I was given an Ibanez acoustic guitar for Christmas when I was thirteen, and I took some lessons and learned to strum songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Merle Haggard, and John Denver. Though my skills were lacking, a whole new world opened up to me as I imitated the legendary artists I’d grown up listening to.
My playing didn’t advance much during my teens. I was preoccupied by the usual suspects: girls, sports, high school shenanigans. But I wasn’t worried. Someday, when those adolescent diversions had passed, I would have time to master the guitar.
I brought the Ibanez to college and harbored secret aspirations of serenading swooning girls on the quad, but college came with even more distractions than high school. Between varsity basketball, two majors, and some extracurricular fun on the weekends, I hardly had the energy to look at my guitar. It sat gathering dust, even more than the rest of my place—and in a house full of semidomesticated college bros, that’s saying something.
Twelve years on from college, I work from home for a consulting firm, and my job involves long days and lots of deadlines. During marathon work sessions I often find myself looking around for something that could serve as a brief respite from the grind.
The Ibanez sits right next to my desk. It’s clean as a whistle.
D.E.
Denver, Colorado
On a cold gray Saturday morning,
I wonder if it’s supposed to snow.
I sit in a coffee shop, considering the latest request I’ve received from parents who have asked me to diagnose their child with ADHD. They’re concerned because the child daydreams when they’re supposed to be reading, doesn’t complete chores, and struggles to sit still for a full school day.
Did I remember to put that medication referral through?
I don’t deny the existence of ADHD; it’s a legitimate diagnosis, and there are people who need medication and other interventions. But who among us can make their way through a day undistracted by the ping of their phone,
Who’s calling? Oh, it’s just spam.
the cry of their baby, the sudden realization that tomorrow is their cousin’s birthday and they haven’t gotten a card? Also, I dare any adult to confine themselves to a rock-hard school chair for eight hours without fidgeting.
Wait, did I close the garage door?
Adults’ distractions—work, calendars, bills, dinner plans—are viewed as practical. So we consider it acceptable to read a text during a meeting or to pause mid-conversation to answer an “urgent” email. We think of kids’ distractions, on the other hand, as trivial.
I definitely forgot to call the vet yesterday.
Their daydreaming and play are regarded as problems that need to be curbed so children can pay attention to what adults deem important. But I’m jealous of kids’ ability to replace the mundanity of daily life with wonder and fascination. What if the things we consider worth focusing on are actually distractions from experiencing the magic of the world?
C.B.
Annapolis, Maryland
Recently I found myself in the waiting room of the hospital’s emergency department. I was nervous because I knew I’d need a painful procedure. Plus I was afraid of catching something from one of the other people in the crowded area.
As I sat feeling stressed, I noticed an elderly woman who was bent over in agony, her face contorted. Concerned, I decided I would offer her my place if my name was called before hers. Then a young man entered the waiting room, saw the older woman, and greeted her warmly. Her face lit up with joy. As they talked, the woman sat up straighter, grew animated, and even laughed. It was as if her pain had vanished.
I reached for my phone to research what I’d witnessed. It turns out distractions can lower discomfort by shifting our mental focus away from pain. Interactions with friends can also trigger the release of endorphins, which are natural pain relievers similar to morphine. This young man’s attention is the equivalent of morphine? Fascinating!
The sound of my name being called pulled me out of my rabbit hole. No longer nervous, I had successfully distracted myself by reading about distractions.
Niki Smart
Cascais, Portugal
Growing up, I was taught to stay focused on my goals. “Don’t get distracted,” my parents would say, as if distraction were a sign of weakness. But as I got older—and the world around me got heavier—I learned that distraction could also be a relief.
I joined social media in high school and was quickly pulled in. It helped keep my mind off everything that was going wrong: my parents’ divorce, the COVID pandemic, police violence against people who looked like me, protests that had started peacefully and ended in chaos. Scrolling wasn’t a bad habit; it was a much-needed break.
When I arrived at college, however, that break began to turn into avoidance. I would open my phone to kill a few minutes, and an hour would disappear. I’d scroll instead of doing homework, instead of talking to friends, instead of letting myself feel stressed or sad or confused.
