What I Really Mean
by Brian Hioe
by Brian Hioe
At some point in my life, when I began to have to send business emails, a second self sort of emerged to manage these relationships. Quite often when I read over my emails I wonder who exactly this cheery person is, so bright and effusive, who is apparently also me. It certainly doesn’t sound like the usual me.
This second self began to emerge sometime during college, when I found myself out in the world and having to communicate with strangers for the first time. Later, when I became a writer and active on social media, I fell into this same patterns in interactions with strangers. To be sure, on social media my persona is a good deal more deranged, and more prone to posting long drunken existential rants and engaging in protracted, day-long internet flame wars than my ordinary “business” persona would be. But even there I find it easier to deal with people on the internet in my cheery persona rather than in my native state of boredom or moroseness.
It’s been a one-way road to this point since the days of AIM and ICQ and messenger apps, but while my writing was probably not as legible back then, I suspect I was writing with a more honest sense of self. What was I like before? Who is buried under all those countless thick and calcified layers of unremarkable, unmemorable emails?
“Just wanted to follow up! But no rush!”
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