my trip to the vault
May 8th, 2024 12:32![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopThere are things that are even more predictably mid-life-crisisy than spending time at age 51 poring over the details of your life in your 30s by reading old emails. But a lot of of those things, like buying a fancy car, are just not in the cards for me, and/or don't have the same inherent appeal for a compulsive reader and overthinker. So emails it is.
Fifteen years ago was kind of a reset point. I had had a big breakup, and besides all the obvious changes like living in a different place, I had a general "well that didn't work" feeling about nearly everything from the time of that relationship whether it was related or not. Pretty quickly it became hard to even remember a lot of things; my memory is disorganized at the best of times anyway, but in this case everything got retroactively covered over with a fog blanket of feeling sorry for myself. I also wasn't hanging out with a lot of the same people, either because I knew them through my ex or because they had moved, so there was less of the feeling of continuity you can get from other people's history with you.
Written evidence is a kind of continuity. Some people keep diaries; I've never been able to do that regularly... but I did use to send and receive a lot of email, especially before social media became so big. And, because I wasn't using Gmail with its semi-infinite storage, I had a habit of selectively filing and purging stuff. By the time of the reset, I'd been using the same email software for about 8 years—roughly the same amount of time since I moved to the west coast—and I had a ton of messages kept in folders by person, project, etc., plus a big general folder of whatever. But about a year after that (apparently; I don't remember this, but it's clear from the file history), I decided I didn't want to deal with any of it until some unknown time in the future... so I exported it all to a big archive and then pretty much deleted it all from my email reader. It wasn't inaccessible, but it was buried way down in a bunch of nested folders and saved in a format that I couldn't easily read without a deliberate reimport.
There were times between then and now when I thought "oh yeah, there's a bunch of old email somewhere, maybe I'll finally go through it and make decisions about what to keep," but I never did—until recently when I started feeling extra bad about that lack of continuity. A friend I met 17 years ago, but had been out of touch with for a long time before we reconnected, is in a crisis. It felt wrong to have such a foggy picture of the old lifetime we had met in. So I found the folder within a folder within a folder and I loaded up those files—intending to just find whatever we had written to each other (which I knew was not a huge amount), but quickly getting carried away and looking at lots of things.
So here are some of the kinds of surprises you can get from that, in increasing order of surprisingness.
1. There's a ton of irrelevant bullshit. That's not a surprise at all, it's just the sheer amount of it (especially knowing that I had surely already deleted a lot of even more trivial messages) that is still nuts.
2. There are people and events that you really don't remember at all. This was actually kind of rare; more often, as soon as I saw a message it would bring back a lot of memories. But sometimes there's a name or a place that just absolutely does not ring a bell, and it's a little disconcerting.
2.5. With people you know, there are details that might not be that important in the long run but that it's still very embarrassing to realize you didn't remember right. I misremembered having only seen someone in New York, when really they had later moved here and visited me here. I misremembered having met someone through my job, when really we met through a dating app (but didn't actually date, partly because we found out we were about to be co-workers).
3. Old messages from or about people who are no longer alive are sad to read, but you'll still feel very grateful to be able to read them. RIP Lori B., Sam Y., Russ H., and Bristolz.
4. Some things from bad times really are as bad as your vague memories of them. I used to sometimes wonder if I had been blowing the relationship problems out of proportion. Nope!
5. In other cases they're better. A big part of that "retroactively covered over with a fog blanket of feeling sorry for myself" thing was that when I remembered being friends with various people in those days, it felt like I really didn't know them that well and didn't communicate with them that much, because I mostly remembered a general feeling of loneliness. But actually it seems like we were pretty close and talked a lot. It's not clear in every case why that fell off, besides just general life changes; I think with some of them it was just me making less of an effort, and I'll try making more of an effort.
6. You can be reminded of an old grudge and realize you were fully justified, but it just doesn't seem like such a big deal now. This is great!
7. You can be reminded of an old grudge and realize you were partly or entirely wrong. This is tough! There won't be closure for everything, and people aren't obliged to want to listen to an apology. Still better to be aware, I guess.
