One of my best friends sent me this text last week:”We need to catch up soon! Like I’m going to make you talk to me on the phone for like an hour, so get ready!”

 

I laughed out loud walking down the siren filled streets of downtown reading and then re-reading her text. I got called out hard and it was a fair and reasonable thing to say for someone who knows me. Here’s the thing, for someone who likes people, I hate talking on the phone. Facetime is better. I can’t get the energy of the other person but I can read some expression over a flat screen. But then it’s like, I have to prop the tiny phone up somewhere and hold it through the call. Facetime is annoying.

 

Additionally, the longer I’ve hidden from phone calls the worse my phone anxiety gets. Like, did I forget how to be friends over the phone? Why am I scared to talk to my best friends on the phone? I hate it because it’s not the same. I’m like a newborn who needs face to face and skin to skin hugs or I WANT NOTHING. My friends know: text me and you’ll get an immediate text back. Call me and get you get sent to voicemail, unless we set up a time for a call and I have the opportunity to prepare. Prepare?!?!? What am I preparing for?!? It’s not an interview, it’s my BEST FRIEND! Can you please send a raven next time?

 

My phone anxiety strangely doesn’t apply to work. I spend majority of my day speaking to students taking online classes coaching them on how to be successful and listening and to their stories of struggle to come up with payments, stay in college, and find the will to finish. On those calls, I’m Hannah the sponge, then Hannah the solver. I take all the information they give me and sort it quickly like a dealer in Las Vegas. I shuffle the deck, cut the deck and I find a clear coaching plan I hope the student will not only find relatable but will glob onto and just BEGIN. I spend a lot of my day encouraging people over the phone to just start putting one foot in front of the other.

 

So why would I rather talk about my day to my stuffed animal looking dog, Frankie, than have the discipline to pick up the phone and call the people I love? I’d give anything to send an owl or a raven with a tiny scroll. The bird of choice could drop the message in the middle of whatever my friend is doing: lifting weights, eating Cheezits while watching Bravo, or feeding their babies. Scratch that. The bird of choice would swoop down next to whatever my friend is doing and set up a tiny easel. From there, she’d take out a tiny paint brush and canvas and paint a tiny pictogram. My friend would have to decode it for a good laugh. That would be my smoke signal. My own quirky way of reaching out from a distance to say hey, let’s grab a beer and a joke real soon, mmm kkkay?

 

 

Maybe within my lifetime I will speak to beamed up life size images of my friends in my own living room. Will they feel my energy? Will I feel theirs? I’m lucky I have great friends who call me out, and hunt me down. I’ll call my friends soon…. errrr… I’ll pick up the phone when they call me, I promise.