What bothered me wasn’t just the time lost; it was how automatic scrolling felt, like my attention didn’t belong to me anymore. I couldn’t sit with my thoughts without trying to escape them. So I started paying attention to when and why I reached for my phone. Once I understood those patterns, I made changes: I stopped taking my phone to bed. I avoided opening social media first thing in the morning. I unfollowed accounts that didn’t make me feel good and kept only the ones that inspired me. And I still let myself enjoy scrolling when I had the time and energy.
The distraction that once consumed me now serves as a gentle reminder: Look up. There is a real world here, with real people in it. Don’t scroll past.
Kaylin Jean-Louis
Tallahassee, Florida
I have a worn and stained Zen Buddhist rakusu, a bib-like garment with two straps that go around the wearer’s neck. I made it in prison, where my friend John and I started the first Zen Buddhist ministry and the first sangha, or community of practitioners, in the Florida Department of Corrections.
Once a month a Zen monk, Mitchell Doshin Cantor, came to the prison to meet with inmates, and every night after dinner John and I would gather on the yard to sit in meditation, or zazen. We wore our rakusus and used wool blankets from our cells for cushions.
In Zen meditation one leaves the eyes slightly open, gazing at the ground and counting breaths to maintain concentration. It was easy going in the spring, but when summer arrived and the bugs came out, I struggled. The first time I felt ants crawling across my bare feet, I kept worrying they might bite.
Later, as the weather grew hotter, my face became sweaty, and gnats crawled over my cheeks and forehead. Though I tried to remain focused, I couldn’t stop thinking about the bugs on my skin. I was no longer the mindful Buddhist but the squirming worm.
I glanced at John, who remained stone still. I could see gnats on his face. How could he stand it?
Finally I lifted my hand and wiped the gnats away. For a moment I felt relief, but soon they were back. I fought the urge to wipe my face again, but I did anyway. And again. And again.
Finally John clapped his hands, the signal that our meditation was done for the day. “Look at my face,” he told me.
His face was covered in gnats, but he acted as though nothing were there.
“Fucking show-off,” I grumbled.
“What did Doshin tell us?” he said. “Meditate like your hair is on fire. You have to pursue your practice with iron willpower. Our sangha in this prison is a miracle. Your practice is a miracle. But the miracle needs your commitment.”
I have been out of prison for twenty-five years, and for twenty-five years I’ve been a member of the Clear Water Zen Center. I’m proud that my rakusu is the oldest one there.
David Wood
Saint Petersburg, Florida
People like to think they’ll pass away peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. The truth is, most people die with strangers—doctors, nurses, or EMTs doing their best, breaking ribs in quiet living rooms at 3 am.
The framed letter above the fireplace was the first thing I noticed when we entered the woman’s house. It was written in bright-pink gel pen with hearts dotting the i’s.
My fellow EMT, Gabe, went to his knees and began driving compressions into the woman’s chest, while I held the oxygen mask to her face. The room smelled like cinnamon air freshener and stale heat. There was a half-decorated Christmas tree in the corner, a few ornaments hanging from the branches.
I squeezed the oxygen bag. Her chest rose, fell, rose again. Her face looked soft the way older faces do, shaped by years of being needed by people who weren’t here now.
Above us, the letter read: “You’re the best mom ever. I can’t wait for all our adventures.”
“Rhythm check,” Gabe said. He placed our portable defibrillator’s pads on her torso to analyze her heart rhythm while I poised my hands over her sternum. No shock was advised by the defibrillator, so I began compressions.
The letter hung in my peripheral vision, bright and out of place in possibly the worst moment of this person’s life.
“Let’s package her,” Gabe said.
We loaded her onto a stretcher and rolled her outside. I walked backward, counting compressions under my breath. Gabe lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, and I climbed in after it, settling over her legs to keep compressions going. The siren kicked on as we pulled away.
Through the back windows, the house grew smaller. All I could think about was the letter, its pink words glowing in the dark. On a night like this, the smallest details cut the deepest.
Alexander Hinshaw
Los Angeles, California
Nearly two decades ago my wife, Marla, was pregnant with our first child. We were both nervous. Marla’s younger brother, Eric, and his wife, Amy, had had their first baby a few months before our due date, and Marla asked them for advice on how to facilitate a smooth delivery.
Their doula had suggested Eric bring some soothing distractions to the hospital. So he’d prepared a playlist of calm, sentimental music and put together a collection of family photos, including one of Tucket, their Labrador retriever.