8. Holding onto weird crap from strangers is usually pointless but once in a while it pays off. There is some stuff that I probably never shared in detail with anyone at the time because I thought it was too stupid or nerdy for anyone else to enjoy; now I think some of it is great, and I might end up posting some redacted versions here.
Fifteen years ago was kind of a reset point. I had had a big breakup, and besides all the obvious changes like living in a different place, I had a general "well that didn't work" feeling about nearly everything from the time of that relationship whether it was related or not. Pretty quickly it became hard to even remember a lot of things; my memory is disorganized at the best of times anyway, but in this case everything got retroactively covered over with a fog blanket of feeling sorry for myself. I also wasn't hanging out with a lot of the same people, either because I knew them through my ex or because they had moved, so there was less of the feeling of continuity you can get from other people's history with you.
Written evidence is a kind of continuity. Some people keep diaries; I've never been able to do that regularly... but I did use to send and receive a lot of email, especially before social media became so big. And, because I wasn't using Gmail with its semi-infinite storage, I had a habit of selectively filing and purging stuff. By the time of the reset, I'd been using the same email software for about 8 years—roughly the same amount of time since I moved to the west coast—and I had a ton of messages kept in folders by person, project, etc., plus a big general folder of whatever. But about a year after that (apparently; I don't remember this, but it's clear from the file history), I decided I didn't want to deal with any of it until some unknown time in the future... so I exported it all to a big archive and then pretty much deleted it all from my email reader. It wasn't inaccessible, but it was buried way down in a bunch of nested folders and saved in a format that I couldn't easily read without a deliberate reimport.
There were times between then and now when I thought "oh yeah, there's a bunch of old email somewhere, maybe I'll finally go through it and make decisions about what to keep," but I never did—until recently when I started feeling extra bad about that lack of continuity. A friend I met 17 years ago, but had been out of touch with for a long time before we reconnected, is in a crisis. It felt wrong to have such a foggy picture of the old lifetime we had met in. So I found the folder within a folder within a folder and I loaded up those files—intending to just find whatever we had written to each other (which I knew was not a huge amount), but quickly getting carried away and looking at lots of things.
So here are some of the kinds of surprises you can get from that, in increasing order of surprisingness.
1. There's a ton of irrelevant bullshit. That's not a surprise at all, it's just the sheer amount of it (especially knowing that I had surely already deleted a lot of even more trivial messages) that is still nuts.
2. There are people and events that you really don't remember at all. This was actually kind of rare; more often, as soon as I saw a message it would bring back a lot of memories. But sometimes there's a name or a place that just absolutely does not ring a bell, and it's a little disconcerting.
2.5. With people you know, there are details that might not be that important in the long run but that it's still very embarrassing to realize you didn't remember right. I misremembered having only seen someone in New York, when really they had later moved here and visited me here. I misremembered having met someone through my job, when really we met through a dating app (but didn't actually date, partly because we found out we were about to be co-workers).
3. Old messages from or about people who are no longer alive are sad to read, but you'll still feel very grateful to be able to read them. RIP Lori B., Sam Y., Russ H., and Bristolz.
4. Some things from bad times really are as bad as your vague memories of them. I used to sometimes wonder if I had been blowing the relationship problems out of proportion. Nope!
5. In other cases they're better. A big part of that "retroactively covered over with a fog blanket of feeling sorry for myself" thing was that when I remembered being friends with various people in those days, it felt like I really didn't know them that well and didn't communicate with them that much, because I mostly remembered a general feeling of loneliness. But actually it seems like we were pretty close and talked a lot. It's not clear in every case why that fell off, besides just general life changes; I think with some of them it was just me making less of an effort, and I'll try making more of an effort.
6. You can be reminded of an old grudge and realize you were fully justified, but it just doesn't seem like such a big deal now. This is great!
7. You can be reminded of an old grudge and realize you were partly or entirely wrong. This is tough! There won't be closure for everything, and people aren't obliged to want to listen to an apology. Still better to be aware, I guess.
8. Holding onto weird crap from strangers is usually pointless but once in a while it pays off. There is some stuff that I probably never shared in detail with anyone at the time because I thought it was too stupid or nerdy for anyone else to enjoy; now I think some of it is great, and I might end up posting some redacted versions here.
