The Forgotten Lives of Forgotten Phones
What I learned about myself by restoring my first ever iPhone
A couple of weeks ago, I found an old iPhone of mine sitting in a drawer. It had died a natural death all the way back in 2013. Its screen was so cracked that if it were to ever see the light of day again, I wasn’t sure I could even manage to make out what it had to say. But on a whim, I decided to see if my local repair store could fix this ancient Apple relic from my early digital days.
To my surprise, it worked.
All of my old conversations, my call logs, and voicemails had lingered somewhere within the circuitry of this dead phone for over a decade. I could even see my old notes, music, photos and videos. What I had accepted as a total loss back in middle school when its screen went dark suddenly returned for me from the brink of technological oblivion.
With the reemergence of all this old information has been an almost ghostly resurrection of who I was then. It gives a glimpse into forgotten parts of myself. So many of the memories encased within these old photos had laid dormant for years and years. Video footage of some of my most memorable adolescent days were intact. Events that I could describe only vaguely had resurfaced in fully-realized detail.
One of the most interesting things that I’ve gleaned from my old phone is just how different I used to be. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’re different people at 27 than 17, but was there really once a time where “O.o” and “XD” were a part of my vocabulary!? Does even my choice in emoji selection change with time? Did I really used to be this bad at flirting?
Some of these conversations encased within old chat boxes have forced me to reexamine narratives I’d been telling myself for years. The ways that relationships formed, the places I used to go and the people I used to call friends were different than I’d remembered. To get a glimpse into how I used to behave, while fascinating, has also been a little discomforting.
As children and teenagers, it can be easy to convince ourselves we’re in the right even when we aren’t. We can view ourselves as victims even when we’re aggressors. Though I don’t think I was ever a bully or cruel in nature, there’s a bitterness that pervades so many of my old text messages. In these old text bubbles, I can see a level of insecurity and cynicism and selfishness that I wonder how my peers were able to tolerate. It’s never felt so clear to me just how much I’ve changed.
But to explore this uncomfortable terrain has brought with it accounts of days I’d forgotten entirely. Exploring old dialogue has meant reviving happy memories. I’ve also delved back into a few painful ones, too.
It’s powerful to see, though, the way that interpersonal conflicts that once enveloped my whole world have dissipated into a sea of hazy memories. I can remember the ways in which the challenges of those years felt like burdens that would linger with me forever.
I can remember coming home from some of my worst days fearing that I could never forget what had just transpired. I can remember the tormented musings of thought that would fill me on bus rides home — the awkward moments, the embarrassing situations and hostilities I longed to forget.
But given enough time, I’ve managed to. It’s strange how you can’t be aware of the memories you’re forgetting. But when those moments we tried for so long to push away eventually do flee our minds, we’re none the wiser. So many of those days we would have done anything to forget have been slowly compartmentalized into a little box called “high school.” Even the realities that felt as permanent as the sky above our heads can fall victim to distortion and eventual deletion when the hard drive needs cleansing.
So much of the story of my life that I tell myself isn’t accurate. There are gaps, holes and inconsistencies. There are false memories and repressed ones. There’s an ocean of ephemeral vision that slips my mind each morning that I awake from a dream.
And in this old phone of mine is the proof. For this past year, lucid dreaming has been a very important part of my life.
This entire time that I’ve been having these experiences of dream control, though, I’ve been wrong about when my interest in them first began. For years, I’d thought my dream journaling endeavor began in 2015. I even remember the moment at which I decided to start.
But in this phone are cursory glimpses into dreams I recorded as early as 2011. And in those forgotten dreams are spectral glimpses into a sleeping mind that’s changed completely.
I hadn't realized I’d begun attempting to explore lucid dreams that far back. I can’t remember beginning to journal them, and I can’t remember when I gave up. But to see that my efforts to attain lucidity stretch back well over a decade was a groundbreaking realization for me.
From forgotten photos and videos, to old voicemails and texts, this old phone of mine has brought with it a treasure trove of insight into the person I once was. As odd as it is to say, to lose our phones can be losing a part of ourselves. We’re lost without our backups. We’re digital creatures. Some of us live our lives inextricably attached to these screens in our pockets. When they go dark, parts of our digital personas can disappear forever.
One of the eeriest features about growing up with cellphones, though, is the way in which forgotten parts of ourselves can linger on — in clouds, and hard drives and dusty circuitboards of forgotten phones. It’s not just information that we store in these devices. We pour intimate parts of our life, soul and personality into them.
To grow up with computers in our pockets has granted us an ability to preserve parts of ourselves in ways that were once impossible. To gain such an authentic look into my early teenaged self is unnatural. But it’s a bitter-sweet oddity that doesn’t arrive without a little beauty. The ability to back up entire parts of our lives into these pocketable devices is just one of the many strange features of our time.
The people we are today will live on in some form or another even if we die tomorrow. The days where we can begin backing up our minds to the cloud may not be so far beyond us. It’s a bridge I think we’ve already started to cross.