aside, let’s look at what social anxiety is. The Mayo Clinic defines social anxiety, or social phobia, as a pattern of behavior in which “everyday interactions cause significant anxiety, self-consciousness and embarrassment because you fear being scrutinized or judged negatively by others.

In social anxiety disorder, fear and anxiety lead to avoidance that can disrupt your life. Severe stress can affect your relationships, daily routines, work, school or other activities.”

I’d say it interfered with my life.

A little more than a decade ago, I was working as an actor in New York City— my lifelong dream. I’d even signed with legit and commercial agents, but, in the end, I scuppered my own dream. I found it much more pleasant to work as a model, because no one expected me to talk. (On another quickie side note, as a French-American actor, my unusual accent in either language pleased precisely no one and that only added to my growing self-consciousness.) However, in modeling, no one cared that I sounded neither standard Parisian nor standard middle American. They cared that I was tall. Incidentally, New Yawk or Valley Girl I could do just fine having had a mother from Brooklyn and a roommate from Beverly Hills in college, who hated me for not so obscure reasons— I was poor, she wasn’t— so mocking her became an art, but neither is really an accent you want to go around life with, any more than the vocal fry that’s replaced the latter for upper-middle-class leaning American girls.

French I couldn’t do because my dad didn’t sound like Maurice Chevalier, because no one in 2010 sounded like Maurice Chevalier.

But as a model? No one had any expectations for me whatsoever. The bar was so low I was often told I had a “great” personality because I peppered phrases like “please” and “thank you” into interactions with makeup artists. I essentially gave up on acting because of a growing fear of my own voice’s vocal hijinks, even as I booked more voiceover roles than regular ones. There were others reasons. See #metoo.

But let’s jump back to the “assman” incident, because I feel like it sheds so much more light on what social anxiety looks and feels like than a dry definition from a medical website can hope to do.

A couple years back then, on those spring Thursdays, I’d take my kids to art classes at an art center way out in the ‘burbs. Another mom once asked me if the classes were “good”. The kids scribbled with crayons on paper and were happy about it. They weren’t little Picassos or anything. I don’t know how to quantify its “goodness”, but I can tell you, as I told her, the art center itself was the main feature of these afternoons. 

 I loved it there. The Main Line Art Center is an oasis of art and gardens, just one street removed from a long line of Mickey D’s and suburban strip malls. It was as if turning off the main road entered you through a portal into another, better world. The Center is mostly housed in an old colonial with a sweeping porch and tall, pale blue shutters. At some point, they tacked on a modern wing to display paintings and photographs, and there’s a smaller, dingier cottage out back for the kilns and all the sloppy pottery people to make their happy messes. Around the other side’s a generous garden full of the flowering trees I so love about the East Coast and the same mixture of modern sculptures and classical throwbacks as the gallery showcases.

My plan that day was to stroll around the garden, see where the sidewalk took me, but before I could step away from the parking lot, my path was blocked by an elderly woman bent almost in half over a cane. 

I paused to let her amble past and tacked on a polite “how’s it going”. (See UVA’s guidebook for foreign students.)

But the elderly woman hadn’t read the same book, because she stopped dead and looked up at me with the most beatific smile I’d ever seen and she wasn't reading from any script when she said, “Remind me of your name again,” and slow blinked at me like an amorous kitten. 

 For a second, I almost took offense. Did I look so ordinary that she thought she’d met me before? But she was so old that there was a soft haziness to her like a small summer cloud that’s about to disperse into the blue sky. She was beaming up at me, so that I found it was impossible to be peeved with her.

And anyway, what the hell was my problem?

“Isabella,” I said. 

“I’m Elizabeth,” she said. 

“Elizabeth is the English version of my name,” I said, because, as I’ve noted above, I am terrible at small talk and should be blindfolded and shot for living as long as I have on Earth and not being able to come up with a better line like that off the cuff. 

