Kyle and I sat down at the restaurant, away from the children, yet I still couldn't relax and enjoy myself. I had been consistently distracted for weeks. Slumped at the table, I stared at him and tried to explain how I was feeling.
“I feel overrun with thoughts and emotions, many of them sad and discontented. My brain feels like it's being pulled in a million different directions. What is going on with me?”
After listening to my winding trail of thoughts for many minutes, Kyle replied, “You check e-mail a lot. You're on your phone a lot.”
My purse sat on the booth seat beside me, and inside my phone's blinking green light beckoned even as he said those words. He's right, I thought, immediately recalling a conversation with a group of women about our children and technology. What was it one of them had said? “When people are on their phones, they're not present in their surroundings. They're going someplace else.”
That description explained it all—the discontentedness, the obsessive comparison with other women, the uncertainty and its resulting pursuit of online evidence that I'm successful and loved, the desire for what I don't have and the wondering if I ever will, the pride. I'd only been checking my phone in every down moment, but it became apparent that these seemingly inconsequential acts of swiping and scrolling weren't so simple and inconsequential after all.
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