Texting is harder than it looks for a significant percentage of the population, myself included. Breaking it down to its simplest form, I feel like texting is a conversation you are having while not truly being in the conversation. It leaves open the option of creating lag in a conversation and shows more or fewer emotions than are actually felt by either person. Texting is a phenomenon that does not conform to the rules of conversation and that is what opens the door to a newer breed of social anxiety.
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Humans are hardwired to have conversations. We are social animals. We rely on communication to create bonds and relationships and usually, there is an emotion or a goal behind those conversations. On the other hand, texts have the potential to be both memos, and have the ability to be fully emotion-driven conversations, and that’s where the anxiety of texting emanates from. Some people have the need to respond to texts immediately, others feel the need to wait on some messages and others feel the need to answer only when they think they can. In any case, none of these are right or wrong but they all lead to a variety of different feelings.
Personally, I have tried to detach myself from the burden I believe texting can be. I first got my own phone once I had finished 10th grade. Until that point, all my communication happened trough my parents’ phones, the home phone, and even email. It was a simpler time. If I wanted to communicate with my friends about something pertinent I would call their phones (I still remember a lot of their phone numbers) and group project communication was a mix of Gmail and hangouts. When I finally did get a phone I primarily depended on home Wi-Fi for my texting needs and that is when the anxiety began.
Everyone around me at that point seemed to be having so many conversations over text messages, during school hours and outside. As an outsider to that world, I seemed to not have as many people to talk to or enough things to talk about. The whole ‘texting-all-the-time’ made people seem more important than I was, so I kept trying to reach out to people and create conversations that evidently were not completely organic. I wanted to see notifications constantly and I wanted to be the one people were texting. It was a kind of validation that was in numbers and not based in people or their personality.
Fortunately for me, I was never the person who waited to respond to texts and as I began to become more comfortable with myself my texting abilities, my texting anxiety also diminished. I realized that what I had with some of my oldest friends, were deep bonds that kept us close even if we spoke once every 3-6 months. Those chats meant much more than everyday meaningless texts, but I realized I can appreciate both equally. But, writing about this now also brought me to another realization. Alongside being more comfortable in texting when I wanted to, that, unfortunately, led me to not responding to others on time. It was a negative result of my own screen time distribution, and not the fact that I did not want to have conversations with these wonderful people. I now worry that I may be the one creating social texting anxiety for someone else.
Anxiety feeds off of the fact that the modes of gratification have changed in the digital age. Anxiety is left hungry and angry when it is not fed (much like me) and when I was in high-school I was looking for that gratification and my anxiety was left constantly unfed. However, over time texting gratification was not what was feeding my anxiety to keep it quiet. That came more from within and the IRL relationships I had fostered. Thus, the texts were not something that stayed constantly on my mind. Looking forward I hope to bring this to other areas of my life as well. I want to be able to put in more unadulterated effort in my work regardless of the public recognition it is going to receive and more. I look to take this confidence into my emails, making sure that effort is seen from my end and not constantly waiting for responses. Most of all, however, I want to put this view into my current job applications and recognize that they are causing my anxiety, and that giving them my everything, is all that is in my control. So there is still a long way to go.
I have not necessarily found the perfect balance, but I have brought myself to find a place where I can choose to only stress about texts that really are a big deal; job decisions, deals, the big stuff. What I do want to work on though, is that if I really do want to talk to someone I should call them. I want to simplify the relationships I have and give them my all. Especially since I can’t see any of these people I truly love, in person. The forced distance of the COVID-19 era has really made the heart grown fonder.
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