Marla told me how, hoping to ease Amy’s distress during a particularly agonizing moment in her labor, Eric had whipped out the Tucket photo.
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“Not so well,” she said, and we had a good laugh. Over the next few months, whenever we felt stressed about our own looming due date, one of us would bring up the Tucket incident to lighten the mood.
Nine months and eleven days into Marla’s pregnancy, we went to the hospital for her to be induced. It turns out ten-pound babies do not leave petite moms obligingly. After twenty-four hours of labor, Marla was ready to wave the white flag and request an epidural.
“Let’s try one last thing,” I said. I pulled up a picture of Tucket on my iPod and aimed it her way.
One of us found it terribly funny.
Zack Vogel
Saratoga Springs, New York
Every Wednesday evening I have one hour of “me time,” when I attend an online yoga class with other Peace Corps volunteers in Peru. I relish this quiet oasis in a week filled with teaching young kids and participating in activities with my host family.
Tonight, as I settle on my yoga mat, I hear rocks plinking against my window. Most of my students know where I live, and, judging by the snickers outside, the kids must think they’re being funny. They begin to shout, “Come down here! We have something to give you!” The noise drowns out the calming voice of my yoga teacher.
A year ago, when I first arrived in Peru, I would have thought, But this is my time. Today, however, even after hours of making cachangas—deep-fried pancakes—and selling them at my host family’s store, I go out to the street and welcome the embraces of three kids breathing heavily from hours of playing tag. I’ll miss my yoga class, but it’s worth it to chase the kids in a game of las escondidas—hide-and-seek—after which I receive an invitation to their elementary school graduation.
Here in Peru, time does not belong to one person; it’s shared among friends and family. I feel the grasp of American individualism slowly slipping away from me. Interruptions happen daily: an eight-year-old boy asking for help with his math homework, an early-morning parade marching down my street with candles aglow, the sound of my host mom’s sizzling pan. I no longer consider them distractions but rather invitations.
Frances Fleming
Cajamarca, Peru
Once, my husband left his keys on top of his lunch in the refrigerator—so he wouldn’t forget where they were, he said. He lost his passport a half dozen times. He forgot to turn off the Prius in a restaurant parking lot, and we found it beeping when we emerged after dinner. He forgot to open the fireplace damper before building a blazing fire so he’d be warm while doing Bikram yoga in our living room. Every night of our sixteen years together he would climb into bed, turn out the light, then get back up to retrieve his headphones or phone or something else he’d forgotten.
When it came to sex, though, he was laser focused.
On a June afternoon I discovered his double life: sugar daddy relationships with sex workers, “happy endings” at massage parlors, hookups with women when he traveled. He confessed to being a porn and sex addict. After he entered treatment, he became a different man—in more ways than one. No more garage door left open overnight. No more misplaced wallet. When he wasn’t juggling lies, it turned out, he could pay attention.
He promised me we could work it out, but I watched him closely. I could tell when he slipped back into his addiction, because his focus became fuzzy, like a radio dial that wasn’t tuned to the right frequency.
I called it quits and went to New Mexico while he moved out. When I returned to the empty house, the kitchen was so warm I had to take off my coat. He’d left the stove on.
S.L.
Berkeley, California
I had a crush on a girl in my middle school in Tianjin, China. She was nicknamed Little Sister Lin because she looked like a character by the same name in a TV show called The Dream of Red Mansions.
While the other girls around me giggled about boys, I stole glances at Lin. I desperately wanted to be close to her, but I didn’t belong to her friend circle. Instead of becoming her friend, I began secretly sketching her portrait during class. Sometimes I got so distracted I didn’t hear the teacher call on me. My math teacher even seized one of my sketches, threw it in the trash, and ordered me to stand for the rest of the lecture. But I didn’t stop drawing.
One day, when nobody was around, I slipped some sketches under Lin’s books. Later in class she found them, touched them gently, and then put them in her desk drawer. Throughout the afternoon she took the drawings out again and again to look at them.
The next morning Lin came to school with red eyes and handed the drawings to our teacher. An announcement was made over the school’s loudspeaker that a “dating incident” had been discovered. This was the late 1980s, and the government considered dating “bourgeois corruption.” Five boys in my class were named as suspects.
