Lived experience
I rehearse phone calls and then don't make them
August 24, 2026 · 4 min read
Short version
- Phone paralysis is about open-endedness, not fear of talking.
- Rehearsing feels like progress but is often the avoidance.
- A first sentence and an exit line beat a perfect script.
The rehearsal that never opens
Last month I needed to call the dentist. Two minutes, maybe three. I wrote a script, rewrote it twice, and practiced the opening line in my head while making coffee.
I did not call the dentist. I have not called the dentist. The script is excellent and completely unused, like a fire extinguisher for a fire I'm too scared to walk toward.
The call takes two minutes. The pre-call has taken three weeks.
Why the phone is a boss fight
People say “just call,” as if the calling is the hard part. It isn't. The hard part is everything the phone refuses to tell me.
- I can't see their face, so I can't read the conversation.
- There is no edit button before my words arrive.
- The call has no stated length, so it feels infinite.
- It might go to voicemail, which is its own separate boss fight.
An email I can craft. A call I can only survive. My brain prices the two accordingly, and no amount of caring about my molars changes the price.
Rehearsing is the trap
The script feels like progress. It is usually procrastination wearing a costume — every rewrite moves the call further away, because now the real thing has to live up to draft three.
Perfectionism on a two-minute call is still perfectionism. The bar rises until clearing it requires a version of me that only exists in rehearsal.
The rehearsed version of me is calm, articulate, and completely fictional — he has never once picked up the phone.
I have rehearsed calls so thoroughly that dialing felt redundant. The conversation had already happened, to an audience of me.
The first-sentence-only script
What finally worked was shrinking the script to almost nothing: one opening sentence and one exit line. “Hi, I need to reschedule my appointment.” “That's all, thank you.” Everything between those two lines is allowed to be ugly.
Sometimes I still don't call. But now the failure is a shrug instead of a three-week saga — and the dentist gets phoned roughly twice as often as before, which is the most ADHD improvement statistic imaginable.
