For a fidgeter, having Twitter on my phone is a godsend

I’ve been a non-committal smoker since I was seventeen years old. Like most things in my life, it’s hard for me to commit to anything for very long because I get bored or anxious or depressed and I try to find something else to satisfy that indescribable craving for anything of essence. But I never got the physical addiction to nicotine and it became really easy for me over the years to just stop if I was having a tough financial month, or if I decided I was going to be into healthy living for the next six weeks.

One of the reasons I keep returning to smoking has nothing to do with the act of smoking itself. I won’t lie, I thoroughly enjoy having a cigarette. I like the social aspect of leaving a bar for a couple of minutes and talking to other people who have decided to ignore the surgeon general and partake in the filthy habit. I like that it gives me five minutes to collect my thoughts and get away from my computer when I’m working, go outside and take in something that’s not a blinking cursor on an empty page. But most importantly, what I love about smoking is the exact same thing I love about using Twitter on my phone: it gives my hands something to do in replace of fidgeting with a pen.

When I was a kid, I used to get in trouble a lot for getting out of my seat at school and talking to other kids, for taking apart pens and putting them back together instead of paying attention in French class, or for building little paper clip launchers that I could flick notes from to friends on the other side of the room. Trying to have important conversations about who was going to play on whose soccer team during lunch recess, and thus who was cool enough to get on the winning side, was much tougher in the days before texting and group chats. Eventually, my grades started to slip and my school ordered a personal assessment to evaluate why I was behaving the way I was. This was during the heyday of kids being diagnosed as ADD or ADHD and my psychologist took one look at me fidgeting with a pen during our meeting and stamped a big ol’ ADD label on my folder.

From that point forward, it was a process of teachers taking away whatever I could get my hands on. This didn’t just mean things that kids shouldn’t have hidden in their hands under their desk, either, like books that weren’t supposed to be read or a variety of GameBoy consoles — for what it’s worth, the SP was just about perfect for hiding and remains one of my favorite worst handheld consoles for that exact reason — but also included elastic bands, paperclips, pencils, pens, markers, mini-staplers or whatever else you’d find in an aisle at Staples. Not having something to fidget with made me anxious and in an era before every 10-year-old on the block had an iPhone — or the deeply missed BlackBerry Bold 9000— office supplies are what I resorted to.

Then came along high school, and my first smartphone. It was a BlackBerry Pearl 8100 and despite the less than stellar keyboard the compact phone came with for texting, it included BlackBerry’s iconic ball in the middle of the phone that became my fixation. I could play BrickBreaker and Snake on it whenever I needed something to fiddle with, but more importantly, I could roll my thumb over it while the phone sat in my pocket and just the movement of having something to fiddle with seemed to ease my anxiety that would jump up when I didn’t have something in my hands to focus on.

Smartphones had replaced the importance of paper clips in my life (which, believe me, sounds ridiculous) and I became obsessed with them. I followed news from different companies on the phones they were releasing, new development tools to make them more powerful and better than they were now, and of course, the inclusion of different apps. It seemed like there was nothing more interesting on the tech scene in 2006 and 2007 than smartphones.

Except a small company called Twitter. I was late to the Twitter party. I had read about it (probably in Wired, which had become my gospel in high school) and, like many people at the time, thought it sounded like a complete waste of time.

“Why the fuck would I want to tell someone about my lunch,” I asked myself. “Why can’t I just do that on Facebook anyway?”

It wasn’t until 2010 when I started J-school that my instructors asked us to join Twitter, “for networking purposes and staying up to the minute on breaking news.”

I remember scoffing at the time and not taking it seriously. I want to go back in time and smack myself when I think about it now.

But I joined Twitter, followed all of the recommended accounts — looking at you, CNN and BBC — and started learning how to use the service. Six years later, I mostly choose to ignore using the service for most professional things and instead treat it like a flaming pile of trash where I can ask the important questions like, “Is there a new level in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood yet,” or make terrible puns.

Despite my disregard for Twitter at the time, I decided to download the app on my phone and, much like BlackBerry’s ball, I stumbled onto my newest fixation. For me, it wasn’t about reading the tweets that were appearing on my screen or even interacting with the people I followed, but it was being able to open the app, physically pull the page down to reload, and then scrolling through that satiated my need to keep my hands active.

Like going out for a cigarette and holding that in my fingers, rolling it back and forth, being able to just whip out my phone and physically scroll through something, touching a screen and keeping my fingers active, was enough to get me through long meetings or car rides. Twitter became my most valued app on my phone, and I wasn’t even really paying attention to it, but a quick look at the data usage on my phone is a constant reminder that I use nothing else as frequently as Twitter.

It’s become a physical addiction. If I don’t have my phone on me, I begin to get sweaty, panicky and I can feel the anxiety start to rise. It has nothing to do with being away from people or possibly missing an important call, but it has everything to do with the fact that I don’t have anything to occupy my fingers with anymore. I don’t carry around pencils, pens or paperclips and it’s rare that I leave the house with my Vita or 3DS anymore unless I know I’m going to be traveling a long distance or I’ll have time to actually play something.

But my iPhone is attached to my hip. I go to sleep with it either in my hands or by my head, where I would have dropped it after scrolling through Twitter trying to get to sleep. The idea of not having my phone, and by extension, not being able to scroll through Twitter mindlessly is panic-inducing, and that’s problematic.

But because I have my iPhone on me at all times, it seems like the natural answer to being able to fidget with something and not look like the weirdo flipping a pen or pencil through her fingers on the streetcar. It’s a socially acceptable addiction — hell, it’s even promoted when you rely on it for work. I can see breaking news and get something up immediately while at the same time giving in to my need to constantly have something in my hands.

I know it’s not the best way to occupy myself, and being on Twitter, let’s face it, is probably more harmful than it is beneficial, but for now, it’s kind of the perfect balance of helping my ADD-riddled mind chill out and keep up on what’s happening around the world. And it’s probably a little less harmful to my health than another cigarette.

For the record, in the time it took me to write this, I only pulled out my phone and checked Twitter a handful of times.