my life in 30,000 emails
A few months ago, Google started warning me that I was running out of storage space. Between my emails, Google Drive, and Google Photos, I was starting to max out on my free 15GB. Did I want to buy 100 GB for just $1.99/month (with a discounted $0.49 for the first month)?
No, no I did not. What was taking up all that space anyway? I knew there were plenty of unread newsletters I kept telling myself I’d find time to read, and too many promotional emails about sales and discounts I hadn’t bothered to delete. But that couldn’t be everything. I clicked on the link to look at my storage. Yes, my email was making up the majority of my storage - but photos (really, videos) weren’t insignificant either. I started slow, downloading some of the bigger videos and removing others. I sent my sister the two hour long recording of the small engagement ceremony we had done at my parents’ house during COVID. We had recorded it all for her husband’s parents, even though they also joined us live over Zoom. I had shared it with my sister on Google Drive and it was a huge file, so deleting it gave me a little space back - at least, enough to ignore the warning sign on my account a little longer. I deleted some of the promotional emails too; I run a regular search on Banana Republic’s emails because they send two or three A DAY (and I’m a sucker for a sale, so I won’t unsubscribe).
Then I went on vacation. Argentina was beautiful, which meant I took pictures, and we went to an incredible tango show at which I felt obliged to capture a few videos. A few days later, the storage warning on my account was red. I was now using 92% of my storage space. Google One started sending me more notifications about purchasing storage. Seeing that red exclamation mark every time I opened my email was starting to make me a little crazy. I refused to even entertain the idea of buying digital storage.
When I came home, I started scrubbing my emails. I would do this between meetings, or in front of the TV after dinner. At first, I treated it like another life chore. Clean the countertops after cooking, clean out a few emails on the couch. But I was often surprised by what I found there. The oldest email in my Primary tab is from a high school friend, someone I’m not in touch with anymore. Somehow, I still couldn’t bring myself to delete it. What I thought would be a task I could complete in five-minute increments began turning into hours down the rabbit hole of my past. Old friendships, travel plans, past relationships, roommate negotiations, weekend adventures - it was all there. The last 13 years of my life, in 30,000 emails.
I’ve never been good at keeping a diary. I usually have one, but I’ll only remember to write it in it if I’m particularly stressed, if I’ve brought it on a trip, or if I come across it while I’m cleaning up my room. And these days, I’ll often write on my laptop instead. Reading these old emails, I wondered if I had ever really needed one. I had so many moments here that I never would have written about, but that I loved revisiting. Much in the way that a song from high school can evoke my teenage angst, these emails brought back so many emotions.
My roommate in California used to send me sweet, random emails saying good morning or reminding me that it was her dog’s birthday. I haven’t spoken to her in years, and yet, I was tempted to reach out and ask how she was, after all that time. Would that be strange? I couldn’t decide. Things can change a lot in ten years. The proof was right in front of me.
I could see my own evolution here. I found the beginnings and ends of friendships and relationships; plans for the weekend; the birth announcements of my nieces and nephews - the oldest of whom is now 11! There was my first email exchange outside of work with my friend Sarah in 2015, whom I now have dinner with several times a year and can’t imagine life without. I could see my growth professionally. My senior year of college and the full year afterward were spent networking with anyone and everyone, trying desperately to find a job. There were bursts like this every few years, as I looked for new jobs, but the outreach became less frantic and more casually confident as I started building my own network.
Despite my feelings, it became easier to delete emails. I made a second and third pass at those oldest emails, and I would find outdated links to photo albums or those email forward letters that used to be all the rage. These were easy to get rid of. But I found myself re-living the stress of my move out to the West Coast, and unable to delete the proof of that. The struggle to move back to New York, to find a job cross-country now that I actually had some idea of what I wanted to do, along with some experience to back it up.
There are pictures of babies, dance rehearsal videos and audio mixes for weddings, recipes, arguments, flight tickets. I didn’t expect to feel so attached to them. My inbox is down to 20,000 now, and my storage is below critical mass at 82%. But I keep falling back in time when I have a few free minutes. I’m rediscovering another version of me, one I don’t think much about anymore.
My emails have let me travel back in time (without cringing as much as when reading an old diary) and with so much detail. To a time when I was younger, more impulsive, more unsure, more open to new adventures…and to a time where email storage was still free.
