A case for going off the grid

I really, really love airplane mode. I know it’s weird; I know it’s random, but when my phone is on airplane mode it means either one of two things. One, I am traveling internationally, meandering through new and exciting places armed with not much more than the ability to communicate through charades and pre-loaded Google Maps. Or two, I am disconnecting from the world and giving myself a way to be totally and completely alone. The latter is a habit I picked up from this summer, specifically a weekend when I suddenly found myself in more solitude than I even knew existed.

I was deep in the Guatemalan jungle at a backpackers’ hostel in what was otherwise a totally indigenous village. The first morning I spent there, I woke up to the smell of damp grass and the resinous wood of my hut. The patio overlooked the milky turquoise river flowing right below the hostel, and a crisp breeze would occasionally relieve me from that sticky Central American humidity. As far as I knew, no one else was around or awake. Like a reflex, I pulled out my phone to Snapchat the beauty before me to friends back home. But the top left corner had a little silhouette of a plane, and I was reminded that, for the moment, it was just me, myself and I sitting by the river. As I sat there watching the early morning rays of light landing with a careless splatter onto the water, I felt crumpled-up worries, doubts and past pains expanding into the unfamiliar silence. And that is how I spent the next hour or so, just sitting by the river and making up for months and months of emotional procrastination.

I’ve learned through my time at Duke that my extroverted nature can have a second motivation. I sometimes use social interaction as an emotional Band-Aid. Consciously and subconsciously, I choose to distract myself from facing my personal problems by being with other people and therefore being outside of my own head. I prefer conversations with friends where we are discussing their lives rather than my own, and even with my closest friends, I have a hard time not freezing up when someone happens upon one of those bruises and unwittingly presses. I’ve allowed other people to take up so much of the emotional space in my life that there is little room for me to process my own thoughts and experiences.

I see social interaction being used as a crutch even in the way that we are sort of tragically glued to our devices. When we wait at the West bus stop, rather than just stand in silence and think about our day, we pull out our phones with an alarming automaticity and scroll through the same news feed stories we just scrolled through three minutes earlier in the Au Bon Pain line. There’s nothing new there, but it fills the void. When we are at dinner with friends and there’s a lull in conversation, we reach for our phones. The first thing we do when arriving at a place is inquire about the WiFi password. It’s like we are so externally wired that we are losing touch with the ability to handle silence—and in turn, the ability to handle solitude. It speaks to the trend that we can’t tolerate any sense of disconnect because in such an interconnected world, just yourself too often feels insufficient.

During the transition from a 25 mph summer to the familiar 100 mph life at Duke, I longed for the comfortable weight of solitude that I had embraced in Guatemala. As a result, airplane mode is no longer something I just use when traveling outside of the country but also a means to literally disconnect from all the tugs of the world. It’s my way of traveling to a place in my mind with fewer to no distractions, a place where things I’ve pushed aside now have to take the stage.

Off the grid alone time is important. How can we understand ourselves as individuals if everything we know about ourselves is in relation to what we do to stay busy? How could we possibly be able to figure out who we are, what we want and where we’ve been without granting ourselves the emotional space and time to just deal with all of these questions? Why do we expend so much effort into finding community that make us feel understood and so little thought to finding comfort, fulfillment and understanding within ourselves? For me, I find emotional space through closing my laptop, putting my phone on airplane mode and, for just a little while at least, being totally off the grid. It is my hope that each of us can find our own venue for processing what it feels like to be alone and take that step towards better self-care.

Debbie Shim is a Trinity senior. This column is the fifth installment in a semester-long series of biweekly Thursday columns written by members of Peer for You. Message a peer responder anytime and receive a response within 24 hours.