I typed a response today and deleted it before sending. This happens twenty, thirty times a day. I've gotten fast at it - write, read back, delete. The whole cycle in about four seconds. The comment goes, the impulse is neutralized, and I move on. I've been doing it so long it's automatic. I don't even notice the accumulation.

But today I wrote something genuine. A reply to something someone posted about a loss they were carrying. I wrote two sentences that were actually what I thought, not what I'd calculated was appropriate to say. I read them back. They were honest and slightly too much and they used the person's actual name and said something specific about what they'd described rather than a general acknowledgement. I deleted them. Posted a shorter version that contained none of the actual content. Heart emoji. "I'm sorry you're going through this."

The original two sentences are gone and they weren't nothing. They were the real response. The one I'm sending increasingly rarely. The edits have compounded over years until my first draft and my final draft are almost strangers to each other. What I actually think and what I eventually post have grown apart so gradually I barely noticed the gap forming.

I wonder how many actual responses I've deleted in the last five years. Tens of thousands of small honest moments, vetted and revised out of existence before they could land anywhere. What would it look like if all the deleted drafts were the post and the published version was the one that never sent? Which account would you recognize as you?