living with no past
I’ve been thinking a bit about all the accreted crap we all end up carting about as constant reminders that we did indeed have a life before this particular instant.
This came up as I did a vanity search recently for my name. We all do it, to see how far we have to scroll before we go hey! that’s me!. Most people want that distance to be small, I kinda want it to be large. Back when I blogged a lot and really was all over the new social media crap the first several results tended to be mine. Then I realized that it wasn’t stuff I wanted everyone to read. So I started taking my name off stuff, then I started just deleting stuff. I kept backups though.
Several computers later I realize the ephemeral nature of hard drives. Several moves later I recognize the ease in losing CDs of inscrutably labeled backups.
I really went digital when I tossed aside paper journaling for blogging back in the 00s, and putting photos online etc. etc. So having my computers explode and disappear has left me with virtually no record of the past decade.
As I move and clean I’ve slowly lost or thrown away much of the other stuff:
- certificates of Youth Leadership, and my presence on the honor role (I had kept the one where I got honors in gym for a long time, but now that I look for it I find that it is gone) Certificates indicating my presence at computer camp — several years in a row.
- my high school diploma. I can’t imagine throwing this out, but somehow it disappeared.
- The scrapbook with pictures of me skydiving, bungee jumping, in my scuba gear, all that “look at me I’m adventurous” crap. No idea where that ended up.
- I had a photo album with pictures of vacations from when I was a kid, with my first point-and-shoot camera. Hawaii, Jasper, probably other places. I remember taking the photos out and putting them in a box when the album got too beat up for words. I threw out the album and the photos disappeared.
- All my old journals. I think I burned a few of the hilariously embarrassing teen-age angst ones. The one that I really liked, that was a scrap-book of all the places I went and things I did, just disappeared at some point.
- All the old books of my formative years — the ones you grow up reading, handed down from friends and family. I kept these for so long, then — in a fit of minimalism — sent them off to the used book store to make space on my bookshelf for boring textbooks I’ll never read (but can’t part with because they were so bloody expensive)
So, to sum up: I have only the one frame of family photos my parents gave me last year, upon discovering that I have no pictures of my family. I have no papers, photos, etc. documenting my past besides a pile of tax returns and my university diploma — which I nearly threw out by accident once. Even my citizenship card is new.
If this was a spy novel I would obviously be living under a false identity.
If I ever become someone worth writing a biography for future biographers are going to scream and tear their hair out.
When my iBook died I lost all the pictures I had of old friends and exes. If I ever go senile I’ll have nothing to fall back on.
Then again I don’t have any documents detailing what I wanted to be when I grew up — and the memories of that are fading — so I won’t be spending any nights reading old journals and feeling like a failure. As I age I won’t look back at old photos and regret the things left unsaid, or the friendships lost to time, since I will have forgotten and there are no photos to remind me.
I can continue barging forward in life, blissfully unaware of my past.



