Befriending Yourself
(is Sacred Work)
Last week, I was eating my lunch on the balcony at my local library. I tried to sit through the discomfort of having nothing to pay attention to except the sky above me and the street below me and the food in front of me… But after years of smartphone usage, my brain has been rewired to escape from the present moment in order to engage with the digital one.
I didn’t always used to be like this. For the first 17 years of my life, I didn’t have a cell phone. I was a pro at being bored. I got my first smartphone the year I turned 30. I knew that once I took the plunge, things would never be the same. And I was right. That toxic relationship has broken me—shattered my ability to be alone with myself into a million pieces.
As an extrovert, I am quite good at living life offline. My social calendar is full of Zumba classes, forest meetups, garden work days, writing workshops, and song circles. Social media has gifted me many of the connections that populate my offline life. There’s the Facebook group that introduced me to like-minded parents who enjoy traipsing through the woods with our children in tow. There’s the email list serv that connects me to my neighbors and fosters IRL hangs like weekly play dates and impromptu crepe brunches. There’s the Discord group where we coordinate who’s watering the community garden when it hasn’t rained in a few days.
My relationship to my smartphone didn’t hinder these social aspects of my offline life. It was my internal landscape that was in disarray. Like with that lunch at the library, it was the quality of my time alone with myself that I wanted to heal and reclaim.
It wasn’t the outer world that faded from view. It was my inner world that became impossible to reach.
At the beginning of 2024, I dumped my smartphone for a dumbphone. That’s what I was fiddling with while I ate my lunch on the library balcony, looking for any possible rabbit hole to distract me. Unfortunately, my dumbphone came up empty-handed and I was forced to eat my lunch with only myself as company. I want to tell you that I enjoyed it, but the truth is, I’m not there yet. I have not been magically healed, and I’m not sure I will ever be fully healed. But as Mehret has written in this newsletter, If you don’t want to fail, don’t try. If you try, you will fail, but you will also have a chance at succeeding.
This was my main aim in getting a dumbphone: to re-learn how to be with myself. To try, at least.
There was a time in my past, I call it “the golden years,” when I didn’t have a smartphone and I didn’t have a Wi-Fi connection at home. When I was home, I was 100% present. There was nowhere else I could be: no digital rabbit holes that I could fall into, no parasocial relationships or vapid “likes” to bolster my ego. And it was bliss. Those years were the most creative, spiritual, and grounded years of my life.
(I also lived alone, without a partner or small children, so silence and solitude were more readily available back then than they are for me now.)
I know that I can’t necessarily return to the golden years. And yet, I can set up my life in a way where it’s easier for me to rebuild my relationship with myself. To reconnect with my spiritual side. To befriend myself so that I can stand to be in my own company without desperately seeking an out.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not an egoless Buddhist who can sit and meditate for hours, and I don’t strive to be. But I do want to give myself the chance to listen to my inner self, rather than having my attention pushed and pulled by the external driver that is Silicon Valley. I want to put my own values in the driver’s seat, and I value the ability to sit with myself without imploding.
Removing the relentless siren’s call of Pandora’s Box—the smartphone—is a great start. I am starting to sense a slight shift in my internal landscape. The low hum of anxiety has begun to wane. I am less all-over-the-place, and more in my body. I have the mental space to ask myself what I want to be doing in small moments when I would otherwise have picked up my device. Sometimes it’s look out the window or lay on the couch. Other times it’s pick up a magazine or jot down some words on a page. This, to me, is progress.
With my smartphone in hand, I never had to be alone—and my spirit suffered as a result. We come into this world alone, and we’re going to leave it alone. It’s important to me that I make friends with the person I am inside, the one who isn’t an Instagram avatar or an email inbox. Just a soul walking around in a body, trying to be free.
Four more things to share:
I recently watched a documentary about free divers and I was astounded by these divers’ ability to do this truly remarkable act of plunging deep into the dark ocean—alone, while holding your breath, with no lifesaving equipment. I’ve always wanted to be a mermaid but this seems a bit extreme. It is clear that freediving requires a tremendous level of mental focus and inner stillness to be able to pull something like this off. Talk about being alone with yourself!
“Eating while sitting down with my feet on the floor and not looking at a screen: This habit was hard to start and tbh, I’m still not perfect at it. There’s just always a TV, computer, or phone screen calling to me at meal times! But I try to enjoy at least one meal a day as if it’s meditation, and that helps me feel connected to my body and the earth. I mean, we are eating plants and animals. We are nature eating nature three times a day! What’s more grounded and interconnected than that?”
Connecting With My Body, the Present Moment, and the Earth, Living in My Body newsletter by Jay Vera Summer
The last paragraph of this essay is everything.
“If you really want to penetrate the social reality, be sure to leave yourself enough time and energy to do things in person. Making moves offline is one of the most pure and radical things you can do now.
If you want to be a cultural critic who actually influences culture, to worldmake, make a name for yourself in the place you pay taxes.
It is a lot more difficult for the elite to capture you when you are not a set of user data but a real breathing, sweating, thinking person, taking up space in a room with your thick legs.”A question/challenge for you:
How do you show up for your community IRL? It doesn’t have to be anything big, like running for office. It could be putting away chairs after the contradance, chatting with a mom at the playground, doubling your applesauce muffin recipe and giving them away to friends or neighbors, checking out a new museum exhibit, or perusing your local bookshop.
A BIG THANK YOU to Carmella Guiol from SCROLL SANITY for this beautiful, wonderful piece! Check out SCROLL SANITY for more ideas on how to stay sane in a digital world:That’s all for this week!
Thank you for reading, and share with anyone you think may benefit.
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Until next time,
Mehret
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