An MFRW Author Post – and check out the other blogs on the hop!
Unfortunately, I’m glued to my phone. I use it for all of my various jobs, meaning I start the day on Facebook, then Gmail, then Instagram, Twitter, and Duolingo. I both love and hate the ubiquity of technology, especially given my own ties to the constant communication. And yet, I cannot deny that it makes me feel safe, connected and secure. And not just because I can call or navigate my way out of nearly any situation. Nope, because I always have a journal and I always have a book.
To say I am an inconsistent journaler is putting it very nicely. I write all the time – blog posts, novels, articles, social content and more. Where journaling is a lifeline for some, I can go months without opening the moleskin notebook that sits on my desk. That’s okay! I don’t need it all the time and as long as I’m still writing something, I’m succeeding.
And yet, because I don’t always need it, I don’t always have it. In the rule of life, when I don’t have it, I desperately need it. I’ve scribbled stories on napkins or the backs of flyers, doomed to be lost to the bottomless pit of my handbag or backpack when I should have just been carrying my notebook around. Because of that, a lot of notes and half-ideas end up buried in the notes app on my phone, lost to time, but no more so than they would have been if I’d scribbled them in a journal I rarely ever open.
And my phone serves more than the role of diary keeper. I’ve never been a fan of damning people for their preferred book media. I don’t love reading on my phone, but I’m a huge audiobook enthusiast and if I don’t have any other options, you bet I’ll head on over to my library’s collection and download something new. I always have access to new reading material or old reading material and that is incredibly reassuring. To be without a book in the event of an emergency isn’t a state I like and yet, it isn’t always practical to carry my next read around with me. Knowing I can always grab something is a surprisingly nice security blanket in this wild, scary world.
I hate to say that my phone is the item I can’t live without because some days I really wish I didn’t need it at all. But it’s not the phone – the phone is just a vehicle, a way of easing access so that I can reach my tools of the trade, writing, and reading. And though modern communication may be too fast sometimes, too connected, too inescapable, knowing I always have a book to read and a place to write, right in the palm of my hand, makes all that noise just a little bit easier to handle.