You can tell tales to strangers and bars or play the beautiful wife to an imperfect husband

maybe, but what happens when you finally need to show yourself?

On this edition of Selected Shorts, stories about selves obscured and revealed.

Stay with us.

I'm your host, Meg Wallitzer, and you're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time.

There's always a little dissonance between the way we see ourselves and how we present ourselves

to the world.

The most obvious examples these days come from social media where posts often feel like

confessions or requests for approval.

You want to tell your truth, honestly, but you can never forget that there's an audience

out there.

On a platform like Instagram, people are keen to tell you they woke up like this, that

there's no makeup or, more importantly, no filter applied to what you see.

It's real and raw, right?

So why are there still so few warts, wrinkles, real human imperfections?

I try to limit my time on social media because the rabbit holes are deep.

One minute you're taking a short morning break from writing a novel, and the next minute

it's nighttime, the apartment is completely dark and you're well versed in the story of

how the child of a woman you haven't seen since you sat next to each other in Algebra

2, lost the family hamster somewhere in the house, and they all spent days looking for

it until it turned up in the woman's husband's shoe.

...