After the split, you're left with an abandoned attic's worth of
stuff: on your phone and hard drive, in your inbox. It's stuff that used
to matter, and still does. It's stuff that hurts. It's stuff you loved.
What do you
do with it?
It's impossible to plow through a committed relationship in an
industrialized nation without piling up an abundant digital record.
You'll have chat transcripts, tagged photos on Facebook, beautiful
photos from a DSLR, email letters, Skype call screenshots, texts—so, so
many texts. Your first instinct will be to throw it all away.
That's not a reflex to be ashamed of—just like you wouldn't want to
stare at a framed photo of your ex while you're hurting, you don't want
to look at hundreds of messages and JPEGs detailing that person either.
We're all hypersensitive when it happens, and we're living in an age of
hyper-info.
There are more grains of salt to catch in your heart wound
than ever before. This isn't easy—but let's try.
Wait.
Wait a month. Wait longer. Wait until you can look at his or her
Facebook profile without feeling something bad in your chest, or the
urge to throw your laptop. No good decision, in this century or any
other, has ever been made in the fresh wake of a breakup. Please, please
don't throw your laptop.
Photos
Don't delete these. Really, don't. You'll regret it if you do. Not
because maybe someday you'll get back together and be so glad you kept
it all. You probably won't. But these pictures aren't just small
monuments to a failed romance, they're high-resolution instants from
your life, recorded forever, unfading. It's not just your ex's smile
that you miss and wish you could have back and oh god I need a
drink—
it's the way you were at a particular moment a shutter
snapped and a digital sensor touched light.
It's your dog, your
apartment, your haircut, your vacation, your job, your old
bike—everything that was
you for that moment, regardless of who you were
dating and who you loved. This is matter you'll want years and decades
from now—
don't be rash and trash it.
Instead, vault it. Copy everything that's too much to look at onto an external hard drive or some remote backup system, and
then
delete it from your machine. Put that hard drive in a sock drawer or
under your bed. Give it to a friend. Place it where it won't distract
and won't harm, but, when you're ready, can provide a vivid reminder of
who you used to be. That's incredibly powerful! Don't destroy it on a
whim.
Playlists
Yeah, toss these! All leftover playlists will do is smear
heartbreaking meaning and nostalgia over songs you'd otherwise enjoy.
Remember, you made this playlist explicitly for your ex—you tailored
songs you both love in an order you thought might make them smile, miss
you, have sex with you. And all those memories could swamp you based on
nothing but this otherwise innocuous list of MP3s. So get rid of the
list. Keep the songs though.
Burned CDs
If you got a burned playlist in return, again, toss. It's an artifact
that carries all the hurtful weight of a physical object with none of
the sentimentality.
Emails
Emails can be as banal and brief as any text message, but there are
plenty of exceptions: long ones penned while abroad, or traveling, mail
with attachments, breakup letters, I Miss You letters. Rather than sift
through everything, archive it all. Do a search for his or her email,
select all, and pack it away into a folder or some other deep depth of
your account.
Remember: this email is part of YOUR life history. It
includes details you won't remember by the time you're long over the
breakup, and you'll be grateful for them.
Texts
Delete—this is just an invitation to wallow and/or leap back into ill-advised contact. Both are bad for you.
Facebook tags
Again, an opportunity to wallow, a web browser shortcut to
melancholy. And who wants a future prospect to see a bunch of pictures
with your ex?
There should be a pattern emerging here. It's difficult, but you need
to discern what baggage is going to be useful even after all the heavy,
horrible, hurtful emotions wear off. What are the bytes that'll have
significance on their own, without the love connection? What stuff will
remind you about your life in some broader sense than a relationship
that occupied some months or years of it? What'll be that GIF or TXT you
wish to hell you hadn't erased, because who knows what it might've
reminded you of about the way you used to be?
Those things deserve backup! The rest was just noise all along...
Disclaimer: This blog represents a selection of articles/poems liked by Vinit Asher. We don't own copyrights on any of the content.