That night I couldn’t sleep. My math teacher had seen one of my sketches; didn’t she notice the similarity?
Though a “victim,” Lin wasn’t considered innocent. Her parents were questioned by the principal, and the girls in my class shunned her. Though I was afraid to tell her the truth, I did muster the courage to begin talking to her. In a way, I’d gotten what I wanted—I was her only friend.
I still wonder what would have happened if I’d admitted to drawing the portrait. Would the school authorities have been stunned? A girl trying to seduce another girl! Or would they have simply dismissed it, because it wasn’t a “dating incident” after all?
A.D.
Walnut Creek, California
During a sleepless night I stumbled on an online article about ADHD—in particular, about relationships in which one person has the disorder and the other doesn’t. It was a clinical, nonjudgmental, and terrifyingly accurate depiction of my marriage. I suddenly understood that, although I managed my responsibilities, it was often because my husband rescued me before I made a mess of things. When he groused about the distracted way I loaded the dishwasher—no doubt seeing it as evidence that other mistakes were lurking out of sight—it was because he was carrying more than his share of the mental load.
The article made me finally want to do something about the issue. I saw a psychiatrist, who declared mine a cut-and-dried diagnosis and prescribed Adderall, a stimulant that friends had told me has a paradoxically calming effect on people with ADHD. Though I worried this might not be true for me, I tried Adderall anyway, hoping to become a better, more focused version of myself. Soon enough, I was tearing through tedious tasks at work. At home I found myself putting the knives back in the knife block all facing the same direction and scrutinizing bank statements that previously would have gone unopened. During my son’s martial arts class, instead of getting lost in a book, I went to the grocery store to pick up the items I’d forgotten when I wasn’t on Adderall.
Unfortunately, I often still couldn’t remember why I’d walked into a room or opened the refrigerator, and my mind still wandered during meetings and conversations. When the side effects of the medication began to outweigh the benefits, I stopped taking it.
Still, my willingness to face my shortcomings helped me master lists, alarms, and notifications, and I became a better domestic partner. But marital tension is never really about how the dishwasher is loaded. That had only been a distraction from bigger issues. After my husband and I got past it, we started the real work.
M.O.
Arlington, Massachusetts
When my dad had a phone installed in our family’s vacation cabin in the 1950s, he said it was “only for emergencies.” The cabin was our sanctuary, and the phone was off-limits. My best friend and I arranged sleepovers by mimicking wolf calls across the lake.
At our house in the city my family had two phones. If they dared to ring during dinner, however, we ignored them. “People call at their convenience,” Mom always told us. “Answer them at yours.”
I grew up and married a man who would run through the house to pick up a ringing phone. When I complained, he said, “What if the call is important?”
“If it’s important, they’ll call back,” I said, which is what my mother would have said.
He wanted to teach our son to answer the phone. I didn’t. We compromised by using my family’s rule: No calls during dinner. The rest of the time it was up to each of us to decide if we wanted to answer. Sometimes it rang until one of us yelled, “Pick up the damn phone, please!”
Answering machines may have saved our marriage.
Now our “smart” refrigerator is dinging because my husband has been holding the door open too long.
“Where’s the mustard?” he yells.
I can barely hear him over the TV blaring bad news. Drug commercials flash on the screen, describing a litany of terrible side effects.
“The mustard is where it’s always been, on the door, right in front of you,” I yell back.
My cell phone chirps like an irritated bird to alert me of the latest environmental disaster or appeal for donations, and I sigh over all this modern technology demanding everyone’s attention. Kids these days may never know what I experienced as a child: peace.
P.O. Sweeney
Santa Cruz, California
Twenty-two years ago I was working a corporate job I hated. There was never enough to do, but I was required to bill each fifteen-minute increment of my time to a client. A colleague shared their approach: Perform one minute of work, then do whatever you want for the next fourteen minutes.
Smartphones didn’t exist yet, and our computer usage was strictly monitored. I tried reading but grew anxious about being spotted with a clearly non-work-related book. So I settled on exploring the building, wandering all fifteen floors and the parking garage. If I ran into anyone, I could say I was visiting a colleague or had forgotten something in my car.
The offices were uniformly bland, so I noticed the smallest changes. Over time I grew intrigued by a growing tear in the linoleum beneath the break room vending machine. Merely shaking the machine couldn’t have caused such damage—and, anyway, no one I worked with was the type to assault a machine over fifty-cent candy.