“It’s actually Mary Elizabeth Lewisham, so they call me Mel for short,” she offered with another one of her terrific smiles.

(I’m using the name I remember her giving me, but I think that’s fine because this story took place in 2019 and Mary Elizabeth Lewisham lives an unsurprisingly social-media-free existence but if you do Google her, good for you. You’ll stumble upon this other nun named Mary Elizabeth from Lewisham, England who ran off with a monk. It’s pretty hot stuff.)

Anyway, I’m also telling the truth, the whole truth, because I’m making a confession here, and I have to confess I had nothing else. A stranger sharing her full Christian name fully stumped me.

My one verbal sally— freaking etymology— had been used up. 

I smiled back and tried to turn away, ready to get my steps in. 

She was still staring at me, though. Something about her gaze pinned me to the spot. There was a questioning look there, now. Or loneliness. I’m helpless before either curiosity or a stranger’s sadness.

“So, are you Italian?”

 “Um, wha—no,” I stuttered, surprised.

I blinked. She blinked back.

Between cats, that’s practically a proposal of marriage.

Ah, what the hell, I thought, and turned back.

“I’m French and American,” I added, trying to be friendly. I have an Italian name and long dark hair and fair skin, and I have been told I look Italian before but not “modern Italian”. What they mean by that is I am kinda happily chubby now, so I wasn’t completely surprised by Mel’s appraisal, but I was flattered. I was a tired mom waiting for her kids. I had a middle-aged visor cap in my car to protect my skin when I was driving.

Full confession: I was pleased as punch to be taken for a mysterious Italian woman, but I don’t think that’s what Mel was really talking about. 

 “I lived in Rome for four years once,” Mel continued, still staring up at me, still bent over her cane. “I worked in a women’s college there.”

I can see now that Mel had been angling all along to bring up Rome, the Eternal City, the love of her life. In that moment, I only noticed the way Mel reverently pronounced women. It was akin to the way I once cradled the butterflies I raised for one of my kids’ science projects.

 And just like that, I was hooked on Mel.

I get these crushes on people. That’s something I hope I never grow out of, even as I have had to learn boundaries and small talk and basically civilize myself because my godless, hippie parents failed to do so. I also appreciated that we weren’t going to chat about how hot it was or how much her back ached. God, no one warns you about how boring conversation as a mom gets. Of course I’m proud of my kids, but is that all anyone expects from me now that I’m a mom? It’s as bad as my please and thank you days. I would have indulged her if that’s what Mel had wanted to discuss, because I’ve been taught to be kind to my elders.

I was suddenly glad as all hell, though, that that was not what me and Mel were going to talk about. 

 “Do you speak Italian?” I asked, which was absolutely the wrong question. I know this now after reviewing this conversation in my brain. Mel didn’t want to talk about Italian. Mel the Nun who caressed the word women with gentle, quivering lips wanted to talk about shadowy corners and feminine intrigue. 

 “Yes,” she said. 

 So, I responded like an asshole, “Io parlo un po d’Italiano ma non bene.”

 “Oh, I don’t remember a word,” Mel said, removing one gnarled hand from her cane to wave my pathetic attempt at Italian away as if the past was a mist of cheap perfume.

I wasn’t surprised, frankly. I’ve rarely met an American who claims to speak a language and actually can speak it. I dropped it.  

The Rome thing sounded more promising. I’ve always wanted to go to Rome, so I asked about Rome.

“I’m studying Italian,” I confided in Mel, “but I haven’t been to Rome.”

 “You haven’t been to Rome? You must go.”

 Dammit, dear readers. Why didn’t I ask Mel why I must go to Rome? Whyyy? I wish I could lie to you and tell you that I did. I wish I could share what she was hinting at with her talk of her work. I still hadn’t even picked up that she was a nun and that right there, that’s on social anxiety. 

