Roaming Charges is the opening chapter of Just a Bit Much, a memoir for women who’ve ever been told they’re “too much” and then spent years trying to be less. Part hilarious travel misadventure, part panic-attack-meets-career-breakthrough, it’s a relatable deep-dive into people-pleasing, imposter syndrome, and that relentless “inner mean girl” voice that never seems to shut up. If you’ve ever overanalyzed a text, replayed a conversation in your head for days, or catastrophised over a single missed opportunity—this is your chapter.
The text hit like a slap. I was in Arizona, sweating through my swimsuit, and apparently sabotaging my entire career.
I knew I shouldn’t have left. I knew this was going to happen.
My inner mean girl was having a field day.
Inner mean girl: Well. That’s what you get. You’re selfish.
She was rampant these days. She was me… but also, not. Confusing, I know. Logically, I knew she wasn’t real (or even right), but she was loud. And it’s hard to ignore “loud.” She got her unwavering confidence from years of girl drama, passive-aggressive eye rolls, and comments about me being rude and way too sensitive.
She had an arsenal of zingers, all lifted from comments people probably didn’t even remember making. But I remembered. And to me, they felt like a scarlet letter—exposing all my faults, branded where everyone could see.
“You always do this.”
She hadn’t always been so overbearing, but lately her voice was everywhere.
Look, I know it’s early to be introducing a whole fictional frenemy. But trust me, she sticks around.
And if you can’t relate to this fictional frenemy in your brain? I envy you. Truly.
But if you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet you have an inner mean girl too. Your own worst critic. The voice in your head that tells you you’re too fat, too old, too dumb, too slow, too late… too much (see what I did there?).
So yeah, my inner mean girl is going to show up time and time again in this book because that’s how she shows up in my brain. Welcome. She’s a bitch. We hate her.
Okay, back to the story about how I got a phone call that made me question all my life choices up to that point.
I looked down at my phone in disbelief. The weight of it suddenly felt more like a brick than an iPhone.
An SMS came through:
| < 👤473-5 |
473-5:Welcome to the U.S.! Add roaming to your phone plan for as low as $12/day. Reply TRAVEL for more information. |
Pocketing roaming charges just so I could be rejected from another country. Nice. Loved that for me.
I leaned my forehead against the windowpane, felt the warm glass, and got distracted for a moment. Even the glass was warm there. I hadn’t felt cold since stepping out of the air-conditioned plane a few days earlier.
That short, long-distance conversation left me ridiculously sweaty, and my chest was tight. Butterflies pounded in my stomach. I just wanted to jump in the pool and cool off. Instead, I tapped the blue and white envelope in the top left corner of my screen and started writing a frantic email to the admin office of the union.
| New Message ☒ |
| August 29, 2016 To: Union Rep From: Mariah Stassen Subject: Interview process |
| To whom it may concern,I was called and offered an interview for an LTO this morning. Due to the information in the job postings that there would be no interviews for French or English jobs I booked a trip to Arizona. I am currently in the United States and unable to attend the interview tomorrow. I was told Skype interviews aren’t permitted but I am hoping that an exception can be made as I am very interested in this position and believe I am an excellent match for it. Thank you, Mariah Stassen EIN 5193965 |
Classic me: miss one fine print clause, respond with a 12-paragraph thesis and a side of desperation.
I sat on the bed in silence. Running the day through my head. Why had I decided to take a vacation? I knew I should have stayed home. I told my mom it was a bad idea.
*Ding*
*Ding*
| ^ Unread | |
| Union Rep | Re: Interview Process – Hi Mariah, we have fo.. |
| Jess | Interview tomorrow – Hi, we are set to meet to.. |
I scanned the previews quickly to assess if I needed to avoid them for four to six business days (bad news) or if I could open them right away (good news).
Omg. omg. Omg. omg. Okay. Ah. Be cool.
I typed a quick message to my parents and brother to tell them I was interviewing for a teaching position. I had to tell everyone. Immediately. Nothing ever seemed real until I told as many people as possible. I pushed the little arrow, sent the message, and quickly returned to my inbox with shaking hands, my excitement suddenly replaced by fear and anxiety—what chance did I have now that I was the girl who had called the union?
Inner mean girl: LITERALLY ZERO, YOU NARC.
I Googled the school and pulled up the staff directory. A name caught my attention in the Vice Principal spot: Stephanie Bianchi. Wait, what?
Stephanie was a family friend—like, “learned to drive stick in her car” family friend. My dad was best friends with her husband. She was the very person I had asked about canceling my vacation in case I got an interview.
“You can’t put your life on hold because you might get an interview. If they want you, they’ll make it work.”
Okay, calling the union? Minus one point.
Knowing the VP? Plus five.
Things were starting to look a little better for me. I exhaled slowly. Maybe, all was not lost.
