Teenage Woman: Doing Big Girl Things By Myself | #02

My personal hell is having to call someone on the phone.

One of the most consistent hardships in my life is having to do tasks without my mom’s help.

I’m not embarrassed to admit this because I believe in my heart that multiple of you all also feel this way.

Having to pick up the phone and make a doctor’s appointment, contact my Super about something wrong in the apartment, or log onto our Con Edison portal to pay a bill on my own is truly my worst nightmare, and it comes true almost every day. As the phrase I’m just a girl encapsulates, doing “big girl” things on my own has proven to cause a lot of strife for me.

This is probably a Gen-Z thing (cringe), but I genuinely despise picking up the phone to talk to another person at the other end. It fills my body with immense anxiety, and when it’s a serious conversation, I don’t know how to carry myself. I’ll take every other possible route to not call someone, whether it’s showing up to a restaurant in person to make a reservation, scouring the internet for some sort of online scheduling, or simply putting off haircuts for weeks at a time until my hair reaches Duggar Sister status.

I’m getting better at it, and I do believe practice makes perfect. Calling the lunch spot near my office to ask what the soup of the day is, three times a week for six months, is like exercising a tiny, little muscle in my brain, and one day, maybe I won’t succumb to nausea when I have to pick up the phone and schedule my next visit to the OBGYN.

Whenever I do a task like go to the post office or the dry cleaner, or even sometimes in meetings, I feel like the Boss Baby. Like a child wearing their mother’s heels, click-clacking around and pretending to be a real person. Even at Trader Joe’s, when I try to figure out what I actually want to eat for the week, and then inevitably have to go home and spend an hour cooking it for just myself, it’s hard to ignore the overwhelming feeling of not knowing what I’m doing, and the pure exhaustion of it all.

I fear that this whole thing is coming across as tone-deaf. Complaining about things that people manage doing every single day—plus the additional weight of being human and going through the tribulations we get tossed from time-to-time, I understand is not attractive. Life really can’t be that tough when I’m able to say things like “the burger at the Polo Bar is overrated.”

It’s giving:

The reality of it all is, I can still be honest about these overwhelming moments that take place during my second puberty and my Teenage Woman years, despite how minute they may be. Sometimes, you have to hit rock bottom trying to find a dentist on ZocDoc before you can really shine.

Having to go through those dark moments in a windowless basement, two levels underground that masquerades as a real grocery store, is creating a callus over my self consciousness meter. While I may feel tingling in my fingertips when trying to decide which bell peppers to get, at the same time, I’m venturing out into the world and finding happiness in things that I wouldn’t be caught dead doing alone when I was seventeen.

I’ve begun romanticizing the idea of being alone, which to be fair, is pretty easy in a city like New York. Sitting at a table and eating dinner somewhere alone with a book or just my phone is treating myself in a Carrie Bradshaw way, and I no longer let my brain trick me into thinking it’s because I have no friends. I spend hours in the park all by my lonesome. I’ll look for things to do like tickets to talks or pop-up shops that interest just me, and I still go even if there’s no one to go with.

There are millions of people who have always felt comfortable doing the above things on their own, and I’ve always looked up to them. I can’t tell you how many things I personally skipped out on because I had no one to go with, and I was too terrified to be seen by myself (who was looking at me? we may never know…). I wish so desperately I could go back and tell myself that I should stop caring what everyone else probably doesn’t even think, but telling an 18-year-old that has basically the same amount of impact as whispering it to myself in a dark room.

After I spent my birthday at Buvette, drinking a latte and reading Andy Cohen’s memoir, or went to my first seminar 92nd Street Y, or successfully picked out items from Zara on a solo mission without consulting anyone, or learned how to set up my 401k without calling my mom urgently—I felt like a real person. And I felt so happy.

That doesn’t mean that don’t I still panic every time I get an unmarked phone call, or that the idea of having to eventually have my own insurance makes me dizzy, but we’re all about progress Coffee Order. One solo-croque-madame at Buvette is one small step towards being someone who can decide what credit card to get without bothering everyone they know.

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he next installment of Teenage Woman will be out next Tuesday. Stay tuned for Teenage Woman: Going Through Your Lana Del Ray Phase at 23 | #3.