My Inbox

This blog is a labour of love, and it will always be free. Over 1,000 people read every post which is incredible. And if just 100 people donate €2 it means that I’ll be able to continue doing all of this for another year. So if you like the work, it would mean the world to me if you considered making a donation. Thank you to everyone who already has this year. There’s no expectations, as ever, and I hope you have a lovely week. Donate here

There is also now a Thoughts Too Loud Podcast!

My direct messages inbox is a graveyard. For all the conversations I never finished. All the talking stages that never amounted to anything more. All the forgotten beginning bits of relationship that never fully flowered. They’re time capsules of a time I can’t remember. Spitting up turns of phrase I’d never use now. I find them fascinating and repulsive.

Names I don’t recognise, dots I cannot connect. But when I enter the conversations, I am there. A version of me at least. Not one I have a strong recollection of being. But I am there, and I am talking, and it is weird to perceive the past version of yourself in this way. Peering inside of interactions they thought were private. But they weren’t, because I can see them. And while we are the same person, we’re not really. He is a version I can no longer be, I am the version he is yet to become. And I wonder then if this exercise in viewing old conversations is some sort of violation.

There are forgotten messages in this inbox. Attempts at light-heartedness, at flirting, at being something I’m not to impress people that would never like the real me. There are many messages I’ve forgotten to reply to. Other conversations where I have not been replied to. There are streams of memes and emojis. There is an entire life inside my direct messages. There are messages I cringe at, things said that I would never say now. Emotions. There is anger, there is cruelty. But there is also what appears to be the beginnings of what might be love. Drunk misspellings and late night requests. There are question marks that float, reams of texts that were ignored despite my best efforts to start up conversation again and again. There is evidence of lives I lived and could have lived.

I scroll and enter chats, again and again, observing all the relationships and friendships I no longer have with these people. It feels like there is an infinite amount, all the people who touched my life that I’d erased from memory. With some, we no longer follow each other, cutting the only ties that connected our lives. Other people still follow me but I no longer follow them, others is the reverse of that. These details act like breadcrumbs, showing who scorned who, who was hurt most by the other person, or who got sick of seeing the other’s face pop up on their screen without consent.

There are conversations though, that strike a memory, flinting a spark of the care I used to have for certain individuals. And there is a microscopic feeling of grief, I can taste it, for paths not chosen, or maybe more accurately, paths not considered interesting enough at the time by either party to bother walking down. It’s an awareness of what might have been if we kept up our interactions, followed through on Sunday plans to meet up. Every choice made is also a negation of a thousand other decisions. A multiverse exists in a way, inside my direct messages. It recounts all the paths I did and did, not take, recording all the roads I could have walked down, but for one reason or another, did not. I see all the paths splayed out in text-threads, all the plans that were never kept, all the new loves that died off, all the what if’s in digital pixilation.

And so I find this process both comforting and distressing. The names at the top of the list, the people I most frequently interact with, symbolise the roads I did choose. And the forgotten ones I find when I scroll my inbox symbolise the untaken paths. It’s comforting on some days because it shows me the intangible in somewhat of a quantifiable pattern. Here are the people in your life, it says, here are the people you chose, and who chose you. And I can be grateful for the names I see popping up. On other days it can be distressing because I see all of the life I have not chosen. All the people that I do not walk with, either due to their choice, or my choice, or both. Lives that intertwined and crossed but never stayed together for too long.

So this is what I do, not very often, but sometimes. I enter the graveyard on my phone. My inbox. I see the people I’ve wronged or hurt, the people who have hurt or wronged me, the friends who have become strangers, the would-be lovers who faded into the background, the new friends I’ve found, the acquaintances I’d forgotten, the life I carved out. It maps out an entire existence, this inbox. We forget how many people our lives touch. We forget it all because it’s too much life to hold in one brain. But my phone holds it pretty easily, without attachment or pain. And so, every now and then, I scroll through it and look at all the people I’ve forgotten. All the people who may have left marks on my life, whose marks may still appear in me now, that I had forgotten to remember. And it feels like a funny thing, to remember them all again.