A note from the circle.
I did a stupid thing last November. I gave up my phone for thirty days.
I don't recommend it. I am not writing this as a wellness prescription. I did it because I had lost a friend, and the friend I lost was one of the people who used to text me a lot, and I could not look at my phone for weeks without seeing his name at the top of a thread that had gone quiet forever. So I put the phone in a drawer. And I kept it there for a month.
The first four days were terrible. I had not realized how many of my instincts had wired themselves to the phone until it wasn't there. The reach for it while the coffee brewed. The reach for it at a red light. The reach for it in the elevator. My hands knew where it should be and kept finding air.
By day five I stopped reaching. That was the first thing I noticed.
By day nine I started reading again. Not scrolling reading, actual reading, the kind where you sit in one chair with one book for an hour and then look up and it's dark outside. I hadn't done that in probably five years. I had thought I still read. I read the way most people my age read now, in fragments, in the bathroom, on airplanes, on my phone. I had confused reading with the act of moving my eyes over words. What I remembered how to do that November was actually reading.
By day fifteen I started to feel something I didn't have a word for at first. It was a kind of spaciousness. Like there was more room inside my head than there had been for a long time. Not happier. Not better. Just more room.
I want to be honest about the parts that were hard, because this isn't a triumphant story. I missed things. I missed a friend's engagement announcement. I missed a work opportunity that would have been nice to have. I missed the way you feel connected to people when you can see what they're doing, even from far away. That version of connection is thin, but it is a version of connection, and going without it for a month was lonely.
I got the phone back on the first of December. I had thought I would feel some big return, some rush of the world flooding back in. What I actually felt was a low-level dread. I stood in the kitchen looking at it in my hand and I couldn't remember why I had wanted it back.
I have it now. I use it. I am not living in a cabin in the woods. But something happened during that month that hasn't fully undone itself in the eight months since. I check the phone less. I read more. When I sit down to eat, I put the phone in another room, not just face-down on the table. My friends have noticed. My mother has noticed. My dog, who does not have opinions about phones but does have opinions about being paid attention to, has noticed.
I don't think a person needs to give up their phone for a month to get any of this. I think that's an extreme intervention and there are gentler ones. But I do think most of us don't understand how much of our attention is being pulled somewhere else, all day, every day, until we stop letting it be pulled and feel what's left over.
What's left over, in my experience, is the version of you that existed before the phone. She is still there. She has been waiting. She is patient in a way that is almost frustrating, given how much time has passed. She doesn't hold a grudge.
If you meet her again, be gentle. She has been on her own for a while.