Making a call is fine for me, but I probably walk half a mile from pacing during the call
I think that’s what the normies call a coping skill… or something, IDK.
Trying to explain to someone who’s NT how my body physically prevents me from speaking in highly emotional situations, and that the act of thinking about talking to someone on the phone or in person creates such a highly emotional situation for me is like trying to draw blood from a stone. Especially since I can only ever get the words out through text, because of the aforementioned problem.
Having a neurospicy brain sucks, a lot of the times.
look up number. type out entire script for the conversation. make the script encompass absolutely anything that can happen in the call. come back to it in a few days. high energy day, find the place i typed my script and the number. triple check the number. call the number, follow the script. make sure to put off any immediate plan demands during the call to minimum two weeks out.
that’s my process. i only run into problems if i have to rush things. but planning my life around avoiding other peoples’ rushes and emergencies works for the most part. it does require me to know extensively more about the systems i am calling than the people operating the systems to make a proper script, but the research is not typically a problem for me… it just takes time.
usually if i follow this process and cover about 90% of topics in my script i can handle one or two issues.
Double-check the number. Looks correct. Triple-check. That can’t be right. Better read it again. Continue until the dialer clears the number due to inactivity.
I somehow can manage phone calls as long as I have paper and pen to doodle. It might start being a set of short notes about the phone call, and is for noting down what people say, but around the notes I also draw wild doodles during the call, and as long as I can do that I have no problems with listening, understanding, and pushing the anxiety out onto the paper where it doesn’t disturb my call. I never realized it was as simple as having pen and paper handy and had so much trouble avoiding calls.
Advantage: nice drawings are produced. Sometimes I like them so much I copy them onto nicer paper and turn them into a proper colored pencil drawing.
…3
