SOCIETY TALK: No space to save phases of my life

Much to my and my boss’s inconvenience, I have been having issues with my Google drive. Since my last laptop stopped working and I refused to buy a new one as a full-time mum with no working space of my own, I have been using Google Drive as my working location.

As an Internet-based storage platform, I can easily access it from any device at any time. Meaning I would sometimes start working, come back, finish my article and send it to my boss without moving from my spot on the couch.

However, as soon as Google Drive stopped sending emails from my attachments, I was frustrated. Even though Drive still maintained I had close to 5GB of space left, I kept getting notifications on low storage space. Frustrated, I borrowed my husband’s computer and started the tedious process of deleting multiple files.

Halfway through the process, I realised I was not just deleting files that were eating up my storage, I was deleting phases of my life. A life long lived and even longer forgotten. An aspiring writer, a student, a student applying for multiple bursaries, a travel enthusiast, a photography novice and at some point, a PhD candidate.

With every email, I viewed the attachments one last time, each sparking a memory that had been buried under years of living different lives. Yet in each and every phase of these lives, I always felt as though these were the most important times of my entire life. However, here I am, a middle-aged woman, a mother, a wife, basically a different person from whom I thought I would be at this age; looking at these emails and photos like I was looking into my own past as an observer.

It is a strange thing, seeing yourself from outside of your body. Reliving your own life as a third person. These forgotten moments that were at one point the turning point of your entire existence, seem inconsequential on this other side of life. Every defining moment, every sentimental memory, reduced down to an email that was met with the same fateful end. The delete button!

With some of these memories, as I pressed the delete key on my keyboard, I realised they would be gone forever. In the physical world as well as in my mind. Just like all storage devices, the human brain is only capable of storing so much.

Even the sentimental photos and emails that I wanted to save met with the same end. Other than the fact that I had to delete them, I also realised that in the physical world, keeping these emails would equate to hoarding. As much sentiment as they held, these memories played no part in the life I am living today.

As we age, we realise that even though our present was shaped by our past, it is not defined by it. Maturing means that the person I am today is because of the choices I make. Our past, backgrounds and former selves have little to do with who we choose to become in the present or future. Memories and physical junk we collect during our lifetime are just like trinkets that have little to no value to the world as we age or die.

I wrote an article a few years ago after my neighbour died. Seeing my 80-year-old neighbour’s life being reduced to piles of garbage changed something in me. It made me aware that the material things we collect during significant moments in our lives are essentially just garbage in waiting.

Whether it be emails, photos, clothes or other collectibles, all these things need to be weeded out after serving their purpose. Otherwise, we just end up living in a world of chaos, filled with meaningless items that we use to remind ourselves of a life once lived.