Identity Crisis
As my husband and I sat in bed wrapping up our evening last night, -each with our computers out, sometimes with competing dialogue and volume -I encountered a surreal moment of an IDENTITY CRISIS. You see, my husband, while also playing games and watching vlogs from Facebook, changed our cell phone provider. This was not unexpected. In fact, we had been talking about and planning this adjustment for a while. As he put the new sim cards into our phones and logged in all the proper numbers and identifiers for each of us, he ran into a problem: my cell phone number would not transfer to the new carrier.
And so you, my reader, ask "so what?" I sat there in my pajamas, trying to watch my episode of "alreadysawthisumpteentimes" on Netflix, and I felt myself being hollowed out -a sinking melancholy washed through me. I was flashing back to my fourteenth birthday. As a freshman in high school, I hadn't expected a lot for my birthday. I understood well that the older one got, the less quantity of presents one should expect in celebration of turning one year older, yet this year my parents very casually surprised me with a trip to the local Radio Shack to purchase and set up my very first cell phone. I selected a blue, Motorola flip phone that felt a little like plastic velvet as I ran my thumb over it. The company provided me with a phone number that I despised because it had no flow, rhythm, or mathematical logic. It was mine, and it was freedom! The next Monday at school, I shared that terrible, illogical, mathematically incomprehensible number with all my friends, and I began to like saying those ten digits aloud to anyone who would listen. They took on a meaning. They took on an identity. I gave them an identity, and they were an addition to mine.
As the years went on, phones aged, cellular plans changed, texting became my central mode of communication. I went from flip phone to slider to Blackberry, and to my eventual following of the crowd to the iPhone. I also changed. I had short hair cuts, long hair cuts, flared jeans, skinny jeans, "mom-jeans", backpacks, purses, diaper bags. Two or three boyfriends, a fiance and husband. I moved from student, cheerleader, singer, dancer, actress to just a student and a dancer to a teacher, coach, and mother. The thing that stayed the same for those fifteen years was the ten digits that became me on my fourteenth birthday. I lost fifteen years' worth of me in one exchange of a sim card.
As all the readers of this blog now collectively roll their eyes, I want to reassure everyone, that I too am rolling my eyes. I've allowed ten digits of a phone number to engrain themselves into my existence. I've become so attached to the identification of iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, area code that I felt a piece of me dissipating as I emailed my new number to my family members and my children's daycare provider. And now, as I sit here lamenting the ten digits that were my identifier, I too begin to roll my eyes and realize the connection I've allowed to grow with technology. I attached myself to ten digits as though they are my prison id number. The beauty of living life is not that it stays the same, but that it grows and changes. I have always been those ten digits, but now I have the opportunity to be a new set of digits. My identifier changes and so do I, not overnight like my phone number, but in time, and at the time that all is supposed to. I must be flexible. I must reach for new ideas and conditions. I will go through changes that will leave me feeling hollowed out, but in time all is filled in again and grows back. Others will adjust to the changes in me as well, and those that do not will fall to the wayside, just as those who do not change my number in their phone will cease to exist within my digital reality. If I thought before that getting my first phone number at fourteen was liberating, consider how I feel now that I embrace my new phone number.
And so you, my reader, ask "so what?" I sat there in my pajamas, trying to watch my episode of "alreadysawthisumpteentimes" on Netflix, and I felt myself being hollowed out -a sinking melancholy washed through me. I was flashing back to my fourteenth birthday. As a freshman in high school, I hadn't expected a lot for my birthday. I understood well that the older one got, the less quantity of presents one should expect in celebration of turning one year older, yet this year my parents very casually surprised me with a trip to the local Radio Shack to purchase and set up my very first cell phone. I selected a blue, Motorola flip phone that felt a little like plastic velvet as I ran my thumb over it. The company provided me with a phone number that I despised because it had no flow, rhythm, or mathematical logic. It was mine, and it was freedom! The next Monday at school, I shared that terrible, illogical, mathematically incomprehensible number with all my friends, and I began to like saying those ten digits aloud to anyone who would listen. They took on a meaning. They took on an identity. I gave them an identity, and they were an addition to mine.
As the years went on, phones aged, cellular plans changed, texting became my central mode of communication. I went from flip phone to slider to Blackberry, and to my eventual following of the crowd to the iPhone. I also changed. I had short hair cuts, long hair cuts, flared jeans, skinny jeans, "mom-jeans", backpacks, purses, diaper bags. Two or three boyfriends, a fiance and husband. I moved from student, cheerleader, singer, dancer, actress to just a student and a dancer to a teacher, coach, and mother. The thing that stayed the same for those fifteen years was the ten digits that became me on my fourteenth birthday. I lost fifteen years' worth of me in one exchange of a sim card.
As all the readers of this blog now collectively roll their eyes, I want to reassure everyone, that I too am rolling my eyes. I've allowed ten digits of a phone number to engrain themselves into my existence. I've become so attached to the identification of iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, area code that I felt a piece of me dissipating as I emailed my new number to my family members and my children's daycare provider. And now, as I sit here lamenting the ten digits that were my identifier, I too begin to roll my eyes and realize the connection I've allowed to grow with technology. I attached myself to ten digits as though they are my prison id number. The beauty of living life is not that it stays the same, but that it grows and changes. I have always been those ten digits, but now I have the opportunity to be a new set of digits. My identifier changes and so do I, not overnight like my phone number, but in time, and at the time that all is supposed to. I must be flexible. I must reach for new ideas and conditions. I will go through changes that will leave me feeling hollowed out, but in time all is filled in again and grows back. Others will adjust to the changes in me as well, and those that do not will fall to the wayside, just as those who do not change my number in their phone will cease to exist within my digital reality. If I thought before that getting my first phone number at fourteen was liberating, consider how I feel now that I embrace my new phone number.
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