I spent the day prepping for the interview and trying to pick out a presentable outfit to wear from my suitcase of vacation clothes. I was nervous, excited, and wanted to fast forward to the next day so I could just get the whole thing over with.
That night, I lay in my bed, unable to sleep and swiping through Bumble. I needed to go to sleep—my interview was in the morning. But I couldn’t help it. I was deep in a spiral about the interview and misery loves company, you know?
I didn’t love online dating. It was so boring. Small talk with strangers who you end up ghosting or never meeting? Exhausting. It’s not like I had other options, though.
Talking to guys at the gym? Terrifying. Lingering eye contact at run club? Not working. Getting introduced by someone? Yeah, right. All my friends were already dating, and all their friends were already dating too.
I swiped a few times, eyebrows furrowing—there were certainly a lot more guys in cowboy hats than I remembered from my last swipe-a-thon. I paused on one profile and noticed the distance away from me was in miles. Oh. Duh. It was a location-based app showing me guys in Arizona near me.
I shut down the app and went to bed.
No way I would move for a guy.
*˚⁺⋆。˚⋆*
I walked up the long path to the front door of the school and noticed the chipped blue paint. My heart beat a little faster as I rang the doorbell and wondered what my classroom would be like, which teachers I’d eat lunch with, and what I’d wear on the first day of school. Maybe a cute, single guy was teaching Grade Four, just waiting for a girl like me to magically show up down the hall so he could sweep me off my feet.
Inner mean girl: I can’t.
I pulled open the door to the school and was met by a tiny woman marching on the spot. The hallway stretched both left and right, and I could see more hallways at the end of each side.
“Hi. Are you Mariah? I’m Jess. Don’t mind me. I need to get 10,000 steps by the end of the day.”
What in the alternate universe was going on here? Okay, be cool. I smiled and followed her into the office right beside the main door. She was still marching on the spot while I looked around.
The room was small… and stuffed. A bookshelf filled to the brim with professional development materials, drawings from students taped to the walls, kitschy decor shoved wherever it could fit. Imagine every stereotypical “world’s best teacher” branded gift known to Hallmark from the 90s being stored in an 8 x 10 office.
I perched on the little couch and smoothed my shirt down, tucking my hair behind my ear and crossing and uncrossing my legs. I crossed them again.
I needed to stop. Stop fidgeting. Stop thinking about sweating. Stop looking at the embroidered pillow across the room that said something about coffee and tiny humans.
Jess was talking a mile a minute, and I tried to zero in on everything she was saying instead of playing I Spy. She told me about the school, my new role, and what to expect during the first few days. Mid-sentence, Stephanie walked in with a big smile on her face and welcomed me to the team. I was so comforted by her friendly face, pushing down the mean girl thoughts that tried to take over the moment and tell me she was the only reason I had gotten this job.
No. I crushed the interview. I had been good. And yeah, Stephanie knew me, but that was just a bonus. Right?
A few minutes later, Jess finished her monologue about bell times, and Stephanie walked with me down the long hallway. She turned right, then left, then another left. Or was it right? Maybe it had been a right first, then the left?
I had never had a good sense of direction, and I knew immediately I was going to have a hard time remembering all the different rooms I had just found out I’d be teaching in.
I thought I was getting a kindergarten position, but as I’d come to find out time and time again, nothing was ever that simple in education.
I was teaching kindergarten… half the day. But I was also casually teaching core French to every single grade in the school. My days would be spent booking it from one end of the H-shaped building to the other, hoping I wasn’t headed in the wrong direction, dumping my stuff on the desk in the prep room between classes, and trying not to cry when the Grade 6 class refused to speak French, again.
(FYI, there was indeed one guy who taught at the school. But don’t get excited—he was older than my dad and married. My wistful thoughts of this contract turning into a rom-com flew out the window, but I hadn’t been banking on it anyway. Teaching, especially in elementary school, was a “woman’s world.” In teacher’s college, I could count the number of guys in my cohort on one, maaaaybe two hands—but I couldn’t even begin to account for all the girls who roamed those halls.)
One of the guys—let’s call him Dante—and I had been dating for a few months mid-semester, our relationship a secret (his idea) to avoid “making it weird” in our small class setting. I hated it.
Why would it be weird? Why did it matter? Was he embarrassed by me? Unsure?
I spent a lot of time comparing how he acted around me in class to how different he was when it was just us—and how he texted me versus how he spoke to me. Things weren’t adding up, but I was rolling with it, convinced he’d come around.
Shockingly, to no one, we ended up breaking up weeks before the end of the year. When I saw him at graduation, it was a total disaster.
Allow me to paint you a picture.
*˚⁺⋆。˚⋆*
I looked great, if I do say so myself. My dress was midnight blue, my hair was curled (for now), and I was trying to convince myself I didn’t care about seeing him.
