My Pocket Spanish Dictionary Was My Security Blanket

I will never forget the moment I arrived in Spain as a teenager. I got off the plane and met my Spanish host family for the first time and they began to greet me speaking in Spanish. It was at that exact moment that I realized that my two years of Spanish in high school that I had taken up to that point had been worthless.

I couldn't understand a word they were saying. I thought for sure that I would be able to recognize keywords and then decipher what they were saying to me. But it wasn't happening. They were speaking so fast that even if they were saying words I recognized, I couldn't keep up to make sense of any of it.

It literally fit into my pocket and I took it EVERYWHERE I went. If I didn't have it, I felt naked. I needed to be able to circumnavigate life in Spain and couldn't function without it.

The more I used it the better I got at it. I was looking up words in seconds and the more words I looked up the more I started to remember them.

Today, my security blanket is my smartphone. I can run my business from my phone from anywhere. I love taking pictures with it. It serves so many purposes in my life that it's the ONE thing I can't live without. 

The only I time I am ever without it as at the dinner table with my family (my wife implemented this rule). 

I'm a grown man who's not afraid to admit that I have a security blanket. I can't leave home without my phone. How about you, do you have something that you take with you everywhere that helps you cope with the world around you?