ONE SELF PORTRAIT EVERY DAY in 2020 : 294

If I go out and forget my phone I feel vulnerable, even if it’s just going out to the corner shop. All the info I need is in there. I also need it to get around as my sense of direction has always been bad but it has worsened since I have been using the phone to guide me. Also, I don’t take a book with me anymore and I wouldn’t know how to fill empty time. But it wasn’t always like this.

I was a late adopter of the mobile phone; in fact I owned one before I adopted it. My sister gave me one, I think it was a Nokia but I never had it on. I would be very embarrassed to use it in public and at home or at work I could be reached on a landline. I probably was one of the few people at the time (at least of my age generation) who didn’t use a mobile phone and was proud of it.

I don’t enjoy speaking on the phone. I remember the feeling I had when the landline rang (we don’t have one anymore), it was always “oh fuck”. Then for my 40th birthday, Katarina gave me an iPhone (the first iPhone came out only a few month previously and there was a buzz around it). I loved it, I kept making calls to a minimum but loved sending texts. I love texts because you can send messages without worrying about if it’s a good time or not as the recipient can answer in their own time. Also, if I receive a message I can decide to answer it later. The fact that I could also access emails was a bonus as I had only recently gone freelance and it was very useful to answer work emails straight away. 

I still have my first iPhone. I powered it up and it’s all still working. I checked my photos and it’s full of photos of Klara and Emil when they were tiny. This is a photo of the four of us taken by Riaz.

I AM STILL ALIVE

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