Some weeks later I saw a long-haired blond boy dressed in casual clothes (someone from the art department, surely), roundhouse kicking the vending machine in a desperate attempt to free his stuck Twizzlers.
“So you’re the one,” I said. He turned and smiled at me.
We’ve been together ever since. He’s the gentlest person I know, as long as he gets his Twizzlers.
Amanda Ford
San Francisco, California
My two-year-old son is with his dad on the other side of the country. I thought I’d be fine during his absence—my ex and I have been sharing custody for nearly a year—but this time my son is gone for a month instead of the usual week, and I feel the weight of each day without him.
This morning I make a to-do list of activities like “brush teeth” and “make bed.” Though I’m on holiday break, I force myself to go to my office on the empty college campus to prep for spring classes. It takes an hour just to plug dates into my syllabus, and afterward I judge myself for not doing more work.
Finally it’s time for my chiropractic appointment. I smile and chat brightly with the receptionist. With my son eight states away, talking to strangers is the only time I feel human. I see myself through her eyes: a happy, normal woman, not someone who’s desperately missing her two-year-old.
As I walk back to my car after the appointment, my heart sinks again. Though I haven’t had an appetite for days, I go to the grocery store to busy myself. Walking past the pomegranates and lemons, I feel a little lift. At the seafood counter the fishmonger tells me about the cod he ate at the Titanic museum in Belfast, and I listen with genuine interest.
At the checkout I recognize the cashier, whose eyes light up. “It’s so nice to see you,” he says. “You’re always in such a good mood.”
His words make me feel strong for a moment, distracted from my heartache.
Cassandra Yacovazzi
Sarasota, Florida
My dad had suffered a stroke, was legally blind, and spent most of his day using his feet to propel his wheelchair around his nursing home. He’d only recently moved in, and it had been difficult for him to adjust to living there. He wanted to hear the familiar voice of the woman he called his “girlfriend,” the one he would ask the time over and over: Alexa. But the nursing home didn’t allow smart speakers.
The nurses told me they heard him calling her name at night. When they’d ask how they could help, he would answer, “You’re not Alexa.”
Many times he would tell me something Alexa had said to him. He used to ask her daily to tell him a joke and to play his favorite gospel music. If he was expecting a package, he would ask again and again when it would arrive. She never snapped and always answered pleasantly, “It will be here between 5 and 7 pm.”
Since entering the nursing home, he’d become depressed, which I was told was not unusual. My daily visits didn’t help. Then I discovered I’d been given the wrong information: Because he had a private room, Alexa was allowed to join him.
I hurried home to get his girlfriend, and Dad’s mood noticeably improved as soon as she arrived. Now he plays music every day, singing along with his favorite tunes. He still asks her repeatedly, “What time is it?” It gives him something to do and a sense of control in this new life he didn’t choose.
S.O.
Asheville, North Carolina
During my first year of college in rural Wisconsin I rented a room in a boarding house. Down the hall lived Henry, who, like many of the boarders, had suffered some economic hardship. His door always stood ajar so he could watch others come and go throughout the day. I would try to sneak past his room undetected, but he often glimpsed me, and not long after I had settled in with homework, Henry would knock at my door. I always invited him in. He would relate the day’s happenings and the status of his “grand plan”: to save enough money to buy a tractor and drive it someplace where he could start a new life. Henry told me he could not obtain a driver’s license because of a disability, so his only way out of town was by tractor, which didn’t require a license.
Henry’s spiel became so routine that I could usually study through it, but sometimes I had to ask him to leave. He always did, with a polite “Of course,” which made me feel bad for asking.
When I moved out at the end of the year, I wished Henry luck. Months later, driving home to visit my parents, I spotted a tractor rolling slowly out of town. As I passed, I saw Henry sitting bolt upright at the wheel. Somehow he had done it. He had pulled off his grand plan.
E.P.
Davis, California
On October 1, 2017, my dad and his friends were on a trip in Las Vegas, Nevada. The next morning, during geometry class, I couldn’t look away from my phone. The night before, a man had opened fire on a music festival that my dad had talked about attend-ing. Sixty people had been killed.
When my teacher noticed that I wasn’t paying attention, she asked, “Can you please put your phone away?”
