Reach Out and Hurt Someone
They used to say, “Reach out and touch someone.”
I learned early that when someone reached out, it wasn’t always with an open hand.
Sometimes it was a hook. Sometimes it was a trap.
And sometimes it was just a long, slow unraveling dressed up as love.
There’s a particular kind of silence that precedes the ring of a phone.
Not peace—pressure.
A tension, like a held breath you didn’t know you were holding.
I feel it before the sound even starts.
A screen lights up. A name. A number. A suggestion.
My chest tightens. My gut flips. Sometimes, I flinch.
It doesn’t matter if it’s someone I care about.
It doesn’t matter if I told them I’d call.
The fear is older than that. Older than any one friendship.
It’s in the wiring.
For years, the phone was my battlefield.
I worked in tech support—Verizon DSL, and a string of other contracts.
Eight hours a day of being blamed for outages I didn’t cause,
talked over, lied to, screamed at by strangers.
All of it with a script in front of me and a manager in my ear.
Perform calm, absorb chaos. Smile through the headset.
And when the shift ended, the headset came off—but the calls didn’t stop.
That’s when it got worse.
Someone I used to love—let’s call her Denise—weaponized the phone in a different way.
Not yelling at a technician, but dismantling me piece by piece across hours.
Calls at 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m.—
relitigating arguments from years ago, inventing new ones on the spot.
If I didn’t answer? Accusations.
If I did? I’d be trapped in hours of gaslight loops and emotional bait-and-switch.
Sometimes she’d say she missed me. Sometimes she’d tell me I ruined her life.
Sometimes both, within minutes.
The texts were no better. Paragraphs. Rants. Screens of blame.
If I paused too long before responding, it was taken as proof of betrayal.
Sometimes I engaged.
Sometimes I tried to defend myself.
Sometimes I just shut down.
None of it mattered.
Eventually, I stopped trusting phones altogether.
Not because they’re machines,
but because they’d been used to hollow me out over and over again.
The ring became a trigger.
The notification became a threat.
Even now, years later, my body responds before my mind can catch up.
It’s hard to explain this to friends.
I type fast. I write constantly.
I can hold a conversation in person, especially in small doses.
But if someone asks me to call them?
I say yes. I mean it.
Then the dread sets in.
The entire day becomes a countdown.
I stare at the phone like it’s ticking.
When the moment comes, I freeze.
Sometimes I push through and make the call.
Other times, I don’t.
And after, I feel like a coward. Or a liar. Or both.
If I do manage to talk, I can’t do anything else.
I either hyperfocus to the point of exhaustion,
or dissociate and lose the thread entirely.
It’s not about multitasking. It’s about survival.
Some part of me is still on alert, scanning every pause for danger.
Trying to predict the turn.
Waiting for the shift from warmth to weapon.
This isn’t shyness. It’s not introversion.
It’s what happens when your nervous system learns that being reachable is dangerous.
When a ring doesn’t mean connection—it means confrontation.
When a message isn’t a hello—it’s a test.
I lost someone once because of this.
Her name was Delia.
She was a close friend—maybe more, in a different life.
She reached out. I didn’t respond.
She thought I didn’t care.
I did.
But back then, my life was so unstable,
I thought the kindest thing I could do was to keep her out of it.
To protect her from the blast radius.
So I went quiet. Disappeared.
She never reached out again.
I still carry that one.
Not like a scar. Like a bruise that hasn’t healed.
So if I don’t answer, or if I vanish for a bit,
please know it’s not indifference.
It’s muscle memory.
It’s ghost training.
It’s self-preservation wearing the mask of flakiness.
I’m still learning how to hear a phone ring
and not flinch.