Delete this

Have you ever gone back through time and reviewed emails that are just sitting somewhere in digital land? It's kind of a healthy exercise to look back, years on some cases, and decide that now would be a good time to begin to remove these little bits of memory.

I have had email addresses for over a decade. In that time friends have come and gone, jobs have flourished and crashed, businesses have been developed and almost as quickly been devalued by the financial abuse of partners. What to do with emails? What to do with notes from people who claimed to be interested in this or that?

What is healthy is to go back and see how things develop. In my own email stockpile I found the slithering snake-like paths that some people used to befriend, and the innocent and lovely path that some people used to become friends. Strange how that works. In one instance, a person Imet started sending me emails complimenting me on my paintings, the emails soon began to invite me to dinners, a stop over for a glass of wine, art openings, parties and soon friendship.

What is fascinating is how things change. When you go through divorce you get all sorts of strange emails. First there are the ones from the person you are divorcing. Lucky for me, at the time I was living in an upscale area where plenty of people had been divorced, so there were scads of emails describing in detail the process and more than one friend said to never delete any emails that related to my former partner, our children and how communication had become less than friendly.

I just deleted those emails, most from over 10 years ago. Even though the children still live with me, they are all old enough that they could now go to court and tell a judge who they would rather live with. I think that was the purpose, at the time, of saving emails. Just in case your former partner wants to go to court to seek custody, you need to have evidence that they are, you know, unfit, insane, untrustworthy and the list truly is endless. I no longer need any proof, so out with the old emails.

As for the fake friends, their emails had to go to. It is not just fake friends, but actual friends emails can be purged as well. The people who are friends, well, I don't need old emails from a decade ago to remind me that we know and love one another. Those emails were delated. Fake friends? In some cases I thought it would be wise to keep incriminating emails that show what a two faces, or three faced, people could be. I am not sure why. So they got deleted.

Business relationships? Well, everyone has told me that I should keep those sorts of letters forever, or something like that. For me, I just can not stand to view these sorts of things. Luckily you can create files and throw all of one persons letters and notes and lies into the file, close it and put it somewhere that is hard to find.

What is kind of amazing about doing this is that you release the pent up anxiety associated with these sorts of relationships. Every now and I then I have had to search my email for something, so I would type in a search word and more often than not, a letter or note or something from long forgotten idiot would surface. Yikes I would think, why is that there? Removing the angry or insane email from possible extraction is kind of uplifting. Never again will I stumble upon one of these little tidbits of my own history.

So the message is, it is probably time for many people to delete the emails. Lift the burden. Remove the stigma. Take away any of the power these emails and their history have over you. The do what I did, celebrate the fact they no longer influence your life in any form.