TS Eliot wrote of “faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction / Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”. TS Eliot never had a smartphone.

Neither did I for a long time. No Facebook account; not even email. Like Eliot, I was a luddite, but a peculiar breed because, according to my date of manufacture, I’m supposed to be a digital native. Perhaps it’s because by the age of 20 I was up the duff in the Welsh countryside with baby brain, no signal and no wifi. I had no need for Myspace and such.

When I finally fell into the digital realm, I fell hard. Unlike my peers for whom social media and mobile technology were vines that had grown and flowered around them, for me it was a sudden immersion, as if I’d been dropped from the sky into the jungle. I got Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts at the same time that I got an iPhone 4, so as my world dramatically augmented it simultaneously shrank to the size of a Ryvita.

Giddy in the tumble-blur of LCD colours, my pleasure centre would light up like a pinball machine at a well-received tweet. I would check my phone; five minutes later I’d check my phone again. If someone somewhere wanted to pick a fight with me, or was going to tell a lie and try to drag my reality into their miserable shitty worldview, I couldn’t let it go, no matter how blatantly twattish the troll (not to be confused with my new children’s book Twattish the Troll; “He’s such a twat!” – David Walliams). I was secretly addicted as the anxiety carousel wheeled unwieldily. I couldn’t focus, not even on a single app on my phone before I was drawn to another, “distracted from distraction by distraction”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TS Eliot: he didn’t have an iPhone. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

It wasn’t just Twitter and emails I was monitoring with obsessive regularity: it was the weather, in places where I wasn’t; it was my menstrual cycle app; it was the ticket site SongKick. And when all that was exhausted: scroll, scroll, scroll. It started to affect my relationships with friends and family, especially as the colours of our politics became our only interactions.

The P-word aside, I still doubt I’ll ever be branded a moderate. One night, without a word, I ditched my iVampire and bought a Nokia 3310 in anaemic red, and became the talk of the town. My phone was the hottest conversation piece. The nostalgic: “OMG, does it have Snake!?” The hilarious: “No, Polly Pocket doesn’t live inside; no, I didn’t get it free with Girl Talk magazine.” The inevitable: “So, Charl, see you’ve started selling weed.” It made me look like a drug dealer, it didn’t have predictive text, but it was my new favourite retro-fashion accessory and I felt great about it.

And the withdrawal? For the first few weeks I had a constant clifftop sketchiness, as if I was supposed to be doing something and couldn’t put my finger on what. But that soon abated. I was still on Twitter, but it didn’t follow me around the whole day, so I stopped responding to arseholes and only posted about stuff I really cared about. Gradually, I became aware that not only had I stolen secret time back from the flutter of hurried days, but somehow a secret space as well. I could stretch out, free to think again, to be wholly creative, to learn meaningfully and to switch off. It was like a cleansing spring shower had come to wash away the mucky detritus left after the long-cluttered winter of my mind.

But, wherever I went I got bloody lost. Wandering cluelessly around London, only to miss appointments, became a frequent pastime. I know it’s a cliche but what did we do before Google Maps?! I was useless. My fella on the other end of the phone became my personal 118 and Siri (“Babe, can you check the postcode for such-and-such”; “Can you check my Gmail for what so-and-so said about what-chama-flip”). When he didn’t answer (almost certainly on purpose) I’d squander huge mounds of cash phoning a real 118 service.

The change was worth it, though. It’ll sound like an overstatement but I think it changed my life. My choices are broader and healthier because I’m not being screamed at all day.

I bought a new phone last week: the Samsung something-or-other. Like a tiny Cardi B in my pocket, it pings and krrrrrs. I had been scared of the rate of progress, crying: “Stop the train! Stop the madness.” But I want to be part of building the future, and to do that you’ve got to swim in the contemporary waters. Rejecting the modern world doesn’t help anyone. It slows you down and I need to be efficient. The futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose Ted talks are essential listening, says: “Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference.” I don’t want to be left behind waiting to take what I perceive as the next logical step. The “human engine” doesn’t wait.

Time will tell whether I’ve mastered the wisdom or adulthood not to fall foul of my checking compulsions. But if I become “the phone-checker” (like Eliot’s “typist” in The Waste Land, the action absorbing identity) I know that I’ve got a crappy block of pink plastic in a drawer that can always bring me back to the real world.