Remember Vitaminwater’s “scroll free for a year” challenge that dared people to go smartphone free for a whole year to win $100,000? Well, this New York woman is eight months into her smartphone-free year, and just four months away from claiming grand prize. Thousands of people applied to be chosen as the perfect candidate to spend a year without touching their smartphone, but in the end, the only person who got to try and survive for an entire year without a handheld was Elana Mugdan, a 29-year-old fiction writer from Queens, New York. Eight months into the challenge, she claims it’s been a freeing and eye-opening experience that showed her just how dependent she had become to her smartphone. “I’ve decided that I will never go back to smartphone use once the one-year contest is up,” Mugdan told CNN. “I don’t think I can be trusted with the technology — if I have access to a smartphone, I suspect I’ll go right back to abusing it, wasting time, staying up all hours of the night on it, and getting addicted to social media, and I really don’t want to go back to all that.”