Acceptance is the First Step to Healing

Hi, my name is Melanie and I'm an email addict. Step One: we admitted we were powerless over email, and that our lives had become overly accessible.

I've been sober for one day. A Certain Introvert in my life staged a minor intervention on Wednesday night. He challenged me to go one day without email. I was permitted to check my email before I went to bed and then not until 5:00 pm the next day. I made it until 6.

It was ridiculously, embarrassingly hard.

I'm a stage four e-junkie. For sure. I probably check my email, on average, every two minutes. No joke. I can't even wait for the automatic Send/Receive setting, which does it every five.

Which is all hilarious because I really don't get that much email. So, most of my obsessive checking is pressing the Get Mail button over and over and staring at an email inbox that refuses to give up any new mail. Very unsatisfying.

Maybe I should start online dating again. Now that's a good way to get lots of email. From creepy stalkers twice your age. Meh. I'll take what I can get.

No.

No, I won't. Because since yesterday I get to consider myself to be a "recovering" email addict.

Boyfriend (a.k.a. Intervention Stager) sent me an article by Neal Stephenson, a novelist who writes geek-friendly prose in the postcyberpunk genre. (Huh? What the hell is that?) The fact is, a sci-fi novelist like dear Neal is really going to be the only place where Boyfriend and I connect on the literary front. Again...I take what I can get.

Anyhoo, Neal is a very bad email correspondent. "I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don't wish to retire at this time," he writes. He doesn't pull the punch in the title of the article either: "Why I'm a Bad Correspondent." Only the link is broken, so I can't take you there.

Boyfriend is the world's worst correspondent, incidentally. But these cats are really on to something because by not checking and/or responding to email, they give themselves great swaths of uninterrupted, creative time. "And then there's call display," Boyfriend said, rubbing his hands together.

"You don't screen my calls," I said.

"That's because I'd face your wrath."

Geeks are smart.

So, I quit the junk cold turkey yesterday and also turned off my cell phone, which felt like cutting off a limb and leaving it on the side of the highway as I drove to Canmore. Alone and uninterrupted in the mountains, I got lots of writing done. Finished reading a book. Had a pleasant dinner and watched a documentary on surf gangs in Australia.

All in all, it was the loneliest day of my life.

My former co-worker Nadine used to get lonely in between leaving the office and getting to her car in the parkade. Between the second floor and the fifth floor, she'd have to call someone for moral support. For seven years, I've used Nadine as my At Least I'm Not That Bad preamble. And I'm not. It just that I find unadulterated Melanie a little scary sometimes. You would too. I can't spend too long with her or things get weird.

The funny thing was, by 5:00, I was too nervous to check my email or turn on my phone. Because emails and phone calls usually mean someone wants something from you.

The trouble was, I needed to use my cell as an alarm clock. It seems my folks have taken their travel alarm clocks with them on their travels (duh) and that's the only kind of alarm clock they have. I switched my cell on and set the alarm.

Almost immediately, my phone started ringing. It was 10 o'clock at night. Are. You. Kidding. Me.

But then I found out why cell phones are the most beautiful invention in the world. It was the Credit Card Fraud Department from my bank and they were calling to save my Not Very Wealthy To Begin With And Certainly Not Wealthy Enough To Support Some Thief Buying Porsches On My Dime...life.

Does this mean I'm off the wagon? Mmmm. Maybe.