Time on your side and on your wrist but not on your phone …
At the start of the year, I treated myself to a present that if I had told my 10 year old self what this present to myself would have been, she certainly would have screamed in horror.
I got myself an alarm clock: one of the tools of discipline and punishment that was the bane of my existence for a good half of my life. It was thrown across the bedroom, shoved off the nightstand, smashed in a thousand different ways until my hand found the snooze a hundred thousand times each morning. Our disdain for each other was mutual.
And this year, I found myself making it a gift to myself.
This came about not by course of reconciliation, but because I came to realize how tired I was of sleeping with my phone. An alarm coming from my phone meant that the first thing I felt in the morning was my phone. It meant I needed to sleep close to my phone. It meant that I fell asleep and woke up with it and I really don’t love my phone like that.
So I decided to get an old school clock. One with hands to tell the time and bells to wake me up. I keep my phone in a drawer and I keep my metronomic clock tucked away behind a curtain and after this little purchase, I felt my life improve a little bit. I woke up happier. This felt like a step backwards, in the right direction.
And so then I took the next step. What can I say, I’m a wild woman. I decided to start wearing the time around my wrist. On numerous occasions, I have pulled my phone out to check the time, and instead I see a DM beckoning me, or Costar belittling me, or an email harassing me, and I don’t even remember why I pulled my phone out to begin with, and I go my merry way still not even knowing what time it is.