Note From Self

RECENTLY, a Facebook troll accused me of liking country singer Carrie Underwood. 

“I hate to admit it ... but in the interest of full disclosure, I kind of love Carrie Underwood’s ‘Cowboy Casanova,’” 23-year-old me had written.

Real-time me was horrified.

The indignities kept coming. College junior me: “I was impressed by Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul,” after a GOP debate in South Carolina in 2008. (Mike Huckabee?!) College senior me, more inscrutably — presumably comparing President Obama’s inauguration to Woodstock: “Back from Obamastock, living the dream.”

Of all the ways to be internet shamed, I hadn’t counted on my old selves.

Launched in March 2015, Facebook’s feature On This Day collects every status update and photo users have shared on that day, every year, all the way back to the beginning of (Facebook) time. For a social platform, this function is oddly, endearingly private. Newsfeed and Pages and Groups are where we meet others, but On This Day is where we meet ourselves.

The for-your-eyes-only digital diary delivers a daily string of our admissions from years gone by, betting on our appetite for nostalgia and navel-gazing. Sometimes, reading the morning roundup delivers an ego boost. (“I was funny!” I once announced to an empty home.) Other times, I’ve shared things that my present self flat-out refuses to believe.

Facebook is 12 years old and has been with me longer than most close friendships in my life. And it acts like it: On This Day is a best friend eager to remind me how desperately, and how often, I’ve tried to be cool. But it also reflects me at my most earnest, filled with unselfconscious observations on life and tentative explorations into new ideas of justice, identity, and belonging.

“Facebook has built up a remarkable digital history on many of us ... [it] understands exactly who and what you care about,” wrote Josh Constine in TechCrunch, indifferent to my country-pop-hating posturing that, until last week, I thought was a lifelong belief.

But the tech company’s intuition about our desire for nostalgia has felt off-target this year. After a year of domestic and international chaos, we were not so eager for reminders of past trauma next to today’s fresh ones. And in a season when battle lines are so clearly drawn—“You’re either vocal or you’re complicit”—a private record of our public reckonings can trigger an avalanche of shame and bullying turned inward. Did I really use to talk up that policy proposal, now that I’m firmly on this side? Did I really celebrate that artist, about whom I can now rattle off a list of at least five ways they are super problematic? Who was I then?

After the 2016 election, media voices made much to-do about the “bubbles” created by social media. They meant this horizontally, as in increasingly polarized social groupings. But I wonder, too, about the bubbles that social media encourages us to create around our present selves. Here, today, we are always correct, always righteous, always cool. But if we are truly to show up at the table, we might need to work a bit harder to find the grace to bring with us our full history, as silly and contradictory and “so-naive-then” as we may be.

On Jan. 21, I scrolled through my roundup, and there I was at the Women’s March in 2017, walking with my sister and friends and thousands of strangers, angry and proud and loud and joyful about it. Other posts tumbled after: my awe at the marches around the world, my resolute hope for the year ahead, my totally irrational, indomitable joy. After a mere 365 days, I barely recognized that woman, so convicted, so ready to scream for justice, so alive with the beautiful fury of the moment. Who am I now?

Thomas Merton once wrote that we gain nothing by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the gulf that separates us from ourselves. Quite unintentionally, On This Day provides us with a needle to pop our own bubbles first.