Mental Health and Taking a Break from Human Interaction

Remember when texting became a thing?

I have friends who are a few years older than me and they have confided in me that they hate texting and miss talking on the phone.

They say this to me in a hushed tone because now talking on the phone is taboo.

And they have unfortunately mistaken me for being a like-minded kindred.

Because I am delighted by the advent of texting.

Sure, the distance between us all grows and lengthens but oh my cats I am so happy to not feel pressured to sit on the phone and listen to someone talk forever.

About nothing.

For hours.

Of course, the conversations I found myself in were largely counseling calls. I was doing an awful lot of listening, analyzing and affirming.

So whatever it was being discussed in these eternal calls wasn’t “nothing” but it was often the same substantive issue being explained and restated about five thousand times over the course of seven hundred hours.

If I could have transcribed their hours of talking, I could have summarized their problem in a sentence.

Then typed out my response in a sentence or two.

And then printed it and mailed it to them and it still would have taken up less time than the phone conversation we were having.

But people want connection.

And that’s great but talking for five hours on the phone never felt like connection to me.

Rather, I often felt trapped.

Clearly, I was having boundaries trespassed and needed to be more assertive.

In any case, I generally hated speaking on the phone unless someone was experiencing a mental health emergency or another kind of crisis, for then the phone became a device of purpose.

But just shooting the shit for hours on the phone…

No.

So when texting came around, I was secretly overwhelmed with joy.

It wasn’t an easy transition for many.

I recall friends feeling very annoyed and upset if I just texted them.

Like, weren’t they worth enough to call????

“Um, no, because I’m just telling you I’m on my way and will be there in fifteen minutes.”

You are not worth enough to me to make that a discussion because, in fifteen minutes, I will be physically with you and we can talk all we want then.

I felt I was odd to be so happy about texting.

But then the millennials came along and all they did was text and changed everything and now no one calls anyone.

Unless it’s an emergency.

So this morning my mom in law called me.

I honestly was not feeling up to experiencing a crisis so I let it go to voice mail and then immediately checked the voice mail, bracing myself for tears and indecipherable emotion.

But it wasn’t an emergency… it was just that my dear mom in law couldn’t text me.

So she called me to tell me to text her so she could see if she still had text functionality.

Right.

So I texted her.

Her response:

Um…okay… that didn’t help me. So I responded.

It took a few minutes but then this exchange occurred:

By this point it all seemed a little ridiculous. Clearly, her ability to text had been restored.

Because we were texting. But then:

And then, after more theorizing and one word affirmation texts, she texted me about her weekend in two sentences.

I suppose the moral of this story is how texting can save us time but since humans are the ones texting, it doesn’t really save time at all. 😂

After I ended the text session, I went back to listening to music and playing Sodoku

because, in the never ending search for purpose, balance and employment…

today only music and numbers feel like the only ways I am able to meaningfully spend time.

Therefore, it’s a mental health day. We all need to take one or seventeen when we can. 🖤