At this moment, I have over 115,000 emails in my yahoo account, 60,000+ are unread. This account goes back 2 decades and actually has quite a few emails that I reference to establish dates and places. If that sound like an excuse, that’s because it is an excuse. I also have a gmail account which only has 6,600 emails. I use email as a digital filing system but many of these are promotional offers that I am reluctant to delete because I “might” need them. I watch a lot of Hoarders and this is basically the line every hoarder uses as they stash yet another broken tooth pick into a pickle jar. By the time the offers have expired, I have had 200 more emails stack on top of the now useless emails. I am the little old lady surrounded by clutter, bushwhacking her way through the digital trash.
The same the applies to my digital photos. I do not know how many digital photos I have but I do know I had to upgrade to the 200 GB storage. I have some OCD tendencies and get very anxious about deleting photos off of my phone despite having two different digital back ups. The result is a phone which is often sluggish and frequently running out of memory. When I need to free up storage in order to send or receive an email I will search through my gallery and find the oldest video that I know is backed up and delete it, instantly freeing up just enough space to get the digital “city code enforcer” off of my back.
Two weekends ago, I was recording an indoor track meet. My son was in the lead of the 3200m heat and was rounding the last lap (or what the officials declared the last lap which turned out to be an error) when my phone ran out of memory and stopped recording. Not only did I miss what should have been the end of the race but I lacked any video proof of the disaster that was the officiating of the race.
Running out of memory was not something new, it’s kind of a running joke in my family that I will use up every bit of memory and then fill an sd card. It was the first time I missed an important event that I didn’t get a chance to re-do. That night, I ensured that both of my backups were current. Took a deep breath and deleted every picture and viedo from my phone. I will not lie, it made me absolutely nauseous. Photos have always been important to me, as a kid a dragged my 35mm “Tomato” camera everywhere. To this day, I have boxes of photos that I took documenting my life from 3rd grade on. Digital hoarding has only made it easier to stockpile photos.
Why is it so hard to part with photos? I even find it difficult to dispose of terrible double exposed duplicates. When I take digital photos, I take multiple shots of the same scene, trying to distinguish which of the series is best and ultimately deleting none of them. I guess for me, I am seeking to document that I was here. Photos are proof of life, our life.
After the initial wave of panic wore off, I felt liberated. Not only did my phone run much faster, I could move forward and make new memories. By holding on to the the past, I lost my ability to not only capture but to enjoy the present. Sometimes you have to delete it all in order to move forward. It will take me a while to refill my memory, I am trying to take more video while I still have kids at home who will roll their eyes at me. Maybe someday I will bring myself to tackle the 100k yahoo emails. Until then, I will hide my digital hoard from the prying eyes of the outside world and continue to keep memories.