We quiet persons should send an email now and again, or we’ll wither up and fade away. It’s true. And I speak as one who loves to reach for the stationery, jot down a few life updates, place the postage on an envelope, and mail to a friend. Stationery is to quiet what Chamomile tea is to calm – it’s a way out of a tunnel – and yet an email is better.

Such a quick gift – a piece of handcrafted writing, in an email that is not Spam, waiting in our friend’s inbox when she logs on to her home computer even after working on one for nine hours during the day at her grueling job. They don’t need to be long, just sincere. She can choose to save them, print them, or delete them.

We need to email, otherwise nobody will listen to our voice. They will only have fond memories of us as A Nerdy Person, because, frankly, we aren’t the brightest light at a party, we lack the boldness to make ourselves known and say, “Hi, let me introduce myself, I’m Mimi Milton.” Mostly we wait by the wall for others to notice and approach us.

Email doesn’t obligate the quiet person to engage in small talk either, as does the telephone. It affords you the luxury of putting an end to lengthy, one-dimensional conversations with Miss Chatty Watty. It spares you the guilt of having to respond repeatedly with, Yeah, Hum, Ah, Oh, and I See.

So a quiet person sits down to type an email. To be listened to by another person – to share and express freely on the screen – to keep in contact without the added cost. To extend ourselves to others through an outlet of written words, when our normal tendency would be to stay in the shadows.

Same thing that moves a friend in Colorado to direct her mouse to open her email and respond to it moves us to take the time to send one. We want to be heard. We want her to know about school, the financial hardships, the new man in our life, and we want to say a few things that might be forgotten in a letter: Let’s plan on going to the Jazz Festival in New Orleans this July 4^th.

The first step, prior to sending an email – learn to manage your email account. Stop deleting everything without reading any of them. The only emails that should be eradicated immediately from your inbox are those that you have tried continuously, and without success, to have your address removed from their websites email list.

The annoyance we feel when we pull up nothing but foreign names from unwanted links to unsightly sites makes it harder to sift through and spot the friendly-familiar dot net’s, dot com’s, and dot edu’s. We have now become frustrated and our response may be less than enthusiastic. Our friends deserve better so just wait until you are in a lighter mood before sending a reply.

Email is fun. Some of the most inspirational and uplifting emails are deleted in frustration and haste. So don’t review the entire contents of your inbox when you are in a rush, just wait until you have sufficient time to look it over thoroughly.

Now you are ready to begin.

Type the greeting. Email is less proper than letter writing so almost any salutation is appropriate – Dear You, Hi, Hello, Hey, What’s Up, What’s Shakin’, How’s it Hangin’, You – then crack your knuckles and dive right in. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or punctuation that’s what spell check is for. Be free. Be yourself. Be an example to your friend of what kinds of email you want to receive in return. Tell her where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing, who you’ve talked too lately, and ask how things are in her world.

When you have additional time, sit for a few seconds ready to respond to that one particular friend who normally forwards nothing but attachments that have been around the world and back again. Let your friend come to your mind and picture how you would tell her in person, “Stop sending me attachments that I’m not going to read. I’m too busy for that.” Don’t be afraid to limit what a friend emails to you. It’s your inbox, take control of it.

Keep in mind that email is not confidential. So avoid typing anything that has the potential to cause embarrassment to you in the future. If you can’t write it on the back of a postcard, refrain from putting it in an email.

Don’t worry about form. It’s not a process, argumentative, or critical essay. When you come to the end of one line, you can either continue typing or drop down a few spaces to start on another subject. You can go from several lines complaining about men to a disappointing mid-term grade to how an assumed friend stabbed you in the back to the fact that you wish you could win the lottery to your ultimate goals for the future. The more you type, the more you find you have to say, and when you have a True Cool Friend to respond to, a kinship, a sister-friend, then it’s like making the decision to walk as a form of exercise, you just slip those sneakers on, step on the pavement and put one foot in front of the other.

Don’t type in all capital letters. This signifies that you are yelling at the person to whom you are responding. Be creative. Color-code your lines, use emoticons to emphasize how you want your feelings interpreted, italicize a word or group of words, use a different script, a different font, put an important point in bold lettering, just let the email flow from within.

Probably your friend will laugh a little at your email, maybe even cry. She may even decide to print it out as a future reminder to you of the date and time you declared for the umpteenth time, “I’m through with men! I’m going to practice celibacy! I’m going to be content by myself!” when you email her again about some guy you’ve met.

You can pick up a pen, and some stationery, and tell someone about the here and now, but by the time the sealed contents reaches their mailbox it will be old news. For immediacy, just sit down at your computer, go to your inbox, click on new message, and start typing.