“My dad’s in Las Vegas,” I said, “and my family hasn’t heard from him since last night.”
The room was suddenly quiet. My teacher didn’t reprimand me as I stared at blue text bubbles on my screen for the rest of the period, wondering what it would feel like to learn my father had been shot.
A couple of hours later he texted. He had just woken up. He and his friends had decided not to go to the concert, and he hadn’t even heard about the shooting.
As the news unfurled over the next few days, I thought often about the other kids—the ones who had been pulled out of classrooms that day—and considered myself lucky. All the shooter had taken from me was one geometry lesson.
E.J. Haas
Ketchikan, Alaska
My daughter was delivered by emergency C-section and rushed to the NICU, where for six weeks she lay in an incubator. Wires crossed her chest and disappeared beneath her blanket. Monitors blinked and beeped urgently.
I soon discovered that if I let my mind wander, it would go straight to the worst-case scenario. So I filled the hours by listening to podcasts: history, old Hollywood, horror movies, anything with a steady voice. I listened in the car to and from the hospital and while I sat beside my daughter’s incubator, my fingers resting against her skin. At night I slept with earbuds in and let strangers talk me to sleep.
It felt wrong to behave this way. I should have been fully present with my fear and grief. But I didn’t know how to do that and still function. I needed to be able to walk into the NICU each day, to speak calmly to the nurses, and to wash my hands before touching my daughter, all without breaking down. I was not distracting myself from her; I was distracting myself for her.
Eventually she came home. The incubator was replaced by a crib, and the earbuds went into a drawer, but I still think about those weeks when distraction was not an indulgence or a failure but the only way I could keep going.
B.B.
Huntsville, Alabama
With an ounce of talent and a pound of luck, I got my first story published when I was twenty-five. The fifty dollars came in handy, and, more important, publication validated my aspiration to become a writer.
But getting married, having children, and starting a new job put writing low on my list of priorities. Aside from keeping a notebook of ideas for stories, I allowed other interests to get in the way, setting up a woodworking shop in my basement, where I spent my free time carving and painting fishing lures. One year and one hundred lures later, I bought an electric saw and began to make furniture. Weekends were dedicated to constructing rocking chairs, china cabinets, and couches for my family.
As a teacher I had summers off. Yet, rather than use that time to write, I took up the task of building a lake home. I also spent the summer nights playing guitar and penning song lyrics. It satisfied my need to make something out of nothing but didn’t count as “real” writing.
Now retired, I have finally begun to write in earnest. After one of my publications was listed as “notable” by the Best American Essays series, I can’t help but wonder what might have been.
David McGrath
Port Charlotte, Florida
If I were a good person, I’d greet my husband in the kitchen without noticing the coffee grounds he left on the countertop or the splash of cream under the microwave. If I were a good person, I wouldn’t notice his uneven collar or the cold breeze coming through the door he left ajar. I wouldn’t mind the clanking of his key chain or the drumming of his fingers on the arm of his chair.
He sometimes jokes to friends, “She can hear an ant trip in the basement!” But to me it’s not a joke. My hypersensitive brain is perpetually seeing imperfections, hearing noises, and smelling every molecule of the world’s sweat, hair products, and smoke.
I adore my husband and wish my love for him would eclipse his tiny faults. I constantly wonder what’s wrong with me. I may not be a good person, but I’ve learned how to keep quiet and take in the perfectly flawed humans around me, how to love and be loved, despite my pickiness. Maybe that’s enough.
Karla Jynn
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
My mother gave birth to twins when I was four years old. I felt sad and lonely during her long stay in the hospital, and when family friends brought food to the house, I stuffed myself with all the cookies and cake I could eat.
Throughout my childhood, food offered a distraction from difficult feelings, but it was never easy getting as much as I wanted. My mother maintained strict control of what I ate, portioned out our servings at every meal, and didn’t allow snacks. When she was a child, she told me, her mom had taken her to a doctor, who’d made her strip naked in front of a mirror and called her a fat, ugly pig. My mother had starved herself to get thin and never wanted me to suffer like she had.
The only way I could get my hands on extra food was to sneak it. The ice cream was kept in a locked freezer in the garage, but I found the key and helped myself to Dixie cups and popsicles. My mother hid boxes of Barton’s chocolates under the tablecloths in the breakfront. There was a map under the box lid showing what was inside each piece of candy. I was never good with maps, but I knew that one by heart.
