Author: Karen Hanley / Source: New York Times
The first message I saw when I downloaded my Facebook data referenced a long-forgotten encounter. Eleven years ago, two weeks before my senior year of high school, I had — apparently — written an angry note to a guy on a clunky Dell desktop (no iPhones yet) from the bedroom I shared with my sister at our parents’ home in Brooklyn.
For some reason, I believed at the time that this person was spreading rumors about the nature of our relationship. The conversation was brief and completely mystifying. It began with me confronting the supposed rumormonger — “ … wanna tell me when this happened?” — at 12:45 a.m.
I laughed out loud as I reread the more-than-a-decade-old conversation from my desk at The New York Times, where I work as a visuals producer. I found myself to be the instigator of a confrontational exchange, an uncharacteristic position for me. The safe distance of being behind a computer screen had emboldened me at the time, but now it made me cringe.
As I read our correspondence, I was unnerved to realize that…
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