My Amygdala Thinks Zoom Is a Hostile Environment

The Librarian, the Gremlin, and the Zoom Call

“Would you be willing to share in an upcoming meeting?”

Sure. Of course. Happy to.

My nervous system: absolutely not.

It’s amazing how quickly a group of friendly authors on a Zoom call can feel like I’ve been called to testify before Congress. No subpoenas. No hostile cross-examination. Just coffee mugs, decent lighting, and someone’s cat stepping across the keyboard like it owns equity in the platform.

There’s still a part of my brain that hears share and quietly reaches for the emergency exit. This would be mildly entertaining if it weren’t rooted in something very real.

Years ago, stress shut my voice down. Not in a poetic “I’ve lost my voice” way. In a literal, neurologist-involved, Botox-in-the-throat way. I was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder that made speaking increasingly difficult under stress. This is deeply inconvenient when your job involves talking to clients without sounding like you’re negotiating through a kazoo.

The injections were an experience. There’s something about having a needle involved in the machinery of speech that really clarifies your life choices. Meetings became endurance events. I could feel my throat tighten in real time, like the librarian in my head had slammed the filing cabinet shut and left an overcaffeinated middle-management gremlin in shoulder pads running the switchboard.

That would be my amygdala. It does not believe in calm.

What made the whole thing harder was that the reaction wasn’t something I could simply reason my way out of. My body had apparently reached its own conclusions about certain situations and saw no compelling reason to consult me.

I eventually left that career and spent a long time recalibrating. Therapy came later, including DBT and EMDR, and the work is ongoing because nervous systems do not operate on an iOS update schedule. You don’t wake up one morning to a cheerful notification announcing, Congratulations! Threat detection has been downgraded.

Things improved. A lot. My voice stabilized. The panic softened. I moved into writing full time, a profession that generously allows me to speak in paragraphs without anyone interrupting me or asking for a Q3 breakdown.

And yet a casual “Would you be willing to share?” can still light up the old circuitry like it’s been sitting in a dusty drawer next to a Lisa Frank folder and an unpaid Blockbuster late fee.

I write about systems, AI, optimization, unintended consequences. I can hold entire fictional worlds in my head without blinking.

Apparently the screen-share button is where my internal firmware draws the line.

For a long time, I thought the goal was to eliminate that reaction entirely. I imagined becoming the breezy version of myself who says “Absolutely!” and means it all the way down to her mitochondria. I’m starting to think that was the wrong assignment.

Some parts of us run older architecture. They were built for a different season, and they do not particularly care that everyone on the Zoom call is nice. They hear performance and respond with whatever kept us functioning the last time performance felt dangerous.

So instead of trying to rip out the wiring, I’ve started asking a smaller question: What would doing this well look like?

For me, it looks like sharing the thing and then stopping. No overexplaining. No sprinting through the answer. Definitely no opening every tab in my brain like we’re doing a live demo. Just finish the thought.

If my voice wobbles, it wobbles. If my heart rate spikes, it spikes. That’s information, not prophecy.

The body keeps logs. Mine remembers a time when speaking carried real stakes. It remembers tension, effort, and the experience of trying to force sound through resistance. I don’t need to pretend those records vanished just because my life changed.

I also don’t have to hand them the agenda.

Therapy, for me, isn’t a finish line. It’s maintenance. It’s learning how to function even when some ancient alarm system is humming in the background like a dial-up modem trying to connect. Sometimes that means doing the thing while the alarm is still making noise.

So I’ll share at the next meeting. I’ll say what I came to say, and when I’m finished, I’ll let the silence sit there without trying to rescue it.

If my brain wants to draft an internal memo afterward, that’s fine. I just don’t have to sign it.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one running 1998-era threat-detection software in a 2026 world. If you’ve got a stern librarian and a gremlin arguing over the switchboard in your brain, welcome to the club.

We meet on Zoom. Screen share optional.