I’ve had my main email account since the summer of 2004. And until this past week, I rarely, if ever, deleted anything. And for the past year and a half, I haven’t really read much of anything either. A combination of depression, ADHD, and a massive sense of overwhelm both by life in general and the sheer volume of crap in my inbox has kept me from checking my email unless I absolutely had to.
Let me just paint a picture of how bad it was. I had all the confirmation emails from every website I have signed up for in the past 20 years. I had all the newsletters I procrastinated on unsubscribing to months after I stopped reading them. I had all the promotional emails. Every password reset. Every one-time code. Every notification that my monthly bank statement was available. Oh god it was a hacker’s wet dream.
I had emails from every era of my life. Every major milestone marked with a series of emails. College. Every job search. Buying my house. Selling my house. Moving. Renewing leases. Breakups and new relationships. Projects and collaborations. Congratulating my brother when his wife was pregnant with my niece and getting no response because I think I sent it to a dead email address. Cathartic drafts of letters never sent to people who it was not in my best interest to stay in touch with.
I had emails from web based games I forgot even existed. There was stuff that made me cringe and stuff that made me cry. And then there was lots and lots of promotional emails and updates that basically sat in my inbox and never got read or deleted. Just marked as read and left to gather digital dust. I didn’t even archive stuff. This was all sitting in my inbox building up over two whole decades.
This week, I’ve been on a bit of a kick about restructuring and reorganizing my digital life. I want to connect with people and make myself more available. I want to stop ignoring the world. I want to notice if a human actually tries to message me.
First order of business was getting through all the unread emails. It was at least a few thousand. The last time I was fully caught up with all my unread emails was some time in 2022. I unsubscribed from a whole bunch of lists. With everything unread caught up with, it made it easier to see new stuff that pops up. I’ve unsubscribed from a few things since doing that.
I was going to leave it at that. That was good enough for keeping on top of new emails. But I still had all of those emails from 2004-2022 sitting in there. The idea of going through all of that was intimidating. But I was determined. And I went at it in chunks. The last chunk was the biggest, because I had built a momentum and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and I really wanted to see it done.
So I went through, and started by searching for things I know I could delete. Companies that had sent me a bunch of ads, social media notifications, stuff like that. And just deleted a whole bunch of things all in one fell swoop. I searched phrases that are used in advertisments, and deleted everything that came up. I searched for email addresses that had sent me a ton of emails. I searched for any sender I kept seeing pop up. And I went nuts deleting stuff. Towards the end, it was harder to delete in mass. I had to go through the last few thousand emails manually, going page by page, alternating between archiving things I wanted to keep and then deleting a bunch of stuff. Then I went back through my “All Mail” section, to make sure there wasn’t anything left I wanted to delete. I had just over 2000 emails left in there at that point. Now there are 1,958 remaining, and it’s all stuff I want to keep for the time being. Reminders of important events, information I want to be able to access again, projects I’ve worked on with others in the past, and of course, lots of emails from friends and family, most of them from the days before I was on social media. It seems like since I got a Facebook account people are less inclined to reach out personally.
My trash can had 27,958 deleted emails when I was done. And there’s some others I probably should delete but can’t quite bring myself to, yet. I don’t know why it’s so hard to delete old emails from exes. It’s hard enough to read them. Either I’m cringing from how gushy we were, feeling a surreal bittersweet feeling from reading about little day-to-day moments, or bringing back old pain. It’s not like reading those things ever makes me happy. I’ve got 236 from one ex, 218 from another who I honestly expected to have more, eight from another, one from another… you know what, let’s pull the trigger. I’ll be right back.
I just deleted every single last gods damned one of the 236. All but four of the 218, all of the 8, and kept that last one because the picture is freaking hilarious.
So now I have an empty inbox for the first time in twenty years. My archived emails are all things that have a reason to keep. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted, even if letting go of some of it was bittersweet. It was fun going back through my life in that way. And now I’m realizing that that is a journey I’ll never be able to embark upon again, but then again, that’s true of life itself, as well. I guess all I can do is focus on the journey I’m on right now.
Here’s to letting go of the past to make room for the present and the future.
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