Kimberlee K.

This is something I’ve been saying to myself on the weekends.

Especially when I have an open day to spend at home.

I leave my phone on the charger in my bedroom, and it stays there.

Any calls or messages are sent to my FitBit, and I will respond if necessary, otherwise, nothing, I am not spending time with my phone today. It is there and I am here. Away.

I need to hear myself think, need to allow myself to be bored. I need to be able to watch the minutes and hours tick by rather than have them disappear as I scroll. I need to let my mind follow the ideas that are shoved down when I open Instagram; need to feel the feelings that go numb when I watch a video and then another and then another. I need a break.

But first, I’ll need to avoid the traps.

The inviting steps into the quicksand.

Maybe I want to play the Wordle and Connections as I eat my breakfast, let me just grab my phone real quick.

Maybe I made a chai latte and it looks so pretty, let me just grab my phone real quick and a take a picture.

The house is quiet, let me just grab my phone real quick and turn on some music.

It looks cold outside, let me just grab my phone real quick and check the weather.

I want to be productive today, let me just grab my phone real quick and look at my to-do list.

They pop up like little demands, like things I HAVE to do. But if I just wait a few minutes, they go away. I drink the latte, I turn music on my TV or with Alexa, I open the door and walk outside, I start writing down chores on a piece of paper.

Without allowing myself to scroll for “just five more minutes” and then losing an hour, I can simply just be here. I can write, I can think, I can clean, I can doddle around my apartment making myself laugh. I can dream up recipes I want to try or page through the cookbooks that are getting dusty on my shelf. I can look at the walls I’ve been wanting to decorate differently, and I can switch out pictures or jot down ideas for things to look for—maybe I’ll even go thrifting. I can clean out my closet, my drawers, the cluttered corners full of things I no longer need.

By 9:00am, I already feel better. The possibilities of a new day promise me that this is something good, easy, life changing. They say that I’ll be able to do this every day moving forward, that I’ve instantaneously broken the addiction.

But I know that when the afternoon hits, when I feel that familiar sense of worry—worry that I’m missing out, worry that I’m disappearing, worry that the weight I avoid will land squarely on my shoulders and make me feel sad, mad, lonely, and bitter—I might tip toe back towards my bedroom, my phone. Might reason that a message could have come through that I missed, reason that I’ve done well today and deserve a few minutes of mindless scrolling, reason that I’ll just spend 10 minutes or maybe 15—20, 30, okay 45 at the most—just looking. For what? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s there, in the next Instagram reel, or the next picture, in the next YouTube video or Snapchat story. It has to be, because I can’t find it here, in my apartment, or inside myself. And I need to find it, because maybe it will make today, or at least this moment, less scary. Maybe it will make me feel inspired or connected, or simply just not alone. Maybe it will be what changes everything.

Let me just grab my phone real quick and look for it.

No.

Not today.

Everything will be there tomorrow.

And even then, I don’t need it. I never have. None of us do. It was always meant to be something secondary to the real world, but time has taught us to blur the line. And I don’t want to do that anymore.

So today I’m staying off my phone. Hopefully it will remind me that it’s not something that needs declaring, something that feels like a feat. Hopefully it will just feel like being—being a person, a thing, a member of the world that is made of more than just her thumbs, a girl who holds her phone, rather than constantly tries to escape inside it.