My phone?

It wasn’t the addiction.

It was just the dealer.

The needle was approval.

The high was being in control.

And the crash…

the crash was what happened when silence finally caught up to me.

A year without it.

No notifications. No dopamine drip. No digital applause.

Just me, my thoughts, and the sound of my own breathing, which turns out I hadn’t really heard in years.

At first, it felt like withdrawal.

I kept reaching for ghosts…phantom vibrations, muscle memory reaching for validation.

But after a while, something shifted.

The world slowed down.

I stopped checking who was watching and started noticing who was actually there.

See, phones don’t steal your time.

They steal your thresholds. Your capacity to be bored, to sit still, to wonder.

And when you lose that, you lose the parts of you that aren’t performing.

We’ve mistaken connection for consumption.

We scroll through people like playlists, skipping anything that doesn’t catch our attention quickly.

And the algorithm?

It doesn’t care if you’re inspired or empty, only that you’re still scrolling.

But a funny thing happens when you unplug.

You start to crave slowness.

You start to crave real.

Your brain stops speaking in captions and starts speaking in complete sentences again.

And that’s when you realize…

You were never addicted to your phone.

You were addicted to escape.

To being seen instead of known.

To staying busy so you didn’t have to feel.

A year without it didn’t make me better.

It just made me honest.

Because silence?

Silence doesn’t lie to you.

It just tells you everything you didn’t want to hear.