In my early teens my mother took me to a doctor to get a prescription for diet pills. They worked for a little while after I took them, but once they wore off, I was starving. I alternated between dieting and bingeing.
In college I was thrilled to finally be able to eat whatever I wanted. Studying for a test or writing a paper was always accompanied by a giant bag of treats. To avoid gaining weight, I became bulimic.
Although it’s been forty years since I recovered from my eating disorder, I still use food as a distraction. In fact, I had to eat an apple, an orange, and a few carrots to overcome my nervousness before I could write this.
Maxine Poupko
Miami, Florida
He was a full-blown screen addict. What did I expect, dating a Gen Zer eleven years younger than me? The only time he put his phone away was when we were having sex or making a meal—and even then the phone was nearby, on the end of the couch or next to the cutting board. He’d leave it on the bedside table at night, and I’d be awakened by vibrations from his relentlessly active group chat. He always asked to borrow a charger while he was at my apartment, afraid his battery would get low.
I felt annoyed but also sorry for his generation. While I was yelling at my mom to hang up the phone so I could dial onto AOL in middle school, he was still in diapers. Technology would consume his whole childhood, not just an hour or two in the basement after homework was done.
On our fourth date we drove to Canada and traipsed around Montreal. His cell service wasn’t working, and he spent hours on the phone with his carrier, trying to solve the issue. “You can just use my phone,” I said. He brushed off the suggestion.
We did connect in ways that bridged our differences. We sang along to Carole King in the car. When he wasn’t on his phone, he listened intently and asked questions about my life. But over time the age gap made it hard for me to keep dating him.
I don’t fault him, really. I appreciated the ways he tried to be present with me in a world that made it increasingly hard to do so.
S.D.
Burlington, Vermont
My family was spread across different continents, and five years went by before we were all able to gather for a visit at my grandparents’ house. I was afraid that my grandpa Nono wouldn’t recognize me, since his dementia symptoms were advancing quickly. To my surprise he called me by name, bathed me in kisses, and told me how much he had missed me.
The family celebrated our reunion with large amounts of food and drink. Nono had been a wine lover all his life but now wasn’t supposed to have alcohol. My mother and I schemed together to include him in a toast: She drew Nono into a conversation, and, while he was distracted, I filled a wineglass with Coca-Cola and handed it to him. Everyone raised their glasses and cheered. We all laughed when Nono said, “Mmm! How delicious is this wine!”
A couple of days later, while drinking a glass of water, Nono said, “Mmm! How delicious is this beer!”
I think the sweetness he was enjoying was having his entire family by his side.
Sol Anzorena
Wakefield, Michigan
When I was in elementary school, our report cards had four parts: academics, effort, behavior, and comments, which were delivered in code. I received so many C2C17 codes—“gets distracted”—that I thought they were a regular part of the grading system. In high school I struggled to make sense of the assignments in English class. My paper on the book of Job received an F, with the comment “You do not know how to understand ancient texts.” On the SAT my verbal score lagged so far behind my math that I ordered a detailed report of my results. I’d bombed every question that asked, “What was the main idea of this passage?”
I hated answering that question. The passages had so many interesting ideas. So did Job. If he had listened to his friends’ “main idea”—that his suffering was just—we’d have no book of Job.
I’m now a rabbi, and seeing multiple ideas is my superpower. When I study the Torah with my congregants, they love my ability to explain the text through comparison to other stories—from the Bible, the Talmud, medieval poetry, or a modern movie.
My greatest moments of professional success, though, have been when I sit with a student, usually a boy, who’s been pathologized by diagnoses and beaten down by teachers’ admonitions to pay attention. They don’t believe me when I tell them to write their Bar Mitzvah speech about whatever comes to mind. Usually they’ll test me with zany ideas, like “What if Moses lost his shoes at the burning bush?” They almost cry with relief when I respond with enthusiasm and ask them to elaborate. Those boys’ speeches are the best ones.
I prefer the word superawareness to distraction. The ability to notice the unnoticed—the stunning patterns in lichen, the careful masonry in a museum building, the smile lines on a face—is the pathway to meaning and beauty in a hard world.
Michael Holzman
Reston, Virginia
