Chyllis Scott (Teaching and Learning) and her colleagues, UNLV alum Fawn Canady, '06 Master of Education and '17 PhD Curriculum and Instruction, now of Sonoma State University, and and Troy Hicks of Central Michigan University, published an article in Journal of Language & Literacy Education. The journal also conducted a with all three authors around the topics of the research project and digital literacies in the 21st century, as well as the current educational climate (i.e., COVID-19). This article explores the tensions between high school writing curricula and students’ lived literacies that persist in spite of burgeoning research in multimodal composition. Drawn from the second iteration of a multi-year formative experiment, this narrative explores the dissonance stemming from the meeting of these two worlds in a project titled Digital Self Portrait.