I spent a good portion of this past week cleaning out a lot of old emails. My oldest extant email address is my full birth name at Gmail, dating from around 2007. I have two others (a professional one, also tied to my birth name, and my first name @ famiconsumer dot com) that I use almost as often plus several others for specific purposes (e.g. social media bot signups). I have a lot of various accounts registered across the three main emails along with a lot of history that's accumulated in the past 15+ years. I wanted to sift through and save whatever I still needed while consolidating down to, ideally, one primary email address.
This began, ostensibly, as a chore to make my life easier. But it quickly became an excavation of my past selves. Going back through my ancient emails and chat logs, I found all the old version of me that I tried on: the sensitive platonic friend to a series of female best friends, the empath hipster with impeccable taste, the Silicon Alley Web 2.0 tech guru.
There are things that I did in those roles that I'm proud of, memories I will always cherish, people who I still care about deeply, but I was never really there. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was just pressing my nose up against the glass, observing my life from a distance. I thought everyone else, too, just faked feelings, faked a sense of self; the problem was that I was just too fundamentally damaged to manage the faking. Then when I became too exhausted to keep up the faking, that just hit as more failure.
I take the good memories with me. I hold them in my heart. The rest goes straight to the trash bin.