I have always been fascinated by the internet. I can vividly recall my first interaction with it. I was sitting in front of a PC with my aunt who was helping me pick my first email address when I was 10.

The email was for Club Penguin, which was the closest thing kids had to a metaverse at the time. It was my first foray into the digital realm and I absolutely loved it. Like everyone in the late 2000s, I didn’t have unlimited access to the internet. It was mostly monitored and rationed. Between the computer at my grandmother’s house and the laptop at home, I devoured whatever little time I got online.

The multiplayer games gave me my first taste of curation, taste, and friendship. I discovered easter eggs, tried out dress-up games, explored Fantage and Poptropica, and built tiny digital worlds. These were worlds I could return to when the real one felt loud or boring or just a little too much.

What made those early digital spaces feel magical wasn’t just their novelty, it was their finiteness. You logged off. You closed the laptop. You went outside and forgot about your puffle for hours. The internet wasn’t yet the default state of existence; it was a treat, a thing you visited rather than lived in.

And then, like some kind of cursed graduation, I got my first phone.

We all want dumb phones now. But when I got a brick with a clunky keypad, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I could barely even text on it. It took seven minutes to craft a single SMS, painstakingly pressing the same number thrice to get the right letter. Meanwhile, everyone else had smartphones. Blackberries. Touchscreen devices that clicked and beeped with an elegant fluidity.

So, naturally, I did what any self-respecting teenager would do. I tried to make it look like it was mine. I stuck a heart sticker on it. Just one. Then I bedazzled it but not too much, just enough to make it bearable. I even figured out how to load a memory card with my favorite songs, transforming it into a music machine. In exchange for dealing with the dumb phone, I was granted the privilege of a Facebook account. I didn’t really care about Facebook. But I needed it, because everyone else had it. I needed it to keep in touch with my old friends, after I switched schools. It wasn’t until years later, after losing touch with absolutely everyone from that school, that I realised: we all created those accounts for such specific purposes and somewhere, along the way, they stopped being about that.

Eventually, I got my first smartphone. It was sleek, shiny, and everything I had dreamed of. But, the moment I got it, I knew I didn’t like it. Well secretly, I loved it. With my new toy, I could take pictures. And not just keep them in my phone. No. I could post them. I could send them to people. I could look at their pictures, at their carefully curated lives. I could text them all night long, slipping into the abyss of conversations with no end. And I did. I slipped through.

The freedom, that endless scrolling freedom, made me feel a little… dizzy. Nauseous even. It’s funny. I didn’t know what dopamine was at the time, but I knew something wasn’t right.

We all are oh so familiar with that feeling: that itchy, restless guilt when you reach for your phone during a lull. My thumbs developed muscle memory to unlock my phone. But I don’t give up very easily.

I planted digital trees like a woman possessed. Each 30-120 minute stretch of focus sprouted a pixelated tree; each lapse killed one. I was #2 on the leaderboard during their early days. I even bought the premium version in hopes that it would add an additional layer of accountability. It worked, for a while. Forest became one of my favourite apps. But eventually, even that started giving me anxiety. I’d panic every time I planted a tree. What if someone messaged me and I couldn’t reply because the wisteria still needed 45 minutes to grow?

At the same time, I started tracking my screen time obsessively. I love data. My attempts to cut down phone usage became a full-blown experiment. I followed my weekly reports religiously. “You spent 37 hours on Instagram. Up 12% from last week.” I’d gasp and then immediately open Instagram… to complain about it. If you're going to ask me whether I tried 'Turn your screen grayscale!' 'Delete your account!' or 'Just... put it in another room?' Well, I did. None of it stuck. The phone always won!

Then I watched The Social Dilemma in 2020. Tristan Harris became my unlikely crush. There he was, explaining the sinister ways in which big corporations were trying to hijack our attention, and he felt like a knight in shining armour, here to save me from myself. I uninstalled everything in a fever dream of moral clarity.

This was during peak COVID, when time felt blurry, days melted into each other, and the internet was both our lifeline and our downfall. Our screen time was soaring, and I was trying desperately to anchor myself.

All these attempts, though unsuccessful, were also successful in a way. They pointed to something important: I was constantly evaluating my relationship with the internet.

We love the narrative of the reformed smoker and the sober alcoholic. But the internet is unlike any other substances that we know. It is the world we live in today, it is the water we swim in. It is the currency of our friendships and the archive of our memories.

So I stopped trying to “quit.” Instead, I asked:

• What if I saw it as a place of play and creation, like my 10-year-old self did?

• What if I replaced the infinite scroll with something finite and slightly useless? (I memorised all the flags of the world. I can identify Bhutan’s dragon banner from across the room and can spot Tuvalu’s flag from a mile away. This impresses no one.)

• What if I accepted that some days, I’ll still fall into the algorithmic abyss and that’s okay? (Relapse is part of recovery. Sometimes you need to watch 17 cake-decorating shorts, 15 reels of strangers running a marathon in a row to remember you’re alive.)

I’ll always love the internet. How could I not? The goal was never purity, anyway. It was sovereignty.

I also hope you will stick around! Subscribe and do a little dance when a newsletter lands in your inbox. Perhaps, leave your scarf here for now and come back for it later? I draw here, I leave crumpled notes here.