My parents couldn’t make it to my graduation ceremony, so my arms were linked with my best friends, Katie and Seb, anchoring me on each side, ready to head out the door.
“Okay. Let’s go. It’ll be great. Whatever. Who the fuck cares if I see him. Not me.”
Narrator: She cared. And was louder than she realized.
My mom’s eyebrows shot up.
“Mariah! Don’t swear. You need to calm down.”
I barely registered what she was saying and didn’t even feel bad about swearing like I normally would. I hugged her goodbye and hopped into Seb’s car, speeding off to the NAC in downtown Ottawa.
During the drive, Katie and Seb tried to distract me with songs and jokes and lunch plans after the ceremony. Besides, what were the chances I’d even see him anyway? There were like 700 people graduating. Maybe I’d see him across the room, but I looked fine as hell. So. It was going to be fine.
We parked underground, walked into the lobby, and bam. There he was. Dante. And I didn’t just see him from across the room. Oh no, my friend. I almost walked right into him, his mom, and his little brother as we rounded the corner.
Seven thousand people graduating, and I bump into him immediately?
I don’t remember putting seventeen marshmallows in my mouth, but I must have, because I couldn’t get a word out, and no other explanation made sense.
I didn’t care, remember?
My vision started to tunnel, and Katie put her hand on my back to guide me to the bathroom. I ran my hands under the cold water while she dipped a paper towel in the stream from the sink next to me to press against my neck, best friend mode activated.
“You look amazing. He is the worst. You’re doing great. Everything is fine. He sucks.”
I tried to focus on what she was saying while we went back out to the lobby to find Seb, who handed me a water bottle. It tasted a little weird—metallic, maybe? I didn’t even realize I was drinking red wine, not water, until they mentioned it hours later.
But round two of distractions wasn’t working as well as it had in the car. The tunnel got smaller and smaller, my vision creeping into total blackness. Katie guided me again, hand on my back, through one of the many sets of doors that lined the reception area, and sat me down on the curb. She and Seb stood in front of me like bodyguards, blocking the sun with their heads and, honestly, looking pretty angelic in the process.
Finally, I remembered how to speak. Marshmallows seemingly gone.
“Katie. My hands. I, I, I can’t move them. What am I going to do? I can’t go across the stage with lobster claws. How will I get my diploma? What will Michaëlle Jean think?”
I couldn’t move my hands, clamped into C shapes like a lobster, and my biggest concern was what the retiring Governor General would think of me, one of 70,000 students walking across the stage that day.
Katie reached out to put her hands in mine and asked me to squeeze them. But I couldn’t. It was like the wires between my brain and my hands had been cut.
Minutes—hours?—later, my hands unfroze, my vision came back, and Katie gently rubbed my back while I tried to process what had just happened.
“You’re okay, but I think you had a panic attack.” Her voice was filled with empathy and concern, which somehow made the whole thing even funnier to me.
Not funny like wow that’s a good one, but funny like what in the actual fuck is going on right now.
Me? Have a panic attack? No way. I had never had one before. And I didn’t even care about seeing Dante, remember? We’d only dated for like four months anyway. There was literally no reasonable explanation for why seeing him would give me a panic attack. That was ridiculous. Not me. No ma’am. I just thought I was being dramatic again.
Narrator: It was, indeed, a panic attack.
An announcement came over the loudspeaker asking all graduates to head backstage. I was shaky and unsure if we should just skip the whole thing and go out for lunch when a friendly face smiled as he walked by me. A guy I barely knew. He seemed to sense my hesitation to go in and backtracked until he was right in front of me.
“Hey! Want to walk down with me? I think we both have S last names,” he smiled—so warm and calm.
Grateful to him for uncementing me from my spot, we walked together down the hallway into the dimly lit holding space.
Don’t worry, I made it across the stage. But I regret to inform you that in the moment, I chose to position my hands like cat ears on my head when they said I was graduating magna cum laude… right in front of Michaëlle Jean.
Now you’re like, “Woah woah—this boy-crazy girl was essentially white knight rescued and didn’t immediately profess her love for him? And what about Seb? Her alleged best friend?”
Fair assessment. Touché.
So, the guy who rescued me at graduation may or may not have ended up making out with me at a club (okay fine, and my apartment) a few months later, but it didn’t go anywhere. He was in the market for a nice, Christian girl who wanted to wait for marriage and head to church on Sundays—and that just wasn’t me (sorry, Dad).
And as for Seb? Big yikes.
Let’s just say Seb is a story for a later chapter.
Want more unfiltered stories about ambition, burnout, friendship breakups, motherhood, and the messy truth about building a life you actually want? Just a Bit Much is part heartache, part humour, and 100% honest.
