Texting for the brave and true

Today, I'm supposed to be writing about text messaging, a topic that provokes much anxiety for me because it's a form of social interaction, which is never my strong suit. So before I get into that subject, let's digress a little bit about the title of this post!

"Texting for the brave and true." Where did it come from? Well, at first, it just seemed to pop into my head, but it wasn't long before I realized that I had lifted it from a session at a conference I attended a few years ago. The session in question was "Testing for the brave and true," and please allow me give it a shout-out. While I completely missed it at the conference, I was so fond of the title that I found the video after the fact and watched it, comprehended almost nothing, but still remembered it well enough to title a blog post after it.

But where did that title come from? Well, I  fed "for the brave and true" into Google and was overcome with results, every single one of which was about some book called Clojure for the Brave and True—Clojure apparently being some sort of programming language. I find it extremely fitting that the title for my blog post on one the traits most commonly associated with dorks, geeks, and nerds (an ineptitude with common forms of communication), was quite accidentally modeled on two separate titles also on topics commonly associated with dorks, geeks, and nerds (software development and testing).

And let's not forget the semantics of the whole thing.  If "brave" were a synonym for "completely terrified," and "true" could be substituted for "socially awkward," then "Texting for the Brave and True" would be the perfect title for this blog post. But since neither of those are the case, it becomes a hilariously ironic title that no one will laugh at except for myself.

And thus concludes my digression. I suppose I should get on with the actual subject, which is still (although I'd forgive you if you'd forgotten by now) text messaging. Over the past few months, I've made a concerted effort to be more social, which has mostly played out on the field of textual communication. Consequently, I've learned a lot of things about texting, including some techniques to make it all bearable, even when just looking at your phone is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

Pre-texting rituals

When the mere thought of reaching out to another human makes you weak in the knees, you can minimize texting's stressful impacts through the time-tested (and more and more time-tested!) technique of  procrastination. The entire first four paragraphs of this post are a prime example of this classic strategy—I avoided having to think about texting by instead droning on about entirely unrelated topics.

Other ways to indefinitely postpone the actual sending of a text include:

• Embracing your inner perfectionist, composing and recomposing the message in your head until it conveys every nuance of meaning that could possibly be wrung out of it.
• Planning a schedule for sending the text (such as "when the recipient is likely to be off work," or "when the recipient is likely to be sleeping"—you know, depending on whether you prefer them to be able to read the text immediately or further extend the procrastination period through their own inactivity), preferably at a point far, far in the future.
• Typing out the text and then suddenly getting caught up in a very important task that just occurred to you.

Post-texting rituals

Let's suppose you've run out of procrastination techniques and have somehow roped yourself into actually shooting off a text message. In the immediate moment, you'll probably notice an immense feeling of relief. After all, that wasn't nearly as hard as you thought it was going to be. Why, it was nothing more than the push of a "send" button (plus hours and hours of preparatory anxiety, no biggie!)! But that rush of good feelings will soon fade (probably in just a few seconds), so what is your next step? Why, it's nothing other than Self-recrimination! Misdirection!

At this point, you might be tempted to immediately regret the text that you sent. You might worry that you came across sounding stupid, or you might wonder why the recipient would ever want to hear from you. You might now start to worry why you haven't received a response, or if the response you are about to receive will be a rejection. You might be coming to the conclusion that sending this text was a bad, bad idea.

The key to derailing those thoughts is to immediately lose all interest in the text that you sent. Forget you ever sent it! It's out of your hands now! The past is past, what's done is done, and you have a very important task that needs to take up every iota of your concentration (I hope you held at least one of these in reserve during the procrastination phase!). Whatever you choose to do to distract yourself from the horrible tactical error that was your text message, do it with gusto! As long as you keep busy, then you won't have any time to regret your actions.

With these pre- and post-texting rituals firmly in hand, you — yes, even you, you quivering bundle of perennial anxiety — can overcome your fears and dash off text messages with the lighthearted nonchalance of an honest-to-gosh extravert. You might even begin to feel a small, glimmering smidgen of self-confidence!

Texting for the brave and true—maybe it wasn't such an ironic title after all!