Welcome to Getting Better. My name is Miriam, and this is where I share weekly personal essays to offer moments of pause and reflection. My essays are a peaceful corner in the world — for when you've been caught in the hubbub for a bit too long and need to check back in with yourself.
My pieces touch on motherhood, joy, loss, chronic illness, and human nature. I share all my work freely right now. Subscribe for free, or upgrade for the price of an oat milk latte — unequivocally the best drink on any menu 🥰 Sign up here:
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It can be unsettling, to get to know yourself in the company of others.
You hear yourself defend an opinion you didn’t know you held, you laugh too hard at a joke everyone else finds offensive, you get sultry on the dance floor after office party drinks. Your ignorance, your arrogance, your thirst reveals itself to you — and to your friends, your family, and your colleagues.
You bear witness to your Self unfolding in the midst of strangers and friends, without consulting you in private first.
This Self shapes and shifts across mediums, too, which throws me for a loop this year. I know exactly who I am on my iPhone — casual, loud, expressive, emoji-ful. I switch to a Light Phone in January and typing on the tiny keyboard requires far too much effort. So I use its voice-to-text feature, which is buggy, at best. There are always commas and periods where there shouldn’t be and there are no exclamation marks. More often than not, I sound like a Boomer discovering Facebook status updates.
Now, rather than:
HAHAH hello!!! I’m so so happy to hear from you! I would LOVE to get together soon — I can’t believe how gorgeous it is this week. Let’s take advantage of this weather and go for a walk?! 😍
(a fairly representative version of a text message from iPhone me)
…my friend may get:
Ha ha hello, I’m so so happy to hear from you. I would love, to get together soon. I can’t believe how gorgeous. It is this week. Let’s take advantage of this weather. And go for a walk.
(Light Phone me)
This version of me is jarring — to me and to friends who know me. I’m surprised at how uncomfortable it makes me to see myself reflected to others in this way that I thought didn’t really matter; it’s just a text message. So now I send follow-up messages apologizing and explaining that I’m using voice-to-text on a dumb phone. I’m not mad or lifeless.
Friendly reminder, that I am voice texting. I have not been abducted by robots.
But even more unsettling than bearing witness to this identity shift across devices or public spaces is what happens in the controlled environment of my own mind, alone with my pen and paper. Surely there can be no surprise here. It’s just me — no family member to trigger me, no mind-altering substance to shock me, no secrets unknown.
And yet, an entirely new Self reveals itself to me. My pen reveals judgments I thought I’d never made and resentments I thought I’d left behind. I’m surprised at my own words and ask myself: How long have I felt this way? What else am I ignoring?
Discovering my identity on the page has at once unraveled and brought into focus my identity off the page.
When the words are unflattering, I’m tempted to say my pen has a life of its own. I know, in truth, it’s my honest self flowing forth, grateful to this crude instrument for its willingness to express the authenticity I usually bury under a façade of humor or indifference.
I would have said before that the most intimate version of myself is the Me in person, standing before you. But it feels now like maybe it’s my written self. The one with pen and paper (how I start all my writing), forced to slow down and articulate only what feels most alive and true, or else risk a hand cramp and storyteller’s fatigue.
Getting to know myself in the company of others can be surprising, but I have the support of a reasonable EQ to step in and cover for me when needed.
On the page, by myself, there’s no such protection. Writing is funny in this way. It’s a space of contemplation and self-discovery, meant to live and breathe alongside us, but the form itself tricks us into thinking THIS piece reveals all.
It never does. This piece is like me on the office party dance floor last night.1 Perhaps tomorrow I’ll regret these moves. But for now, they’re an honest expression.
This is creative license to the max, for the sake of prose. I have not been to an office party in many beautiful years.
Hi Miriam! I relate so much to you and your different texting personalities! Same same but different haha 😆 I often find myself being unusual in front of strangers. Maybe it's the way I start talking or sometimes even the subject of the conversation that I didn't even know I have an opinion on! It's all inside of us and so cool you pulled it out and made it sir in front of you and wrote about it. This was my first substack essay of the morning and I thoroughly enjoyed it 💐🧿