Mallory McDonald

It has happened. The worst has come. My phone whose crack I so lovingly blogged about just a few weeks ago has finally perished.

I thought I owned my fear. I thought phone and I had seen the worst and though she was damaged, we would be okay in the end. I had even come to love her cracks. But, no. Oh no, the wonderfully spiteful universe had other plans for us.

I thought I no longer needed to fear when phone slipped from my grasp. I thought phone and I had struck a deal with the universe that she would make it. I thought we had our own space of being invincible. So on that fatal fourth of July as I walked to my car to meet my best friend Jessica I didn’t panic when I failed to catch her.

But instead, the same offender as before came back to strike again–the concrete garage floor.

With my confidence in her strength (which I now see was ignorance to her weakness) I picked up phone thinking she was okay. The original crack hadn’t expanded and so giving her a once over, I moved on.

It wasn’t until further investigation aka when I attempted to send a text that I realized there was a vertical line going down her right hand side. It didn’t appear on the glass, but rather on the inside of the screen. And anything to the right of the line didn’t work when I touched it. Meaning the send button, the seflie camera on snapchat, and any letter after the ‘n’ all didn’t work (all vital, by the way). This evil little line was unbearable and had rendered my phone useless. I had to face the facts that my stupid little phone was just that and nothing more. She wasn’t a ‘her.’ I couldn’t choose to see the fall and the crack as a metaphor for life. No owning of fear, no damaged but unbroken mentality. Nope. It was dead. Gone.

And the thing is, I have no eloquent words to offer about it. Like so many things in life, be them as small and trivial as a broken phone or larger more truly terrible events, sometimes (often times) things just suck. It sounds crass, childish, unprofessional, and perhaps even a little naive. But, it’s true.

There are tons of clichés that say, “time heals all wounds.” Well, I firmly disagree. The things that suck–truly suck in this world–they never stop sucking after a certain amount of time. You never wake up one day and think, “Hey you know that thing that depressed me for months? Well actually now that some time has passed it really was wonderful and I wish it would happen again.”

You may be more okay with the sucking. You may get better at ignoring the sucking. You may learn something from the sucking. God willing you may even forget the sucking. But the fact that the event, whatever it was, sucked, sucks, and is still sucking, never changes.

The things that truly suck in this world will never not suck. You can’t–you won’t change that. What happened–the past–never changes.

You can only change you.

You can only try to not let the sucky things suck the life out of you–the will out of you–the fight out of you.

You have to consciously, logically and intellectually think of what happened and separate it from yourself. You don’t suck. You won’t be sucked into the sucking. You can change.

This is what I try to do every morning when I look at my old, ugly, ridiculous iPhone 3. It sucks and it’s slow and annoying and ugly and doesn’t have my main girl Siri (who lovingly called me Chuck Bass), and it can’t take selfies for all my snapchat homies and it takes pictures that come out looking like the dark ages. And it sucks. Trivial as it may be, it sucks. And it sucks that the universe had to target phone and I. It sucks that the universe had to prematurely end our budding love.

But, I take a deep breath and I try to think of something positive–anything positive. I know I am a little crazy (if you’ve read all my blogs you can see). But, mainly it’s just a mindset. It’s a decision I have made to look at things and find the humor, the joke, the lesson, or the metaphor in them.  And so that’s what I try to do when I look at this stupid, sucky iPhone 3.

I try to take things I hate or that suck and make it a game. I make it fun for myself, because the other alternatives won’t make me happy and won’t make the problem go away. And if that makes me a little crazy, then so be it.

There are a million things that irritate me to no end, but what can I do about the things I cannot change? Nothing. It’s like the serenity prayer, “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Although I would add a line about finding the humor.

Realistically, I don’t really speak to my phone as a ‘her.’ And we don’t really have a budding love affair, but isn’t it just a little more amusing?

You‘re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are. – Lewis Carroll

And that would be how I feel about today’s blog. It’s a little nuts, and mostly I’m kidding, but it gets me through the day and gets me through this sucky hassle of a broken phone. And if nothing else at least there’s that.