Losing My Religion
“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.” ― Hanif Abdurraqib
It happened slowly, my cell phone religion. It was the early aughts. Some people had cell phones and others didn’t. My boyfriend (now husband) really wanted me to have one. He wanted an upgrade from his pager (insert laughter here) and so he got me an early generation cell phone. But I wasn’t devoted to it.
I used my Razr to call people, but I still had a landline. I answered it, when I heard it from the depths of my school bag. There were no text chains or group texts. My Razr wasn’t a portal to social media or news updates. I had Facebook, but I checked that from my laptop. I used mapquest to scribble directions onto paper, and there was no twitter or instagram, tiktok or snapchat.
I don’t know when I started to genuflect at the screen, but I know had to do with repetition. I started checking, picking up, being alerted to the constant notifications, the buzzes and pings of all the texts, group chats, calls, and social media alerts all coming from the little handheld computer I stowed in my pocket. I used the GPS maps to get around the world and with all of that repetition, my phone became a sort of religion. Still, I never intended to become so devout.
So, I’m thinking about the move back to phone free classrooms as a kind of apostasy. I’m leaving the religion of something I have done repeatedly for too long. Hanif Abdurraqib contemplates this idea in his essay collection, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, “With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.” This cellphone repetition is not working for me, yet I have continued to return to it. We all have.
On February 18, the opportunity of phone-free schools is a chance at a phone-free-er me. I’m looking forward to the spaces that will emerge, to a new religion I can learn to repeat. What might take the place of the screens as we turn away from them?
Can you take a minute? Who knows what we might find.