 In fact, I was still poised awkwardly, one foot on the hot asphalt of the parking lot and one on the sidewalk. Mel still clutched her cane, blocking my route, utterly still like we were characters written by a writer with no sense of active verbs. I had no grasp of the situation, no sense yet that the coming scene would haunt me or who the characters in it, myself included, really were. It didn’t aid my powers of perception that Mel was wearing simple loose garments and not a wimple or head covering or anything like that. Her white hair was very short, but most little old ladies wear their hair shorn that way. She was still blinking up at me expectantly.

How many conversations did Mel have left on Earth and this verbal diarrhea is what I was serving her? That did occur to me and that is my only excuse for what happened next.

 “My sister lives in Florence, actually,” I tried. Half-sister. An international party girl who cons trustfund babies into funding her jet-set lifestyle, supplementing some of it with an Only Fans account and whom my genuinely bizarre French dad has praised as “an artist at the top of her game” exhorting the rest of his five girls, among whom number a scientist, a teacher, a published writer, and a receptionist at an exclusive London club, to emulate her ways and that is also true, I swear to God.

Is it any wonder I struggle to understand social mores?

“When you visit her—” When hell freezes over, Mel, I didn’t interrupt to say— “you must go to Rome. In Rome, we had students studying French, English, Italian, and Latin. If they didn’t speak English…”

Her voice trailed off, laced with a vague, enticing menace. 

“Did you teach them?” I asked. 

“Oh no,” Mel laughed. She had a nice laugh, as soft as the loose folds of her skin.

‘They had to figure it out on their own?” I said. 

“Oh, yes.”

 “I almost studied courtly Italian, but I didn’t think I could figure it out,” I shared. “It’s funny, because I think I could now.”

I don’t know why I shared that, but Mel looked so expectant and I was doing such a lousy job conversing with her. 

“Oh, you’ll do wonderful at that.”

“No, I-I didn’t do it. I was meeting with this professor about studying the Provençal poets. Provençal is a lot like French, which I speak. But the professor? He wanted me to study the medieval Italian poets instead. I wish I had. He’s a writer as well. Professor Açiman,” I said. It is pronounced “assman” incidentally, unless you go out of your way to make it sound as pretentious as possible.

I didn’t. I didn’t say “Assaman” or “Ahsssmahn.” Nope. I said “Assman”. Sybillant on the double ss, hard on the apple-like A. What a great word “assman” is, incidentally. It really sounds like what it is—someone desirous of juicy, roundness filling their mouths.

I was lost then.

We both were.

We looked at each other, and it was a very, truly terrible moment. I didn’t know Mel was a nun yet, so the moment through the lens of memory has only grown in its terribleness. If you didn’t know it yet, if you have social anxiety, saying the phrase assman to a lovely, elderly nun is possibly the worse thing that can ever, ever, ever befall you. 

“He’s also a novelist,” I added, trying to fix it. At least, I didn’t say Açiman’s name again. “He wrote ‘Call Me By Your Name’. It’s set in Italy. I don’t know if you’ve read it. Or seen it.” I was babbling, which is another symptom of social anxiety. “It’s also a movie.”

“That’s a nice name,” she said. Then Mel full-on winced. “I meant the book is a nice name.”

So, Mel had 100% definitely heard me say “assman”. 

“Well, I’m just waiting for my children, actually. They’re in an art class over there.” I pointed at the art center behind us and Mel looked around as if astonished to find herself beside it. 

“I live down there,” Mel said, also pointing, her hand pale and veined and the fingers not really pointing at all. They curved back at her due to great age, but I got the point.

“At the assisted living home with four of my sisters,” she added.

I have four sisters of my own as I mentioned above, the sociopathic one and the other three are great, and for a moment I was astonished at the thought of living with them in my old age. Particularly the sociopath who would probably con me out of my pension if I have ever have one, and then the truth dawned on me at last, what with her talk of theology and her name “Mary Elizabeth” or “Mel” for short.

