Flip Phone Diary

Or, how I learned to turn off the Internet in my pocket.

Last week, I went for a hike in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Tongariro National Park. I’d recently written an essay for Paris Moskowitz's Mental Hellth about my desire to kick my phone addiction and the Tongariro Northern Circuit hike, with its amber scrub brush, volcanic landscape, and lack of internet access seemed like a good place to do it. I brought C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, a notebook, and some hiking supplies. I wanted, like Hilma af Klint painting Swedish forests, to neurologically attune myself to flowers and grain pod spirals instead of the portal in my pocket.

In my Mental Hellth essay, I described how I use my phone to distract myself from discomfort. “When I’m sad, I go on my phone. When I’m bored, I go on my phone. When I wake up at night, plagued by rational fears my family in the U.S. might get sick or hurt in environmental disasters, I reach for my phone to dispel them,” I wrote. I use my phone to suppress everything from boredom at the bus stop to my fears about bird flu, and it's become so effective that I didn’t know what I was keeping at bay anymore. I went on a three-day phoneless trip because I wanted to see what would rush in in the absence of digital distraction.

The first day, I hiked though miles of burnished gold tussock with a snow-capped Mount Tongariro in the distance. I was exhausted. I sang “Black Jacobins/ I’m going to keep on dancing with the Black Jacobins” to myself over and over again to the tune of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” I visualized my neurons as burnt-out electrical wires that couldn’t handle the Internet pulses I sent through them anymore. I felt numb, like I’d cattle-prodded my brain so much that I’d deadened its nerve endings.

As I walked, Internet references ricocheted around my brain like pinballs trapped in the machine. “Why do we fall? So we can learn to get back up. Batman Begin.” I’d say to myself, then laugh like a madman. I barely remember the other ones. Turning off my smartphone turned off the spigot that washed out old content out with the new, and all that remained was detritus growing fetid in still water. I wanted to post my thoughts as tweets. I wanted to text meme jokes to my girlfriend. But all I could do was think them, hold them in my mind, then let them slip like blackbirds out of sight.

I got to the Department of Conservation hut at sunset and went to bed early. That night, I had the most vivid dream I’ve had in years. In it, I was back at my abusive mother’s house in New Jersey. In my real life, I ran away from that house at 14 and I haven’t spoken to my mother in years. But in the dream, I lived there again and discovered she was spying on my Whatsapp messages through her computer. I went downstairs to confront her, full of homicidal rage, while she cowered and cried in the kitchen corner. She was small and breakable and my hands were distended and powerful. I approached her menacingly to kill her, then bolted awake so intensely I sat upright.

The next morning I was deeply perturbed. I went on this hike with the intention of letting in things I’m afraid of, and it manifested as something I haven’t thought about in years. Before I left, I imagined I’d ponder my friends, or my relationship, or something about my life in New Zealand. Instead I thought about my estranged mother, who’s half a planet and a lifetime away. It felt like hot water bubbling up from a long dormant geyser. The next morning, I felt deep shame at my dream-desire to kill her. But then I wondered “Why? What exactly is there to be ashamed of?” 

When I was a child, my mother tortured and abused me. She beat me, threatened to burn me, and controlled my movements and communications on an estate you could only enter and exit by driving. When I called my father, who I saw on weekends, she’d stand by the phone with her hand on the receiver. When she decided the conversation had gone on long enough, she’d yank it away and cut the connection. For years I asked authority figures in my life for help, from my father, to my mother’s sister, to teachers at my private school. They shrugged it off. In America, children are their mothers’ property, and they wouldn’t help me even when they sympathized with me. Finally, at age 14, I realized no one was coming to save me. I called my father and demanded he take me in. I resolved that if he said no, I’d keep running away til the state put me in foster care.

Luckily, he picked me up. He then sent me to boarding school and got me out from under her thumb a year later. But in the years that I lived with my mother, lots of people made me feel ashamed for wanting her gone. Her sister, my teachers, and her friends would tell me she was trying her best. My family perturbedly told me “Don’t talk like that” if I got too angry about her. If I expressed rage, I was made to feel like a monster. Every time I asked for help, they forced me to empathize with a woman who regularly beat me, threatened to kill me, and told me to kill myself.

They made me feel so ashamed of wanting her to disappear that I buried it in a wordless place, so deep I could only exhume it 15 years later and half a world away. It was only on that mountain, finally alone, that I could admit I wanted to kill the woman who abused me as a child and that there was nothing wrong with that. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I wanted to be free. As a child entirely in her power, her death was the only means through which I could envision that. 

I never laid a finger on her and ran away instead. But that memory of powerlessness is why I empathize so deeply with Palestinians and women in abusive marriages. Until you live under the thumb of someone who can beat you on a whim, it’s impossible to understand how it shapes your psyche the way water shapes rock. Freedom becomes the guiding principle of your life, as orienting as a diver’s need for air, and it changes how you move through the world. If you’re lucky enough to get free, you enter the new world in a shape unsuited to it, and you build a new life on the foundations of the old. But that foundation has a well on it. You can’t tell what might crawl out of it until you look inside.

When I got home from that hike, I bought a flip phone, an alarm clock, a wristwatch, and a physical calendar. I’m not scared of my unconsciousness anymore and I don’t feel as compelled to be online. I keep my smartphone in my backpack for when I need to call Ubers or use two-factor authentication, but I otherwise try to keep it off and use the flip phone and physical timekeeping devices to stay off the Internet. I feel less agitated and like I have more room to breathe. I notice clouds at the bus stop, I’ve read two books in the last two weeks, and I’m reacquainting myself with peaceable boredom. Even when things frustrate me, they dissipate at a manageable pace rather than an Internet-stimulated one. I feel more capable of being happy.

In my Mental Hellth essay, I wrote that the shift between the television and the cell phone eras was marked by the shift in the transitive point between the body and the machine. TVs are stuck in fixed locations but phones can live in our pockets. That makes them a permanent route of administration for whatever sludge people want to feed us. I don’t want Elon Musk pumping white supremacist bile into my brain and I don’t need to be distracted anymore. So to the best of my ability, I’m shifting the transitive point. I already feel hopeful it’ll work.