We Think We’re Just Talking

On digital memory and the versions of ourselves we keep leaving behind.

If your text messages ever got leaked, what would happen?

I’m less interested in the drama of it and more in what it would feel like to watch the world meet a version of you that no longer exists.
A version you remember but have moved on from. Grown new skin over. Sewed fresh thoughts into.

And then you stumble across that version in old chats or forgotten screenshots or past Facebook statuses, and you think…

Oh.
That’s how I sounded.
That’s what I thought love was.
That’s what I believed I deserved.
That’s how quickly I reacted.
That’s who I trusted enough to share with.

It’s disorienting, meeting yourself like that. Intimate and estranged at the same time.

So much of us lives inside our phones, and without noticing, we leave behind pieces.

Versions of ourselves inside the group chat, the late-night spiral, the podcast-length voicenote.
The bitchy one. The vulnerable one. The narcissistic one. The desperate one. The loving one.

Snapshots taken from different angles of the same person. Texting makes space for each of these to easily exist. No faces to read. No silence stretching long enough to make you reconsider. No eye contact reminding you someone else is receiving this in real time.

So we say what we feel as we feel it. What we think as we think it.
Sometimes in paragraphs. Sometimes in a meme. Sometimes in a sticker that says it all.

And then we move on.

But the message doesn’t.

It gathers into a record. Emotional evidence we didn’t realize we were creating.

A bad breakup text. An unhinged rant. A confession sent at 1:49 am.

We rarely return to these moments unless forced to or by accident. They belong to people we used to be, and yet they remain, perfectly preserved, ready to be lifted out of context and presented as character references.

This is what makes the idea of texts being exposed so unsettling.

They caught us mid-formation, mid-thought, mid-feeling, mid-being human.

When someone else’s private texts are leaked, the reaction is almost always the same.
We say: if mine came out, I’d be finished.
What we’re really saying is: please don’t define me by moments I’ve already outgrown.

Digital memory doesn’t recognize that. It keeps the moment as it was, keeps you as you were.

And here is the part that fascinates me most: no other generation has documented itself this casually.

We speak freely in rooms that never forget. We narrate our inner lives in real time. We distribute fragments of ourselves across platforms, threads, and timelines, trusting that context will somehow travel with them.

It rarely does.

What remains are artifacts. Tiny fossils of emotion.

Proof that at 22 you loved someone who later broke you.
That at 28 you were in the throes of motherhood.
That at 30 you’re still figuring it out.

We think we’re just talking but we’re also recording.

And one day, whether through a leak, a memory, or a late-night scroll you didn’t mean to take, you will meet these former selves again.