My whole life, I’ve loathed phone calls. And that’s not an exaggeration. Given the option, I would rather drive several hours to talk to someone I don’t know well face-to-face than pick up a phone and call them. And that’s saying a lot because I am usually avoidant of unfamiliar social situations as well. When I was younger and would resist calling extended family members or family friends to thank them for birthday gifts or cards, my parents treated this avoidance of phones as my being spoiled or ungrateful.

Even now, as an adult, I will immediately abandon any job posting or activity that requires answering phones (though that hasn’t always helped me successfully avoid jobs where it was required). I respond to the ringing of a phone like I’m in a life-or-death situation. My whole body tenses up, and I go into fight-or-flight like I’m facing off against a bear.

Because my response to phone calls is so intense, it seems perfectly reasonable that the jobs I hold do not expect me to answer a general line with incoming calls, but, unfortunately, that has not been the case. My first jobs were in retail, where I was expected to handle calls for whatever store or department I worked in. Even after I left retail, I still ended up in jobs where I was responsible for the main lines. My first office jobs were admin assistant positions in a few different companies. I was stationed at the reception, handling both main lines and randos off the street.

None of these roles helped my anxiety around phones, despite so many unsympathetic managers insisting I would get over it. In fact, it often exposed me to people who were rude, crass, or even downright cruel. For most, people would get aggressive if I couldn’t immediately solve their problems or answer their questions; for others, they assumed I was stupid when I failed to understand their half-explained requests, and on the odd occasion, I was even exposed to people using captive retail workers for their own perverse pleasure.

All of this is at play behind my phone call aversion, which has never improved across my life, but even without these negative experiences, I’d hardly be the only autistic person who doesn’t like phone calls. It tends to be a bit of a stereotype of the community, as phone calls strip away crucial non-verbal cues that autistic people (especially high-masking autistic people like myself) rely on to guide them through social interactions. Phone calls can also exacerbate sensory processing issues. Spotty service might lead to garbled words that are harder for autistic people to decipher. Audio might be too loud on some calls and too quiet on others. For me, these things combine with my anxiety to worsen my sensory processing disorder so that even simple conversations can become incomprehensible.

For me, written correspondence is much preferred over phone calls. Text messages, emails, DMs. They’re all better than a phone call. With written words, I can take my time to process what I see (literally seeing what’s being said also helps make it more concrete in my mind) and compose a reply. It takes the pressure off maintaining an aural conversation’s cadence while removing non-verbal cues from the equation entirely. Many autistic people still struggle with recognizing implied tone in written text. Our writing can often come across as more formal than our NT peers, but, at least for me, it’s still better than a phone call.

One of the most frustrating aspects of my experience is the difficulty in explaining these issues to individuals who may not be as open-minded or who may benefit from disregarding my concerns. It’s one thing to share these struggles with an audience that is already open to listening and understanding, but it’s an entirely different matter when trying to convey these issues to less understanding individuals.

Multiple times, I found myself in jobs where it wasn’t communicated beforehand that part of my duties would include answering a main phone line until after I accepted. When I voiced my concerns with the employers involved, I was made to feel hysterical and that no one in the history of humanity has ever had this issue. They didn’t understand or care about the struggle I was going through every time the phone rang, how hard I had to push myself to answer it, or the repercussions I dealt with for hours or even days after, feeling so on edge that the slightest disruption in any setting had me startling like a spooked horse. This lack of understanding and accommodation in the workplace can be incredibly frustrating and isolating.

I’ve written before about my experience with neurotypical people (especially coworkers) who claim they would never judge anyone for being autistic (or disabled in general), only to turn around and call me weird or treat me like I’m being ridiculous when I bring up these exact issues. The truth is, being actually accepting means accepting me at my word when I express limitations. It means respecting that I am an adult and know myself better than you. It means understanding that the breadth of human experience is wider than you can imagine and that everyone’s experience is valid and worthy of respect.

Just because you can’t imagine what it’s like to fear a phone doesn’t mean no one does. And even if you think the fear is ridiculous, unless the person has asked you expressly to help them with that fear, it is not your place to try to fix them.