Afterward, though, I felt a little proud. I often suffer from the common writer’s fallacy that every life experience should be impeccably amusing. We only watch the best TV shows and read the best books and go to the best parties. We only leave the house because we’re expected to be somewhere or so we can brag about being there later. But some things are just kind of boring, and networking is one of them. If I had been drinking, it would have only slightly dulled the pain, anyway.

When Chloe called, I told her about this minor victory. She congratulated me and asked me how I did it.

I explained that I had approached the evening as an experiment—Would I be able to survive this social interaction sober?—and wondered aloud to her if it was a good idea to game-ify my awkwardness in this way.

“Maybe,” she said, “this is a first step.”

The app was not always a panacea. A few months into my time with Joyable, someone close to me said something really awful to me. I can’t revisit it here, but it happened just before Chloe was scheduled to call, and I mentioned it to her. Though she offered some good, alternate ways to think about the situation, her tips didn’t really work that time. The wound was too deep. My brain felt like a runaway train; there was nothing I could do to steady it on its tracks.

I told Chloe that my boyfriend naturally takes criticism in the Joyable-approved way. “When you criticize him, he seems to say, ‘That’s interesting! I’ll assess your viewpoint along with all the other evidence,’” I said.

She laughed again. “That’s rare, though,” she said.

Toward the very end of my time with Joyable, I noticed some small changes in myself. I began to recognize the Joyable cognitive distortions in other people, and was occasionally able to help them calm down. Once, I could tell a friend was exaggerating how bleak a situation was simply because she, herself, was feeling extremely anxious about it. In reality, the strength of our emotions doesn’t necessarily reflect the force of an event. I was able to gently talk my friend down, the way Chloe would reassure me.