Methaphone

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When rock bottom came, I was all sweaty and thinking about TikTok. All week I’d been battling some sort of virus, or maybe it was a respiratory infection. What I knew for certain was it had started on Tuesday evening with an aching throat, graduated to an initial mild fever and lots of snot, then ebbed away by Friday. Sure, when I awoke on Saturday my chest was unbelievably tight and it hurt to laugh but maybe that was just anxiety?

It was not just anxiety and over the course of the day, the chest pain wrapped itself around my torso and spread across my back too, tangling with an existing, persistent twinge on my lower right side, just above my glutes. By the last stop I managed on the birthday pub crawl I happened to be attending, I was hunched over like a mid-20th century Disney crone. I dragged myself over the bar’s threshold and decided that five hours in, felt reasonable to partake in my first — and last — alcoholic drink of the evening, a deliciously fresh spicy margarita.

Who’s to say whether the chemical reaction of tequila and influenza sparked a brand new phase of illness, or whether the virus was just waiting until my body was tired enough to stage another attempt to hack my cells? Regardless, within 30 minutes, I had quietly Irish exited the event to get some food, and then realised I needed to return home, immediately, because spicy as the margarita was, it probably wasn’t responsible for how hot my forehead was getting.

Then there was this weird limbo period where my body decided whether to fully crash or just be like, bearably ill. I maintained functionality at this point, hauling myself into the shower, filling up my water bottle and Googling ‘back pain and chest pain sort [sic] throat’. ‘Acute bronchitis’ was the diagnosis returned by the internet. Increasingly feverish, I took in the symptoms. They all chimed. I just had to wait it out, the Google’s little AI summary said. I did not fact check this.

Rather, I thought: Now that’s sorted, I’m going to use my last remaining braincell to read a Substack. On my laptop no less; it was propped on the bed because I had intended to watch a movie but my movie receptors had been blitzed by the bronchitis. I wish I could explain the logic of why it was easier to peruse a dense Substack essay than watch Meg Ryan despise her way into Tom Hanks’ arms, but there isn’t any logic because it was a cognitive process generated by the mind of someone whose entire internal workings were engaged in battle against viral infection.

Anyway, the essay I read was by Sam Kriss and it was about giving up your phone. I should do that, I thought as I came to the end and then my body decided to totally reboot and I barely had the time to close the laptop and place it on my desk before the fever claimed me.

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My phone has been my primary partner since I was 14. It feels redundant to recount the entire journey we’ve been on because Kriss does it far better, and it’s likely that most of you reading have also trodden the same path. I’m quite obviously an addict.