Try surviving without your cell phone

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Try surviving without your cell phone

On Wednesday, I left the house without my cell phone. The horror.

When I got to work at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning and noticed that my cell phone was missing, my first thought was: today is gonna suck.

And it did. Anyone under 30 knows that you just feel naked without your cell phone.

The old people reading this (people who were teenagers before I was born) won’t understand. They grew up in another time, a time when you weren’t available to everybody in the world at any given moment. They don’t understand the psychological impact of suddenly finding yourself unreachable.

So I lied. I told myself I would be ok, that I could communicate with other people verbally and face-to-face, that this is the way the dinosaurs did it.

But the reality of my situation didn’t disappear because of self-induced denial. I wasn’t ok. I found I don’t even like talking to people’s faces. And all the dinosaurs are dead (maybe even because they couldn’t call 911. Who knows?).

All these thoughts were in the first five minutes at work. At 8:05, I started imagining all the people I didn’t have to talk to.

My mom couldn’t call me.  I mean, she still called my friends and tracked me down on Wednesday, but that’s not the point. My mom couldn’t just call me.

I wasn’t “phone-less.” I was “phone-free.”

My mom is the mom who calls just to say “hi.” It can take longer than five minutes for her to say “hi.” If she even sends a text message to say “hi,” it has never just been one page. I’m not saying she talks a lot, but she probably couldn’t handle the space limitation of sending a tweet.

Maybe all generations in history, from the dinosaurs to the old people, had it easy. Without a phone, nobody can bother you. Do you even realize how much of life you miss out on because of your phone?

On Wednesday, I learned that my teacher is sometimes funny, I can survive working eight hours in one day and Justin Timberlake brought sexy back. Those were all parts of life I must have missed out on because of my phone.

Leave your cell phone at home for a change. Make it a challenge even.

What’s the worst that could happen? Your friends will still be your friends, the earth is still 93 million miles from the sun, your boss still hates you and Ben Affleck still shouldn’t be making movies.

But your cell phone will get a break from you, and you can get a break from the world. I needed that break more than I knew, even if it was just from my mom.