The small try

The third method is to do the thing. One thing, once, from the list in chapter 16. Sit at the window table. Go to the class. Say the point in the meeting without the run-up. Wear the jumper. Eat at the Italian place on a Thursday. Not all of them, and not as a programme. One, this week, chosen because it's the one you'd most like back.

Do it with the numbers. Before, make the headcount. During, at some point, do the shoe count. After, write three facts. Not how it felt. What happened. Who looked, for how long, and what you did. If you can't name a face from the room, write that, because it's the most useful fact of the three.

Then, later, check the enjoyment. Ratner and Hamilton's people overestimated how much a companion would add to a film or a meal. Ask yourself, the day after, whether the coffee was worse for the window or the meal for the empty chair. If it was, that's real, and you've learned something about yourself that isn't about the audience. If it wasn't, and I'd expect it mostly wasn't, then the thing you'd been avoiding for the room's sake turns out to have been fine, and the room, when you counted it, wasn't there.

I want to be clear about what this isn't. It isn't a course of treatment and it isn't a ladder of harder and harder rooms. If doing one ordinary thing in public feels far beyond you, that's the preface's caution and chapter 23, and a GP is a better next step than a jumper. For the ordinary reader, the small try is one thing, this week, done with a count, and its only aim is to give you a fact you got yourself.

Dan, from chapter 11, is the small try. He went, the beam came on, he counted, it went off, he can't describe the other tables, he'd go again. That's the whole method. It doesn't cure anything. It replaces an estimate with a count and a fear with a fact, and after a few of those the room is a different place to walk into.