I Discovered the Cure To Phone Addiction

Time travel, 37 minutes average screen time, and the theme for 2026.

Hi friends!

Today we begin in gratitude:

Thank you to everyone who reached out after my last dispatch. I really appreciate your support and especially loved the melanoma stories with happy endings.

And thank you, Foster Kamer, for sharing my end of year screed with the esteemed FOSTERTALK community and for calling this newsletter “funny, cathartic soul-manna.” Foster’s newsletter/radio show is a delightful, irregularly sent digital bacchanalia that he’s now threatening to send weekly. It’s very entertaining, full of correct opinions, and handcrafted by a madman. I have a feeling, my wonderful readers, that it might just be up your alley. Go read/listen to Foster’s latest and show him some love.

I’m not feeling my best, and that means everyone should be like Foster and compliment me beautifully. Writers notoriously need two things: money so we don’t die penniless in a hovel, especially now that a decent hovel is, like, $2,500 a month, and constant compliments for our fragile egos. Substack has cornered the market on the paywall, helping writers monetize easily, which is great, but I think they’re limiting us. What we really need, especially in these dark days of world war winter, is a complimentwall.

Think about it: Compliments are free for you and priceless for me. Tell me how great I am and you get to keep reading. I love compliments and I want the option to brazenly fish for more. I realize that Substack is an independent media/AI slop pyramid scheme with venture capitalists at the top, so they need to make money above all else and will never go for my brilliant complimentwall UX addition, but it would be a hit.

I guess this will have to suffice for now:

that rainbow stretched over the ocean. take me back.

I left Los Angeles on December 22 and landed in Brisbane, Australia on December 24. Somewhere over the Pacific — perhaps during the missing December 23 — I deleted TikTok and haven’t looked at it since. I now feel like my brain went through a car wash and all its microplastics have been rinsed off.

Aside from prying myself from TikTok’s talons, I didn’t intend to go on a digital detox. But when my brother and nephew picked me up from the airport and whisked me straight to a town called Sunshine Beach in Noosa, on the coast in Queensland, where I was so warmly greeted and given the nicest guest bedroom in the house by one of the all-time great hostesses, Christine, who is technically my brother’s mother-in-law but is actually my dear friend and the best person to eat Coffin Bay oysters and drink a cold Chablis with, I was transported to a different dimension where looking at my phone held no appeal.

It also helped that my nephew and niece are two of the most entertaining human beings to ever exist. In case you’ve wondered, yes, I have fulfilled the prophecy of being a fun and free-spirited Aunty. My nephew, Oscar, is eight, and like all great Lenkinski men before him, he never, ever stops talking when presented with a listening ear or willing partner in conversation. He is one of my favorite people to talk to and we had a blast shooting the shit. My niece, Helena (the baby), is sweet and sassy and just turned three. I have long thought that three is the perfect age for a human being and she upholds my hypothesis. She might be the funniest of us all. There is a physicality and joy to her comedy that evokes the world’s daintiest Jack Black. Before I left, I told my brother, Lee, and sister-in-law, Emma, that I hope they don’t traumatize her badly enough, but if they do, she has star quality and a bright future in comedy.

So, the cure to phone addiction is actually pretty simple:¹

1. Find out you have melanoma.

2. Fly to a different hemisphere less than a week later.

3. Delete TikTok on the plane.

4. Stay at Christine’s house in Sunshine Beach.

5. The ocean.

6. Have two little clowns performing for you constantly.

7. A deep need to pretend your other life, the melanoma life, doesn’t exist.

8. Constant fun activities where you know someone else will be capturing content.

9. Oh, and, definitely take a week off work (at least).

37 minutes average screen time, by golly, it works!

oscar, me, and christine on a hike in noosa national park. content captured by emma.

I entered 2026 feeling very refreshed, if a little jet lagged, when I landed back in LA, having lived one less day in 2025 than everyone else, a small victory against a cunt of a year. But 2025 is still lingering for me, because yesterday, I had to return to Kaiser Permanente. If you read my last newsletter, you know that my hit list at the moment is just Kaiser Permanente written nine times.

