My month without the internet

I know social media is great for staying in touch. I love having an encyclopedia at my fingertips. But I don’t need it all day long.

Ididn’t understand how badly I was addicted until I was forced to go cold turkey. It happened during a monthlong retreat to Scotland, where I’d been given a chance to work on my new book uninterrupted by the inconveniences of daily life. The administrators fed me, did my laundry, cleaned my room and the bathroom and left me alone. I didn’t have to pay bills or walk the dog or water any plants. They even delivered lunch silently in a lovely wicker basket right to my door.

It was my dream of a perfect writing environment, except for one thing: There was no internet or cell phone service.

I’m not a digital native. But during those first days in Scotland, the lack of WiFi was horrible. I sat in front of my computer, but instead of communing with my muse, I was anxious, distracted, aware of my heart thumping too loudly in my chest. Classic withdrawal symptoms. Worst of all, I felt claustrophobic, trapped in a foreign country without a car or an Uber connection or the ability to Google a bus schedule.

In Scotland I wanted to post pictures of the rolling countryside and the sheep and receive all the “amazing!” and “so cute!” and “lucky you!” affirmations. But I couldn’t tell friends back home how beautiful it was, how delicious dinner had been, or how much work I’d done that day. I couldn’t even tell my spouse I had arrived.

I blamed it on a lack of access to information. That first day at the retreat, I was desperate to know the name of those little ceramic cups without handles in a Japanese tea set. It wasn’t integral to the plot of my book. No one was in Japan or even really drinking tea; still, I felt I couldn’t write the next scene without that single, specific word. Finally I realised I was agitated not because I couldn’t do research or communicate with my spouse. It was much deeper than that. I felt left out, missing what my friends were doing, seeing where they were having lunch or taking walks. Did I even exist if I couldn’t share my days, show my cyber community where I was, and exactly what I was doing? Why was it so important for me to see and be seen?

Little by little I began to work. I had to. There was nothing else to do. I put three asterisks whenever I wanted to research something, so I would know to go back to it later. One day at the end of the second week I discovered I had written without stopping for four hours. I quit wondering what my friends were doing and, more importantly, wishing I could tell them what I was doing. I was enjoying myself and I was very, very productive. I had my five fellow retreat writers to talk with at dinner about our day’s travails.

“No internet is a deal breaker for me,” a writer friend said when I told him about the residency. It almost was for me. Instead, the month without it changed me. They say it takes three weeks to break a habit. I hope this habit is broken.

I was home two days before I took out my computer and then only to organise the Christmas dinner potluck.

It’s not that I’ve become a Luddite. I know social media is great for staying in touch with people far away. I love having an encyclopedia at my fingertips. But I don’t need it all day long. That is my New Year’s resolution: to continue to write without interrupting myself. Meanwhile, my many pages of work from this retreat are speckled with those three-star indicators that research is needed. I’ve already started filling in the blanks. The Japanese cup without handles is called a yunomi.