“Oh, are you a sister?” For some reason, I couldn’t say the word ‘nun’. Not directly after saying assman. I couldn't.

“Yes,” Mel said. “My order founded Rosemount College a hundred years ago. We started letting in boys two or three years ago.” Mel’s voice dripped with disdain. 

Oh, I just loved Mel.

 “There are a lot of seminaries around these parts. And girls’ colleges. I think Bryn Mawr is still a women’s college?” I said hopefully, trying to get back in Mel’s good graces. I wanted her amorous blinks again. Her warm regard. After pointing the way, we had started ambling in step, walking back towards the retirement home together.

“How old are your children?” Mel asked me as we walked, but she was only being polite.

For another terrible moment, I could not recall their ages. Yep, another symptom of social anxiety. Fear of physical symptoms that may cause you embarrassment, such as blushing, sweating, trembling or having a shaky voice. It occurred me I could have lied, so I started to and then changed my mind, and yes, my voice shook.

 “5 no 6 and 8,” I said with all the conviction of a bad liar, making up that she even had children to begin with even though I 100% have two children along with the two c-section scars to prove it.

 Mel side-eyed me, asking when I would visit Italy and I told her I would go that summer, at the end of the summer. 

Another lie.

And Mel knew. She’d have made a terrific poker player in her time. She was fed up by then. I could tell when she looked at me. Really looked at me like she knew. 

At last, we reached the front doors of the assisted-living home, and she bent back over her cane and shot over her shoulder, clearly a dismissal, “You’re a very well-rounded young woman.”

I don’t know how to describe it, but it was the harshest thing anyone has ever said to me.

No more beatific smiles for me. 

I don’t know why I lied to Mel except it’s yet another symptom, isn’t it? Fear of situations in which you may be judged negatively. 

So, I conceded defeat and walked back to the art center. I had had visions of Mel and I having tea together while she took down albums filled with black and white photos of nuns posed in eternal sisterhood by the Trevi Fountain. Instead, I retreated with a bland, “It was nice to meet you.”

Had it been? I don’t know. It could have been. Why didn’t I ask Mel for a life lesson anyway? She had wanted to share something with me so badly, and instead I’d lied to her and talked about myself, or my made-up self. Why hadn’t I asked her what living in Rome was like? I’d have loved Mel’s perspective. Jhumpa Lahiri’s own Roman Stories were dull as dishwater, sadly. (Don’t trust the reviews; the big publications are all just angling to get someone with her name recognition on their podcasts, I suspect.)

Most of all this: why, oh why, did I say “assman”? 

Social anxiety is a terrible thing. Maybe that’s why I like to study languages so much. I have an excuse for stuttering or employing an odd phrase when I'm speaking in a foreign tongue, stumbling over an unknown accent and an understandable narcissism. The “I” phrases being the first ones you learn: “I go to Rome. I have children. I walk. I talk. I love.”

Or, I thought, as I strolled back much more quickly than I’d ambled away to the art center garden, spotting a white-tailed bunny among the statues there, immediately beginning to feel better in the peace and the sunshine that to me is as spiritual as a church, is this how everyone feels after they’ve been talking to a nun? Judged? So profoundly judged and found profoundly lacking. 

Maybe.

Or maybe, next time, I could remember I do know other declensions in English. I know how to say “you” sentences, too.

“Do you love Rome? Do you miss Rome? Do you regret coming back? Do you love your sisters? Do you love women? Do you really love women? Did you always dream of being a nun? Are you afraid? Do you think you’ve experienced God? Did you experience Him in Rome? Do you think God is a woman?”

I sat still on the grass, running the blades through my fingers, letting my jeans grow damp from the residue of April showers, and the bunny hopped back. I so would have liked to have heard about another vanished layer of the Eternal City. Goddammit. I opened the Duolingo app and chose the Italian flag for a grammar lesson in Italian. I still had 30 minutes to kill.