Living a Present Life with the Phone™
I'm trying to figure out my relationship to the phone and I can't get up.
Every time I finally get away from the clutches of the phone™, it slowly claws its way back into every hour of my day. I would like to believe that I’ve been on a bit of a phone™ detox this year but I’m not sure if that’s exactly true. I think there are days where I put the phone™ away so that I can experience life and there are days where I don’t look at the phone™ to avoid living. This week I had 51 text messages, 15 emails, and 3 missed calls in one day. It’s easy to use separation from the phone™ as a way to get out of staring back at those overwhelming numbers.
Last week, I went on a long walk. I was listening to an audiobook and my phone was in the sling bag over my shoulder. One of the hardest things for me to learn when I’m not using the phone™ is where to put my hands. My hands swung at my sides, I gave myself a kind but uninviting face, and I dipped my head to give my fellow walkers a faux sense of privacy. Because the path is long and flat, many people pulled out their phones twenty feet before they passed me. What does a head staring down at a phone tell you? It says, “please, for the love of God, don’t approach me.” There’s nothing wrong with this signal or wanting to be left alone but, for me, what becomes a quick check of the phone™ screen to avoid a stranger becomes carrying my phone, then checking my email, then…
The phone™ is the ultimate life raft when drowning in a sea of self-consciousness. When I look at the phone™, I’m being perceived by a screen that I control. There is a safety in the organization of apps and unlimited clickable menus that keeps me happily disassociated from the world. The phone doesn’t negate feeling awkward but instead dulls the uncomfortable feeling that builds in the body when walking past strangers. Oh, I’m feeling insecure about the outfit that I’m wearing or the cluster of zits on my chin? Why not get in an elevator or sit in a coffee shop or wait in this line and play another round Royal Match?
The hardest time to avoid the phone™ was during the school year was when I waited for Eli to meet me at the stairwell at the end of the day. After dismissal, groups of teachers would circle up outside of a classroom to informally debrief. The few times I tried to join in, I recognized that these exclusive hangouts were meant for those who had spent the past eight months trauma bonding. It wasn’t personal, I just hadn’t been employed long enough to integrate into the community. So, avoiding the phone™, I would stand at the base of the stairwell, with nothing to look at, and awkwardly smile at teachers I didn’t know and staff I’d never seen. My eyes weren’t distracted by color and light. My ears weren’t numbed to the sound of a social group getting along without me. Instead, I waited patiently for Eli to come down from his room, and I paid attention to my breathing. Sometimes, if I wasn’t completely exhausted, I would try to process the complicated emotions I was feeling head on. It’s okay, I’d say to that nervous bird in my heart, not being integrated into a social group doesn’t mean that I don’t belong.
For the last few months, my gynecologist has temporarily put me on birth control pills along with my IUD as a last ditch effort to manage some cramping I’ve had. The cramping has disappeared, but side effects have popped up. I kick, hit or pull Eli’s hair in my sleep. I twitch violently when I fall asleep and say the dialogue of my dreams out loud. Often, I wake myself up with a bruised knuckle from slamming my unconscious fist into the wall. Because of this new disrupted sleep pattern, I find myself awake at late hours of the night or early hours of the morning trying to decide if I should pick up my phone™ or not. If I’m awake at five am, I’ll spend the first hour of being awake scrolling through emails, reading the news, and getting distracted by my photos app. Because I’ve been off of social media for a while, I sometimes find myself mindlessly scrolling LinkedIn, hoping for the dopamine rush of a notification. By the time I am out of bed, I have been inundated with endless media while jacking up my day’s screen time by an hour. Just a month ago I was leaving my phone away from the bed when I went to sleep. What happened to that?
Two things: boredom and the news.
The last six months of news seems to have met the “how bad can it get” threshold, reaching a head with last night’s attack on Iran. The feeling gives me flashbacks to the beginning of 2020, when I would anxiously find myself scrolling through news to try and feel in control of COVID or, at least, be informed about how it was ravaging the country. Greedy for information, I would use my early morning hours to scour the internet for new facts, political choices, and devastating death rates. Now, five years later, I find myself doing the same thing. Knowledge is a false sense of control.
Secondly, my summer has been very relaxed. I have plenty of time to read, write, draw and do all of the things that I enjoy doing in a single day. I know my current schedule is a privilege that will soon change when I get some part-time or full-time work, yet I find the open endednes of my schedule more curse than blessing. To avoid allowing myself the gift of boredom, I find myself holding on to the phone™, staring at my home screen or rechecking the daily email I get from USPS.
For the last twenty-two years, I have been more or less reliant on a smartphone. I’m okay with needing the phone™ as a tool to manage my schedule, help me remember meetings or find my new doctor’s office. What I’m not okay with is using the phone™ as a way to hide from the discomfort or become my only source of entertainment. My inner artist thrives in the boredom of a Thursday afternoon… but only if I give myself over to it.
After many starts and stops with limited phone use, I can confirm that being away from the phone™ turns the whole world technicolor. I see birds, trees, plants, and neighbors I never would have seen if I gave myself over to the seduction of Instagram’s blinding lights. Poem titles or phrases flash themselves into my mind like little EXIT signs, further pulling me away from the impulse to hide within distraction. Catherine told me when she visited that it is estimated we spend at least eight years of our life scrolling the phone™. I want to be conscious. I want to live in the experience of that time.
I don’t have a five step guide to share with you about how to lower your screen use (this message is coming from the person who spent two weeks lying about how they were able to stay away from their phone™). I’m not here to proselytize a phone lockbox or a timesaver app. Instead, I want to share the shift I am working on - shifting from the phone as a necessity to the phone as a tool. If there is no heaven or hell, no afterlife, I do not want to spend more time than I need to on the phone™. I want to spend it enjoying everything the earth offers me. I want to be the one who determines my one wild and precious life, not my targeted ads.
I want to share how I’ll be avoiding doom scrolling this week (and please share your strategies in the comments!):
Charging my phone™ at my desk instead of in my bedroom
Only relying on Google Maps when I need it instead of using maps for all destinations
Staying off of social media (I miss it so much!)
Paying attention to my screen time data so that I know where I am wasting the most time when I use the phone™
Carving out a little bit of time in my day to answer text messages instead of letting them pile up
Walking while listening to an audiobook (yes, technically this is the phone™ I know)
Writing more mail to more friends
Reading all the library books I’ve checked out
Shooting film
Eating (if you’ve been here, you know that I am terrible at eating)
Moving around
