Defying the Crowd is Resistance

I never had a smartphone. I gave up my old flip top phone during the beginning of the COVID isolation in April of 2020, while I looked for service from the most ethical company I could find. Then life changed, and I still don’t have a cell phone, of any kind.

What changed was my thinking, then awareness, in response to friends and strangers who were intolerant of my phoneless state while I took my time researching the phone industry. Friends offered old phones or informed me of free-phone programs. What made my antennae rigid, however, was the anger expressed, more than a couple times. Anger? Where did that come from?

The number one symptom of any addiction is denial. Poking at or mirroring denial immediately elicits anger. I started hearing or reading about the addiction to screens, especially phones. Almost everyone admitted it, as they held the phone to their ear or began to text.

I didn't choose to be without a phone; it just happened that way at first. People’s anger and inability to entertain the idea that I might choose not to have a phone made me drag my feet. I broadened my research. I looked up the destructive effects of cell phones on individuals, society and the environment. I wondered about mining for minerals. Immediately I was directed to website galore on how to get rich by investing in mining. How mining affected people and our planet was impossible to find, until I used specific language, and began finding studies. My integrity suggested I do more than slow down my search.

I am punished for not having a phone, making it difficult to bank or buy things online. I often find myself left out of conversations, interactions, and transportation systems. Being left out, however, is nothing new. I know the gifts of observation and insight that comes, eventually, when one can look from the outside.

Suicidal depression for decades locked me out. Hating myself because I was a girl, the fuel of my suicidal thinking, came from a complete inability to live up to my mother’s and society’s gender role for me. It was a time when we had no language, conversations or permission to mention such things. I was male in my childhood dreams, and into my twenties. I had no clue how to take care of myself or a sense of self, but some healthy unconscious pull led me to finding and befriending gay men, at the beginning of my twenties. For the first time, I was not alone on the fringe of society.

Fortunately, I no longer think of suicide. My life is full of inconveniences and frustrations because I don’t have a phone or a car or a conventional gender. My life is also saner, slower and quieter, full of opportunities for sacred life, that is life set aside from the crazy violence of the world around us.

If we grew up on better translations, we would see what a bad choice “church” is in the New Testament. “Eklesia” would best be “the called-out ones” in English. When I follow the call of my inner true self, I am called out of convention. I am called into a holy place where I live more simply, in comm-Unity, and do no harm. I am only in charge of myself, and this self cannot be complicit in the death of children who are forced to mine for minerals for cell phones.

Susam Schalle is an attendee at Charlottesville Friends, in Virginia, but a westerner at heart. Susam first attended a Friends Meeting in Sandpoint, North Idaho in 2016.