Yesterday, I accidentally ran my brand-new iPhone through the laundry.
The whole cycle.
Amazingly, it still worked. Until sunset, when it didn’t.
I followed the instructions — stood it upright, sealed in a container with silica packets, and waited. About fourteen hours.
When I took it out, it worked perfectly.
It’s still on. So far. Yay! But also… not so yay.
Because during that brief window without my phone, I noticed something unexpected: I was hoping it wouldn’t work. Hoping I could live phone-free for a few days longer.
Maybe I’ll do a ‘dry January’ - but instead of giving up alcohol (I don’t drink) I’d give up my phone. I mean, I’d still use it for calls and checking my bank balance but maybe delete the social media apps. And maybe leave it downstairs when I went up to bed. No New York Times games in the bathtub. No checking the time all night. I could get a clock — I used to have one, green numbers glowing beside the bed.
Maybe I could walk without dictating what I was seeing into an app.
I could just… look around. I could just … be.
Last night, phone-less, I fell asleep after reading the book that had been waiting on the side of the tub for months — a book I’d been meaning to start but hadn’t gotten to. Distracted by the crossword, the final check on emails, Substack notes.
I slept later than usual — late — and woke full of dreams. As I opened my eyes, a single thought was there, clear as a bell:
Oh. I see what’s wrong.
I am living inside of Trump’s name.
(Releasing the Enemy — November 2016)
2:28 p.m. Day after the 2016 election.
The spell breaks.
Oh. I realize. Oh.
For the past ten months, my attention had been captivated by a name — and by a person I had never been interested in before. I’d never watched his show. I wasn’t impressed by the buildings I passed each time I drove to Manhattan. He was a blip, a commercial interruption in the flow of the world.
And then suddenly, I couldn’t stop watching.
I didn’t see it at first. I only noticed that when I woke in the morning — instead of my own thoughts, instead of the bright thread of guidance that usually greets me — there was a NAME in my mind. Heavy block letters. Solid. Immovable.
How did that get there?
I’d pad to the kitchen to make tea, forgetting the dream I meant to write down, the email I meant to send. My intuition, usually fluid and accessible, felt blocked. I couldn’t seem to see around the name.
The NAME sat in my consciousness all day. The work that mattered could wait. First, I needed to watch. To track. To stay alert.
I thought I was being responsible.
Then, one afternoon, the NAME let go of me.
I no longer felt compelled to fight it or remove it. Instead, a numbness set in — followed by grief.
When I let the grief rise, I didn’t find only the loss of an election. I found something deeper: the grief of having evacuated my own heart for ten months.
Ten months of hypervigilance. Ten months of holding my gaze on an enemy, believing that if I watched closely enough, I could keep the world safe.
As if I was supposed to save it.
As if the world needed saving.
And then I saw the pattern.
This was an old one — learned when I was small — the belief that if I could track the dangerous figure closely enough, I could control the outcome. That my safety depended on vigilance. That love required constant monitoring.
I woke up. I made tea.
And as I drank it, I realized the NAME was gone.
I wept — not for the election, but for my emptied-out heart.
For how far I’d strayed from my own life while telling myself I was protecting it.
My heart had been whispering all along:
This war is not real.
That name is not your enemy.
Return your gaze to love.
I have never been so grateful for my sisters, my children, my husband. For the voices of friends calling and texting so we could hear one another breathe.
When I turned my gaze back to love, love returned to me.
I let go of the enemy — and it let go of me.
Letting go of the enemy doesn’t mean yielding or giving up. If anything, the opposite happens. It means returning — from distraction and distortion — to what’s actually here. Returned, you find yourself again at the threshold of your own life.
And now I’m curious: how are you holding all of this today?
If you want to, leave a note — even a single word.It only takes one breath to return. Another to settle.
What do you notice when you do?
but HOW to let go/let be ???
This essay is deserving of publication in a big newspaper or magazine. Maybe that doesn't appeal, but it is.