Eight lines in someone else's voice, then one line in your own: that is the whole design of Dalilahshigaraki's "My Story: The Truth My Family Shares." Almost everything sits inside quotation marks, a family's portrait of a person who, judging by the title, is also the speaker. Only after the closing mark does that person answer, and the answer is a single question. The poem is about being described instead of listened to, and about the uneasy possibility that "getting better" may only mean getting quieter.
The most striking feature is typographic. Every pronoun is split: "S/He," "him/her," "His/Her," "he/she's." The slash works like a form letter with the blanks left unfilled, or a hedge that refuses to commit. The family cannot, or will not, settle on one word for the person they claim to know. The order even wobbles. "He/she's a gender she/he's not" flips the pair midway, as if the writing itself were unsure which side of the slash is supposed to be true. The slash returns in "ADD/ADHD," which suggests, though this is my reading, that diagnosis and identity are both being treated as interchangeable options to be waved away with an "or."
The tone of the portrait is indulgent on the surface and belittling underneath. "Likes to call everyone s/he meets a friend" turns warmth into a habit, almost a quirk. "His/Her new bestie" is a fragment, a sneer in two beats, and "bestie" shrinks a real connection to something childish. "Gets into trouble sometimes" is vague enough that nobody could answer it. The verbs do the quiet damage. The person "likes to use" mental health "as an excuse," and "thinks" they are a gender, never feels it or knows it. Each verb puts the family's judgement between the person and their own experience. Then comes "a bit better now." "A bit" is the language of a school report, mild and managerial, and it presents the whole portrait as a case that is improving.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short, flat statements, many opening on a pronoun, stacking up like entries in a file. That flatness is the point, because nothing in the rhythm bends toward feeling or curiosity. The only real break is the last line, which leaves the quotation marks, leaves third person, and speaks as "I" to "you." It is also the only line that asks something instead of declaring it.
That line is carefully built. "Better" returns, but it has changed sides. In the family's mouth it means improved. In the speaker's it means more skilled at concealment: "did I learn to hide it from you better?" The question is clipped too. "Am I" is never finished, and the missing word is presumably "better," as though the speaker cannot quite say the family's compliment aloud. And "it" is never named. It could be gender, a diagnosis, or simply the self, and leaving it open lets the word cover all of them.
The poem never answers its question, but the family's own portrait is the strongest evidence for the darker option. If a person has been told that friendliness is silly, that a diagnosis is an excuse, and that gender is a thing they merely "think," then hiding is a sensible response. The improvement the family reports starts to sound like a door quietly closing. The title adds to the irony. "The Truth My Family Shares" promises something held in common, but what follows is only their version, and the speaker's truth has to squeeze into a line at the end.
The poem is significant because it shows how much punctuation can do. It wins its argument by letting the opposing side speak at length and then adding one short question. For readers it also raises something worth carrying into ordinary life: the way we describe people can make it easier or harder for them to be honest with us.