FOMO was a slang term that started being used when I was in my twenties. Fear of Missing Out – anxiety that an exciting event may currently be happening elsewhere.
Basically, if any social event was happening and you knew about it – you didn’t want to miss it for fear of missing out on something fun.
It wouldn’t matter if you couldn’t afford it, or that you had to put in a great amount of effort to do it – you wanted to make it happen. Often, FOMO was centered around the prospect of meeting a man.
The worst case of FOMO I ever had happened in Grade 10. This is the story, as I recall it.
A guy we went to high school with was given the keys to a house, as he was responsible for watering the plants while the owner was away. A plan to have a party there was hatched.
Most of my best high school friends lived in the area near the house where the shaker was happening, so it wasn’t terribly difficult for them to make their way to the party palace. A few lies had them all sorted out.
My best friend Sarah and I lived on the other side of the county, so getting our party hungry selves to the location was rather complex. We had huge FOMO and the only way that made sense to us to rid ourselves of it was to steal her parent’s car.
Oh, and we didn’t yet have our driver’s licenses.
Two other friends had previously committed to babysitting that night. They figured they would be home somewhere around 10 p.m., but we couldn’t risk a phone call as we didn’t want to rouse any suspicions with whispered conversations. At that time, the phone was in the most central part of the house – you couldn’t text, talk or Facetime from your bedroom.
Instead, we decided that Sarah and I would drive by one of their houses. If they had returned from babysitting, they would leave a basement light on and that meant they would be at the ballfield near their houses waiting for a pickup.
We waited until Sarah’s mother had a solid and steady snore happening. We snuck out the door and turned the engine on. We didn’t turn the lights on.
Now to set the scene a bit further. Sarah quite literally grew up in the middle of nowhere. We had to go down four dirt roads just to get to the main road. Just to make the scene even more ominous – it was pouring rain and very dark.
After successfully making our way down the dirt roads and not hitting a deer, we pulled the Cutless Sierra onto the main road. We blew by my house about a kilometre over the road. My mother (who was more of the watchdog parent in my house) was working nights as a nurse. Dad was likely watching Hockey Night in Canada and wouldn’t even think to call to be sure we were where we said we were going to be. Sarah and I are cousins, so we had special exemptions when it came to being at each other’s houses.
We made it to town.
In order to get to the Number 7, we quite literally had to drive by the RCMP station. No po-po’s in site.
As we hummed along, we nearly hydroplaned, but Sarah - being a confident, non-licensed driver - handled it with ease.
As we slowed in front of Sacha’s house, we saw the foreboding light in the basement.
We made our way to the baseball field where our two friends came at us like moths to a light, out of the darkness and into the Cutless Sierra.
With a full carload, we made our way to the party house.
Let’s just say what we arrived to was nothing we should have been FOMO-ing about.
The house was freezing. A lot of alcohol had been consumed by the other attendees and we felt like Mother Superior arriving at a Metallica concert.
We needed to get out of dodge, but we needed to deliver a few friends home before we could make our way back to home base.
Kim, one of our besties, had come down with a flu and couldn’t climb out of her window as planned. Lara was staying at her house and had a bad need to see a guy who she was crushing on – he was going to be at the party. She climbed out Kim’s window.
We delivered Lara back to Kim’s driveway. We waited a few moments to be sure she was indeed able to scale her way back in through the bedroom window.
To our dismay, she came barrelling down the driveway saying, ‘They know, they know, they all know’.
OMG.
Back on the other side of the county, Sarah’s older sister was babysitting and was weirded out by some noises outside of the house. She rang home, and unfortunately, her twin brother woke up when the phone rang. He told her he would buzz over to check things out.
When he went into the yard, he noticed the car wasn’t there. Confused and thinking that perhaps their car was stolen, he woke up Sarah’s sleeping mother. Upon inspection of the house, they realized us two bandits were not in bed.
Sarah’s brother called all our friend’s houses in an effort to track us down. His calls woke up sleeping parents – empty bed discoveries were made.
Upon the delivery of the news that our jig was up, Sarah began singing Bob Dylan’s How Many Roads.
What should we do? We didn’t know ‘who knew’ at this point.
As we drove along the road, we needed to pull over to allow a friend to ‘evacuate her system’.
Suddenly, like the movie Gorilla’s in the Mist, out of the fog we saw something coming at us. It was Kari’s parents in their Astro Van. Hunting us down.
They took the keys and drove us back to their house, where we stayed the night.
Lara’s parents came to collect her. She admitted to them that she had indeed had a drink.
I had just turned 15 a few days before our grand theft auto outing. I feared that my mother would certainly take back all of my birthday gifts.
Sarah’s brother and sister came to get us criminals in the morning. One drove us back and the other drove the impounded car home.
With our tail between our legs, we made our way back to Sarah’s house.
We told an Oscar-winning story of how we were Friends in Shining Armour. Rescuing our bosom buddies from a very bad place. Not premeditated, but instead as a response to a desperate plea for rescuing.
This is what our FOMO led to. Had we just stayed at Sarah’s house, entertaining each other by passing gas, none of this would ever have happened.
FOMO has never really led me to anything really rewarding.
I’m still full of fun and want to be in on the action, but with age I’ve become much more investigative of what the outcome of putting my time, money and energy into something will be.
It’s better to be content where you are than wishing you were somewhere else.
With an insatiable love for human behaviour and circumstance, Emilie Chiasson absorbs the world around her, and turns her experiences into relatable stories. From her home town of Antigonish, NS to her travels around the world, she never fails to connect with the characters and perspectives that make life a bit more colourful. Read more at https://emiliechiasson.wordpress.com/.
