Oh no, oh no! Slipping my hand into my side pocket and… no iPhone. Panic setting in; more quickly than from a sudden copperhead sighting. Testing that pocket once more. Maybe my fingers are lying. They’re not.
Heart pounding. Head feels like I’m spinning 360°. Scanning, scanning, scanning for that lost lifeline! My iPhone. Where are you?!
My once-precious life has devolved. Personal power has been handed off, oh geez, just handed right off to a small lump of metal. Ok, yeah, my heart’s still beating. I do seem able to think, see, and verbalize. Oh, wow, is that the floor beneath my feet? Holy cow, it is! I’m not a lost cause (just yet.)
Alive, yes, but minus my iPhone. My iPhone, for heaven sakes!
Reality check, reality check. That all-pervasive lost iPhone anxiety of mine? Allowed. You betcha. Allowed because my culture (yours, too) has veered toward supplanting my real heartbeat…..with a digital one. Trying to hold my head above the rising waters of this digital tsunami. Including all the many dependencies born of it. Dependencies such as, “I WANT MY IPHONE!”
Deep breath. (Oh heck, just take another one; it won’t hurt.)
Digression. My alter ego, who once upon a time, called herself a social worker, is knock, knock, knocking on my inner door. “I wanna be heard!” Politely insistent, my alter ego gently reminds me about one of my favorite social work-y terms. Agency. (No, no, not the IRS.)
In social work-ese, “agency” is the sense of control I feel in my life. My personal capacity to think my own thoughts and catalyze my own behavior. Me. Not my (damn) iPhone. Me. I have agency. I’m still a capable human being (well, mostly) even minus the presence of that digital thing, nesting comfortably in my pocket. My digital teddy bear.
But, but, I feel so anxious when I don’t know where my iPhone is. I can’t lie about that, can I?
Nope. But here’s a scintillating thought. You’re still the same person who, once upon a (non-cellular) time, hitchhiked through New England, climbed Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, and got lost in the Bronx, ALL with no cell phone. No beloved iPhone, should one have been needed, to bail me out. It appears I survived.
And my self-avowed cellular dependency? Just being honest, and all.
Anyone out there remember the famous old TV commercial, “Got Milk?” Build strong bones! (https://tinyurl.com/3z8uh53h ) Let’s try a similar one for those moments of lost iPhone terror. “Got Curiosity?” A reminder that finding my way through lost iPhone panic can be mediated through my own curiosity. I ain’t powerless, yet (nor are you.)
I totally understand that panic when I can’t find my iphone and I’m driving and realize halfway to the grocery store—about the only place I frequent these days—that I left my phone on my bedside dresser on charge.
I too take those moments to navigate backward to a time period when my mom taught me to read the roadmaps and then the atlas’s. I was 14. If we were heading south to Florida from New England in the fall, I learned to read the map upside down. That way the map was pointed in the right direction of south. Coming back north after school was out for summer, I’d read it right side up.
I also hitchhiked one way by myself from up in northern Maine Lubeck area, down to Kensington, NH one fall to my dad’s farm after staying up there on a commune for a summer. I was almost 18. No phones. I had barely $75 in my pocket that I’d earned after two weeks raking blueberries in Machias.
“I got this!” I tell myself, if I could do all that then…
I still have some atlas’s that date back to1991!
Did you figure out where your phone got off to?