From Group Chat to Real Friends

Names have been changed.

In 5th grade, I was diagnosed with selective mutism. Though I could speak comfortably at home with my parents and my twin sister Ada, at school I was completely mute. We were in different classes, but I’d stick by Ada at lunch. 

“Why are you always hanging around me? Don’t you have your own friends?” she’d say in frustration, back home after school. 

“I do have friends,” I’d lie. 

“No, you don’t. They don’t even talk to you. Stop following me all the time.”

My sister did want to help me, but she gave me very tough love. One of my teachers had suggested a “talking chart” to help me practice, which my sister thought was a great idea. 

Ada made her own talking chart for me on Google Docs, with different fonts, colors, and emojis. Across the top, each column was labeled with a day of the week, and down the side, each row had the teacher for each subject, and the time of their class. Her point system was one point for fully talking, one half point for “whisper talking,” and one quarter point for whispering. She would total up points at the end of each week.

She added motivational quotes at the bottom. One week it was, “Your fate awaits you! It’s OK to fail: First Attempt In Learning to be better.” She printed out a fresh chart with a new quote every week and placed it in my folder.

The talking chart didn’t help; it made me more anxious. Sometimes I’d scribble in a fake point to boost my total. Then I’d feel guilty for cheating. 

I told her that a simple “Good luck!” would help me more than the chart, but she said those were “empty words.” Ada said that progress meant actual improvement and that just wanting to improve was meaningless. She never seemed to understand how I felt, which made me feel even lonelier. 

I was pressured by her expectations for me, and that didn’t help me speak. Callie, my counselor, showed me gentleness and patience—what I wished Ada could give me—and that helped me achieve my small breakthrough. I whispered aloud reading from a book at first, and eventually I began whispering conversations with Callie. But Callie left school at the end of 5th grade, and I didn’t get a new counselor. Then in spring of 6th grade, the Covid lockdown began.

Lockdown

In March 2020 Ada and I, like everyone else, logged on to Google Classroom, Google Meets, and Zoom calls. I saw stories online about Covid-19 deaths and Asian hate crimes. Those scared me, but in many ways, I liked lockdown, particularly remote learning. 

Being pressured to speak at school caused my anxiety to spiral. Now I could be behind a screen in the safety of my home and type in the classroom chat to communicate. The fact that my classmates also had to type in the chat to answer made me feel closer to normal. For the first time, I could participate when a teacher asked a question. 

What I missed most about school was spending time with Callie. She was the first person outside my family I wanted to talk to, but she had left my school. Without her, my efforts to talk were on pause. And now I couldn’t build on the successes I achieved with her help.

Lockdown continued into 7th grade, and it started to wear on me. It was boring and lonely, a repetitive cycle of logging on and off. I could now communicate without the pressure to talk, but other than the teacher, I had no one else to communicate with. My classmates used the google meets chat to interact with each other, which surprised me. I didn’t know they were all friends. People still stayed connected with each other even during quarantine? 

Before Covid, when I hung around Ada at lunch, Amelia and Sofia were two friends of hers I liked. Once lockdown started, the three of them formed a group chat. 

One day in 7th grade, I worked up my nerve to ask Ada, “Can I join your group chat?” I remembered her saying back in 5th grade, “Don’t you have your own friends?” It felt like the biggest favor I could ask her. 

I pressed on: “You could just, like, introduce me. Like say, ‘My sister wants to join’ or something.” I mumbled, my eyes flickering to her laptop screen. 

To my happy surprise, she typed, “Can I add my sister in the gc?”

I could see the responses flowing down. My heart was pumping out of my chest. It was my first social group conversation outside my family. As a person without a voice, I now had a way to share my thoughts with other people. I typed “Hi” and pushed Send. 

 Talking to people was how I truly experienced myself—how I knew who I was.

From then on, I found myself texting in the group chat every day, a welcome addition to my repetitive routine in quarantine and a break in my loneliness. I could finally express myself and make friends. 

Those conversations were liberating. Even something as simple as “Good morning” or chatting about our daily lives was fulfilling. I liked uncovering more about the intricate lives of my new friends and showcasing my own personality. 

Friend Group

But it wasn’t enough. Texting carved a pathway for a deeper connection, but talking to people was how I truly experienced myself—how I knew who I was. With my family, I could pour out my interests and opinions, and tell stories—like the one about the disastrous birthday cake I baked myself—in a way I couldn’t achieve through text. Without a voice, I lacked some of my identity. Other people decided who the silent girl was. 

It took me a few months of chatting to tell Amelia and Sofia that the reason I didn’t talk at school was an anxiety disorder. They were extremely understanding, reassuring me that I could try talking to them with my voice whenever I felt comfortable. I was grateful for their patience and it gave me the room to make my own decision, like I had with Callie.

Slowly, bit by bit, my reserve dropped away. Our chat continued over the summer after 7th grade. 

We all got ready to go back to school in person for 8th grade. The last day of summer vacation, I thought about how nice it would be to talk to my friends, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to tomorrow.

Swallowing up my fears, I typed into the group chat that I wanted to try talking. My heart was beating rapidly, and second thoughts rushed in. Amelia and Sofia responded with encouragement. 

“Do you want to call? We can do a little countdown,” Amelia texted.  “It’s OK if you don’t do it,” Sofia added. 

I replied, “I don’t know if I’m able to, but I want to.”

I stared at the unmute button on the bottom of my screen. My palms were sweating, and I typed: “Give me a minute, sorry.” I frantically typed, “What do I say?” 

“You should say hi,” Amelia said in the call.  Hi. A word stuck in my throat for years. 

Amelia started texting the countdown. “Ten…Nine…Eight…Seven…

My mind started racing and I couldn’t keep up with my thoughts. “Six…Five…Four…”

I noticed my stomach curling in that familiar feeling of dread. “Three…Two…One”

Silence. 

I swallowed and clicked unmute. The diagonal “silence” line over the microphone disappeared.  

“Hi.” My voice was smooth and clear; you almost couldn’t hear the anxiety. Amelia and Sophia erupted with compliments and encouragement.

My body felt numb, as if all of the energy had been sucked out of me after the rush of adrenaline. I blinked, and tears ran down my face. It wasn’t because I was sad or ashamed; I was crying in happiness. 

I typed, “What should I say next? I want it to be like a sentence like people normally say to each other.”

“Say ‘You guys suck’,” Amelia suggested, and we all laughed. 

“You guys suck,” I repeated, smiling. It was the first time I ever said those words. They threw out more suggestions of things for me to say, with countdowns. My next step was to read things off the internet. It wasn’t a conversation, but it was practice using my voice. I was still riddled with anxiety, but I grew less anxious as it went on. 

These were huge steps, but of course my selective mutism didn’t go away overnight. The next day at school, I couldn’t talk to Sofia and Amelia. It took another few months to actually converse with them in person. And not until 9th grade did I have normal conversations with other people at school.

Now, two years later, it’s like I never had selective mutism. The tight hold my anxiety had on my heart washed away over time. Talking to people at school became normal, and public speaking grew easier. 

Sofia, Amelia, Ada, and I are still friends, and this summer, we went to the beach together. We all held hands, laughing, and ran to the shoreline, where we encouraged each other into the cold ocean water.