My Life in Voice Notes: A Whole Digital Autobiography

If we are being honest, my digital world is a full ecosystem. Instagram is my unofficial living room. That is where I laugh, cry, post, lurk, scroll, and mind my business. TikTok is cool, but every time I open it I feel like I am in someone else’s house touching their furniture. And Facebook is strictly for my elders, the people who raised me, and the cousin who still writes statuses like it is 2009.

Now let’s talk about how I actually communicate. Because I am absolutely a voice note woman. A connoisseur. A seven minute auditory experience type of communicator. People send texts. I send episodes. You want the full story, the tone, the sigh, the pause, the side eye, the plate clanking in the background while I tell you the truth. You are getting a voice note. I call them mini podcasts. And if I do text, it is never one long paragraph. It is ten separate vibrations hitting your phone like a drumline. My brother once said, can you stop texting like that, my phone keeps going off. Sir, silence your phone or silence yourself. The choice is yours.

Do I meme my emotions. Not really. In social media speak, we call that "subbing." And that's not really my thing. Not in friendship, and definitely not in regard to my love life. The lover you would be meme'ing about does not care. If they did, would you be posting that sad meme? And the friend, if the relationship meant that much to you, you'd be better off with real communication to prevent further alienation. Ask me how I know.

Online versus offline is two different people. I am funnier in person. Softer. Sharper. More of a menace in the best way. I am trying to merge the offline me with the online me so the internet can finally meet the woman I actually am, not the version editing herself for the algorithm. My career depends on that alignment, and I am learning how to show up without shrinking.

Culturally, the way I communicate is shaped by everything I come from. Black communication is a whole dialect. We speak in tone, timing, silence, side eye, sighs, and laughter with layers. We tell stories with our hands, our eyebrows, our pacing. Digital spaces strip all of that away, so I use voice notes to bring my culture with me. It gives me my warmth back. My cadence. My soul.

One of the readings from this unit talked about how mediated communication loses emotional cues, and even the SY Lumber Super Bowl commercial showed how easily messages can become confusing or misleading without the right context. If a multi million dollar ad can be misinterpreted by millions of viewers because the imagery felt disconnected from the message, imagine the misunderstanding that happens every day in our texts and DMs. I have lived that. A period has started an argument I did not know I was in. A “k” has ruined someone’s afternoon. Tone does not exist in text. That is why my microphone button stays employed.

Now for the real stories.

Let’s talk birthdays. I have cut off family members for pretending social media posts count as affection. My birthday came and went, and I did not get a call or a text. Meanwhile I watched them do theeee absolute most for others. Oh, so you don't rate me like that? Understood! In my opinion, digital communication will reveal who prioritizes you faster than any phone call.

Then there is my friendship with Petra in Arizona. Two moms, two work schedules, two sets of responsibilities, and yet we maintain an entire sisterhood off voice notes alone. Our friendship is held together with seven minute audios, a quick girl let me tell you something messages, and the sound of dinner cooking in the background. It works. It is intimate. It is ours.

What my mediated communication life says about me is simple. I value connection, but I also value my energy. I show up with honesty, humor, and heart, but I do it in ways that protect my bandwidth. My online self is still becoming. And the the woman you hear in those voice notes, the woman with the layered stories and full presence, is the woman the world soon gets to meet.