Working Up to the Send Button: A Rant

While we are on the subject of ranting (those of you who are reading online will need some background: I have been writing a very acidic rant about my writing course this summer, but it’s too biased to be really suitable for anyone to read without taking away the entire substance of the thing.) I should like to express my feelings on emailing.

Communication is a very daunting task for me. In real life, this is understandable, since I have a very quiet voice and I am very shy. However, it takes watching me work up to hitting the send button on a casual email to realize how at home I actually am in conversation. I think this is because, when face to face with someone, you can use facial posture and expressions to show exactly how you feel. Furthermore, sometimes you don’t even have to talk at all—you can shrug, or nod your head yes or no. This sometimes causes amusement among the adults who watch me, but that’s all right. I can live with people realizing I’m shy. People realizing I am shy is a good thing, because it proves how brave I am.

Now, the reason this topic comes up is that I just emailed two people, both about as supportive as you can get without being really personally close. One is my music teacher, one is a past music teacher. Anyone else would dash off the two-line emails I just wrote and hit the Send button without thinking twice about it. I can’t do that. I couldn’t even do that if I just thought twice. I think I thought about twelve times about hitting the Send button, but I could be wrong. It was a scary thing for me; by the time the little emails had left the nest of Juno for the sky of cyberspace, my palms were so sweaty it was difficult to believe I was actually capable of handling a mouse at all.

It’s a weird thing. Writing as a form of communication for me has always been—still is—akin to the experiences of those people who are clumsy on land, but who, when they slip into the water, are as graceful as the fishes. Writing has always been effortless, or relatively so. But making something as casual as a two-line email permanent, communicating with such little effort that it's easy to misword your thoughts and end up with a result opposite of the intended, that's scary.

Is there a redeeming feature to my fear of communication? I suppose you could say that; perhaps, since words are so difficult for me to send out into the atmosphere, I think proportionally harder about them than do other people. But I don’t think this is true. You see, although I take longer to write and send my email, a lot of that time is taken up with worrying about how the email will be received and working myself up to hit the Send button. I think longer, but not necessarily harder, about my emailing. I think that my fear of emailing is just a fear of emailing, and that I will have to work over it in time.