I Wrote 7,500 Words in One Weekend (After Deleting Most of My Apps)
Sometimes I wake up with my phone in my hand.
When it’s not there, the ghostly feeling of it is. My fingers curl into a permanent C-shaped claw, imagining that they are holding it.
I’m brave enough to admit that my phone has become an addiction— something that I cling to all day, every day.
At work I check it for text messages. In the evenings, I watch YouTube or Netflix while I cook dinner, clean the apartment, do laundry — anything.
In the dead of night, I find myself trapped on YouTube Shorts (a symptom of having deleted TikTok and Instagram weeks before), desperate for hours and hours of short-form content to help me feel connected with the outside world.
I’m never not indulging in something, and it’s made my body ache like a rotten tooth after too much sugar. My eyes, my hands, even my neck.
I’ve gained weight. I feel like I’ve lost brain cells.
Before two days ago, I felt like I was really struggling — like there was no way out.
Committing to the Bit
On Thursday afternoon, after a long day of staring at a screen for work and then rotting my brain on the couch watching YouTube Shorts, I decided that something had to change.
That night, on a long phone call with my best friend back in Michigan, I tell her I want to do something. Something I had been dreaming about for a month now.
Something drastic.
“I have this idea,” I tell her over the sound of the shower water running.
“What?” she asks, the static sound of the phone echoing off the bathroom walls.
I sit on the bathroom counter and wait for the water to heat. I kick my legs and decide.
“I’ve been thinking about living like it’s the 90s.”
“What does that mean?” she asks.
“I want to pretend like the internet sucks, and the only thing I can do on the computer is either write a novel or play Solitaire. And I want to delete all my phone apps.”
“No way,” she says, laughing.
“I mean it! I’m only gonna keep Maps, my music and audio books. But other than that, my phone is going to be just a phone.”
And a calendar, and a texting machine, and a way for work to reach me, but still…
“Wow,” she says, skeptical. “Sounds like a plan.”
“I think you should do it with me,” I say.
My best friend also suffers from the same phone addiction that I, and nearly everyone around me, does. When we used to live together I would watch her come home from work, cook, and sit down with her phone and stay on it for hours.
That’s what I do now. But I don’t want to anymore.
“I dunno,” she says.
“Well, what if I do it and tell you how it goes? I’m thinking like… two weeks.”
“Definitely,” she says. “Let me know how it goes!”
We chat for another half hour and then hang up. Both of us have to work in the morning. That night, I delete everything. I delete everything, including Netflix, Tumblr, YouTube, Hulu — anything I can think of.
Uninstall?
Yes.
How It’s Going
My novel’s second draft was at about 500 words on Thursday night. Now it’s Monday morning and I’m at 8,000 words.
Between Thursday night and now, I had also:
- Got all my Friday work done on time
- Gone to the pool
- Bathed in the sun
- Exercised
- Consolidated clutter and gave some away
- Took the dog on long walks during the cooler hours of the day
- Wrote this essay
And let me tell you — writing this essay? Would usually have felt impossible.
But I feel good. My brain feels a little less noisy, my hands ache a little less — well, except for all the typing. My current WIP novel is now in the forefront of my thoughts and I feel like a writer again — someone who isn’t always “finding the time” or “struggling through writer’s block” to get words on the page.
But I’ve had some weird moments, too.
It’s Not Easy to Kick an Addiction
You have no idea how many times I reached for my phone these last few days. I literally didn’t even know I’d picked it up until it was in my hand, searching for Netflix like some kind of zombie.
I found myself craving content like I do sugar. Like when I bake a batch of brownies and find myself in the kitchen digging into the pan, with no knowledge of how I’ve gotten there, even though I’ve already had four today.
It’s scary, kicking an addiction. But I’ve done it before.
During the pandemic I would drink about six shots of espresso a day, holed up in my house, while I got my freelance writing career off the ground. After one large panic attack thinking my heart was going to explode, my doctor said I should quit caffeine, and so I did.
You would not believe the withdrawals. I had to sip black tea for a week just to stave off the worst of the migraines. After they finally went away, I quit full caffeine and chose decaf everything.
Decaf tea, decaf coffee, decaf chocolate.
Do you know how much more caffeine is in dark chocolate vs. milk chocolate? Double the amount. 100% more.
But once I can discover where a problem is coming from, I pride myself in being ready to tackle it.
And I know what my current problem is…
“…Could I interest you in everything?
All of the time?
A little bit of everything
All of the time…” — Bo Burnham | Welcome to the Internet
In high school, we had terribly slow internet out on the old farm where I grew up, so I stuck to offline Word documents and knocked out (terrible) novels, fanfictions, short stories and journal entries like it was my full time job. And I think it was possible because I had far fewer distractions, less noise in my head.
Netflix was still sending DVDs at the time, and I don’t know if the world had access to their streaming system yet. We had to ask our mom for movies we were interested in seeing, and we’d wait for deliveries that seemed never to come when we actually wanted to watch them.
As for the internet, forget about it. I didn’t have the patience to wait for it to load all day. If I spent time playing on the computer, it was not from a plethora of online games, but from inserting a Zoo Tycoon or The Sims 2 disk into my grey Dell tower and pressing “Play.”
My sisters would take turns playing Animal Crossing on the Gamecube or we’d all get together to yell at each other over a board game like Risk. When we wound down for the day, we’d all read library books or sit outside on the porch swing and watch the storms roll in over the Midwest cornfields.
I feel silly, but I romanticize that life now.
Adjusting My Own “Today” to “Yesterday”
I was born in 1996, so I know I’m a little young to be wishing for “the good old summer days” when my biggest concern was to either play Mario Party 4 with my sisters or to go outside and read library books in the hammock. But I do wish for them, because — and I didn’t know it at the time — things were so much quieter.
And I mean quieter in my head.
Back then, it felt like I couldn’t stop writing. I let stories play out behind my eyes while I tried to sleep, and in the morning I would write down scene after scene, tens of thousands of words filling up blank Word documents.
I had the hunger then, because my brain wasn’t already full to bursting.
I can’t shut it up now. There’s always a song stuck in my head, or a million doomsday thoughts from reading news stories. I can hear the voices of my favorite pod casters in my mind better than my own mother’s voice.
That can’t be healthy.
I’m tired of wearing headphones and blasting the latest episode of whatever in my ears hour after hour. So, I’m giving the 90s (or, more accurately, the early 2000s) another try. I’ve already deleted most of my distractions off my phone, and if I find more, I’ll delete those, too. I don’t want to need Netflix or YouTube or Tumblr. I want to connect with people, to exercise, to write, to read.
Maybe I’ll cave early, or maybe I’ll reinstall my apps once the book is written, but for now I want to log off.
I want to be a little old-fashioned in the best way.
So, for now, we’re at about 8,000 words and counting on my novel’s 2nd draft. I don’t think I’ll be giving up on writing my Medium stories — though they have been sparse — so I’ll keep you and my best friend updated on my progress.
If anyone decides to join me, let me know! It’s way more fun to unplug with friends than to go it alone.
Happy writing!
Shelbs
Hey, I’m Shelby! I help first-time authors write and self-publish on a budget. I’ve created free resources, hosted design workshops, and I’ve just written a book about how to design a book cover layout with Canva!