Before I even found out about the melanoma, I had an appointment booked to surgically deal with the other gross skin thing on my back that sent me to the dermatologist in the first place. I almost cancelled it, but decided not to in an effort to have everything taken care of so I can move on with my life. My strategy was to just be real breezy about the whole thing, so I didn’t bring anyone with me, got a coffee, and walked to my appointment. I honestly felt fine about it, but they had to take my blood pressure three times before it was normal, and the nurse told me that my heart rate was too high.

When they took me back to an exam room to meet the doctor, he was about 90 years old. I’m rewatching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt right now because Titus Andromedon is one of my favorite sitcom characters and I need him, and this doctor looked exactly like a sight gag from an episode I watched the night before that involved a puppet playing an ancient grandmother.

this but a man.

I wasn’t thrilled to see the ancient doctor, or that he was wearing a ski jacket indoors, but I still felt fine. My nervous system, however, was betraying me. He took my pulse and said it was too high for him to do the procedure. Their solution? Leave me alone, laying down, in a very cold (no ski jacket was offered), dark, silent hospital room. When the nurse came back to check on me, even though I had implemented some of my best yogic breathing, it was higher. Anyone whose nerves run, uh, a little hotter than most can tell you that the solution to anxiety is not whatever they were trying. The nurse offered me a bottle of water. What I really needed at that point was a Xanax and a trip to the Temple Grandin hug machine.

A few minutes later, after the nurse distracted me by talking about her hot flashes, my pulse was low enough that they said they could do it, which was hard to believe since I felt so much worse. I considered leaving but knew that meant I was just putting it off. A different nurse took me into a different room and got everything setup. She said the doctor was very fast and told me to listen to the barely audible music if I got nervous. I asked her to talk to me since that would probably work better, but when the doctor came in and started working, the first thing she asked me was, “How’s your 2026 going so far?”

How was I supposed to answer that?

As soon as he started, I could tell that my back wasn’t frozen enough. I told the ancient doctor that I could feel it three times and he ignored me three times. It wasn’t until I literally screamed that he listened and then I still felt him stitching me up. The good news is, since it was never really frozen, it never got more painful and I feel surprisingly fine today.

Perhaps, based on that whole episode with my heart rate, he thought I was hysterical. But the thing about hysteria is that you need to have a uterus to suffer from it and the uterus is a magical, powerful creator of life and also an organ of torture and turmoil for every single human being who possesses one. I promise you a hysterical woman has a higher pain tolerance than any man you can find.

When Kaiser called me earlier to tick a number off a spreadsheet make sure I’m alive, I told the man on the phone that I feel physically fine but unleashed a way more graphic version of what I just told you and he seemed rightly horrified and said it would be relayed to the department’s director. I haven’t decided if I’m going to report a formal grievance because now that it has entered the Annals of Unhingement, I don’t want to think about this ever again. It’s not like I can sue him, he did a good job. I mean, I could literally feel that he knew what he was doing. But I also don’t think elderly doctors who don’t listen should be cutting people open without sufficient anesthetic.

So … everything … still insane! Which leads me to our official theme of the year:

2026: We’ll Try & Fix?

made us a vision board.

I am very excited about this year’s theme, because after 12 months of “We’ll See What Happens,” during which we saw it all and didn’t really know what to do about it, this year we’re going to start looking for some solutions. I also like that it rhymes — it feels satisfying, and we deserve that.

“2026: We’ll Try & Fix?” includes a heavy question mark. I want to be very clear that no one should be bearing the weight of THIS world on their tired shoulders. All we can do is our best, and I don’t know if our best will be enough, but what I do know is that none of us want to spend another twelve months watching the world self-immolate on our demented little phone screens feeling this frightened, angry, and powerless.

Lots more to come because I’m excited to explore this theme as we move through what I’m sure will be another year of many notable moments. Even though we’re in January, and it feels wrong not to set goals for the new year, I’m giving myself the grace to just not. After yesterday’s heart rate incident and World War I surgery, it’s clear that I’m in the trenches and the only thing I need to fix at the moment is myself.

When I got home from Kaiser, I considered whether Moleania, my melanoma, and I can continue to coexist since I’m not sure I can ever go to the doctor again. But that’s not an OK train of thought, so I’m going to call the good doctor’s office and find out which White Lotus mom pills I can take before my surgery.

2026: We’ll Try & Fix?

Take care of yourselves, stay away from Kaiser Permanente, and more soon because I’m doing fuck all right now.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz

1. This is where I would have put my compliment wall! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