I do a thing at 1am I’ve never heard anyone confess. Lying in bed, phone too bright, scrolling back through some conversation from two years ago. Not the important thread. Not the one I’m supposed to be protecting. A random one. A group chat that died. Somebody I don’t talk to anymore. Reading my own side of it like it’s somebody else’s mail.
I know I’m not the only one who does this. But it’s the kind of thing people do in the dark and never say out loud, so each of us believes we invented it.
The strange part is the voice doesn’t sound like me. You’d think it would. My thumbs, my words, my name at the top of the thread. But the person in those texts uses triple the exclamation points I use now. She types “haha” after sentences that were not jokes, like she’s padding the walls of the room. She says “no worries if not” about things that absolutely had worries if not. Reading her feels like watching footage of yourself as a kid. Technically you. Also technically a stranger.
Cringe is the first response, every time. The double text at 11:47pm. The paragraph you wrote to somebody who answered in six words. The eagerness, god, the eagerness. It’s tempting to read it all like a prosecutor. Exhibit A, she cared too much. Exhibit B, she apologized for having a preference.
But I’ve been trying a different read lately. When you cringe at your old messages, half of what you’re cringing at is a person who hadn’t learned to shrink yet. The eagerness was just love with no armor on it. Those exclamation points were somebody trying to be easy to hold. You’re not embarrassed by the message. You’re embarrassed that you once needed something out loud.
Nobody warns you that old messages are proof of becoming. You can scroll and literally watch it happen, message by message. The “sorry to bother you” era, which lasted longer than I’d like to admit. Then the slow arrival at sentences that don’t apologize for existing. Reading back through that is the closest thing I have to a growth reciept. The cringe is growth with a bad attitude.
Tangent, but it belongs here. I keep my old messages the way some people keep their baby teeth. There’s a chat I will never delete where the last message is mine, from 2024, and it just stops. No ending. No fight. Nothing. I reread it maybe twice a year, not to hurt myself, just because some version of me is still alive in there and I like visiting her.
That’s the whole point. Don’t purge the thread because it makes you wince. The wince is the data. It means you moved and the messages stayed, and that’s the only way any of us ever get to see ourselves from the outside.
The person in your old messages wasn’t embarrassing. She was honest in a way that cost her, and the fact that it makes you squirm now means you are not her anymore. That’s an entire biography, right there in the text bubbles. Be nicer to her. She got you here.