Several years ago I had a blog. It quickly got quite a following among other people going through the same situation I was experiencing. However, after two and a half years I realized I had to stop it, because I was devoting so much time to reliving the awful things that had happened (even when they kept happening in real life). It was a sweet sorrow, in a way, and as much as I wanted to move beyond it it had defined who I was.

So I deleted the blog cold turkey one day—at least from the site. I put all the entries into a single page (a couple of reams’ worth, I believe) and saved it as an HTML file. For the sake of computer memory I lost all the photos and comments. Every now and then, however, I’ll recall something and so I’ll open the file and look back. Two things strike me: how crazy and sad and desperate things were, and how beautiful the writing was—from the soul. A third thing that hangs over it is how much I edited myself to omit the truly exacerbating detail of family, who I feared above all finding my blog. I say ‘exacerbating’ because with their support, I think I would have fared a lot better; however, empathy is not part of their makeup…

Since then things have improved significantly—that’s a story for another day—but the most rewarding part of my experience is that I’ve come to know many other survivors from all walks of life. I wouldn’t delete them for anything.

I must add that what I was experiencing wasn’t pointlessly painful, because it was something beyond my control and also it made me who I am and who my daughter will be.

So, that’s my long answer to a short question. When you can’t take it anymore, you remove it. You’ll know which ones to destroy and which to put away for a time when you can handle it. The rest won’t matter.

Re: keeping stuff, I keep a lot of digital stuff on my computer – music, audiobooks and courses, interesting .pdfs. Much of it is stuff that other people thought I’d be interested in, that I’ve never even looked at. I tell myself I’ll get around to looking at it one day but it rarely happens. Whenever I think about dragging it to the Trash, I feel a little guilty because the person who sent it thought I’d like it enough to take the time to send it… etc. So it’s still taking up space on my hard drive ….

Ha. I have a degree in Computer Science and have spent almost 10 years working with computers and am still very computer-unsavvy. If I get an error message, I panic and stop whatever it is that I’m doing. I do not like computer issues and am always afraid I will do something wrong and kill my computer.
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As for the archiving, I keep all the photos. All. Of. Them, including the ones my kid took of the printer or the carpet. I also keep home movies and so on. But I delete emails and old files unrepentantly. I like the idea of a ‘clean’ computer, and so my bias is to scrap stuff, even stuff I might want to use again.

The stuff I do keep, the photos and the movies, I do look at again. I like re-living my kids’ babyhood, for instance. So I don’t feel that bad about holding on to this piece of digital history.
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I’m a tosser. I bookmark stuff to look at under just favorites so I know it’s new stuff that I want to take a look at. I give myself a week to do that. If I go back and can’t figure out why I saved it, delete. If I can figure it out, then it might get filed under Fave Blogs, or copy and pasted into a folder for sort of stuff. I go through favorites once every month and delete a lot. If I haven’t looked at it in three or four months it’s outta there.

Now about the folders…I save my articles, books to cd’s to be safe. Two copies. lol I save correspondance and when it’s up to six months worth, save it to cd and delete the old one. I’ll add the next six months worth to the original word doc then delete that one. (yeah, dated and such) So mostly my system is to save only meaningful stuff to cd’s the rest can be deleted. I’m mostly not a saver though…think that’s a habit from being a foster child where I got used to not being able to keep things so I’m careful to make what I do save very small and portable. lol (I keep a tote with my cd’s that I can grab with my purse in case of a fire, for instance.)

This year I’ve gotten into photography…that’s a new one. I haven’t got a system for that yet so if my drive blows up…it’s gone. Guess I better figure something out on that one, eh?
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