The dreaded ring. I couldn’t stand it. So I switched to vibrate only. And I couldn’t stand that either. So I removed all sound, and I missed many calls. Most of them business. And we couldn’t have that. So I went back to putting my ringer on. Sigh.

I am extremely embarrassed to say that I’m terrified of my phone. A gadget. And I feel immense guilt when my first instinct upon hearing my phone ring is to silence it, and debate whether I have the strength to answer it then, or call back later. If it’s a client, the answer is always yes, so I take a few deep breaths and put my game face, and voice, on. But afterwards, I feel drained.

I have always detested making phone calls, and would rather text or email if I could get away with it.  I know this is not normal behaviour and I’m trying to work on it – I haven’t made as much progress as I would like though. So I went and researched about it, and found a community which shares this problem. It’s extremely comforting. Telephonobia, that’s its name, and it’s common amongst those with social anxiety disorder (SAD). Really, someone came up with that acronym. Symptoms include severe anxiety, shortness of breath, or a racing heart. I check all three. It’s officially a thing-having to fight the instinct to hurl your phone across the room and hide from a phone call. And treatment includes therapy or medication. In Africa, we do neither. How I deal with this is to religiously reward myself every time I ignored this instinct, acted like an adult, was brave, and answered it.

So I thought that my only problem was that I was incapable of answering phone calls. Was I misguided! I have no explanation for this other than to say that my physiology changed when I graduated. Someone texted me, and the familiar urge to throw my phone across the room arose. I was heartbroken. See I loved texts – I grew up texting, I didn’t have money to call, so I would use my phone credit to buy messages and would text everyone who’d contacted me. I knew how to summarize every word to fit an entire conversation in one text. Texts did not demand, did not insist. I was, or so I thought, a text person.

Courtesy: Brandon Chung, introvertspring.com (2017)

So I had to be an email person. But then I joined the job market, and I encountered proper emails, not forwards with funny jokes, but ones that requested you to complete assignments before a defined, and often looming, deadline. Whilst I had the luxury of responding to these when I felt like, respond I had to do. And some had “Urgent”, or worse still, had the subject written in all caps. And I finally had to face the truth. It simply wasn’t a text, email or phone call problem. Rather, it was what it represented. I’m just not a people person. Which is unacceptable now,  as I have a business to run. And I don’t have the time, or money, for cognitive restructuring or exposure training, suggested treatment options – I simply bite the bullet, and faithfully reward myself afterwards.

There is a methodology to how I approach my phone these days. My trusted notebook is always at hand to jot down key points when I have trouble concentrating, or feel especially nauseous at a long winded reply or explanation. And I give myself a quick pep talk and allow it to ring at least three times before picking up. And when I get a text, I quickly reply to it and log off. Throw my phone across the room – very satisfying – and then retrieve it, log back on, whoop with joy when there’s no reply to my text, and if there is, quickly reply to the replied text, and repeat step 1. It is a constant battle, this engaging and disengaging, and connecting and disconnecting, but there is a methodology to it and that goes a long way to calm me down.

Now of course there are exceptions to this. My family and intimate friends invariably know I can’t abide chit-chat and call when they have news to share with me. And there is no SAD anything attached to these calls, texts or emails when I see their names come up on screen. I do spend hours ruminating on ideas with them, may Allah preserve and reward them abundantly, in this world and the next. As for the rest, I acknowledge that this is a problem, a 21st Century problem, but an evident problem nonetheless which I’m working on. And it may take a while, as my long held dreams of secluding myself in the mountains of Afghanistan painfully fade away. In the meantime, don’t call me, please?