Digital Kondo Death Cleaning
One year ago yesterday, I packed a tiny U-Haul with a tiny amount of stuff and drove it 17 miles north to move in with my husband. 14 months ago yesterday, I was in the process of getting rid of almost everything I owned.
I didn’t know much about Marie Kondo at the time. I had no exposure apart from watching YouTube videos of her folding very cute underpants in the tidiest of ways. I also had no knowledge of Swedish Death Cleaning, whereby you decide whether or not to keep an object based on whether you think anyone will give a shit about it after you die. I didn’t know I had merged both processes into a convulsion of riddance.
The night before I drove the packed U-Haul up the road I spent alone in my empty house, watching The L Word on my iPad and drinking white wine out of a twist-top bottle. I slept on the 3-foot section of the couch, dogs in boarding, listening to the furnace cycle on and off for the last time. It broke my heart. But that’s another story.
This story is about getting rid of shit. Ruthlessly. About shutting off memories. Discarding your past.
I had a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom 1300 sq ft ranch house full of a lifetime of acquisitions. I thrifted, I antiqued, I collected everything from comic books (Love and Rockets always) to mid-century kitchen linens. The vinyl that followed me from the Chicago suburbs to central Illinois in 1986 and then to Florida and Colorado was shoved into a corner of my garage. Photos, keepsakes, Russian nesting dolls from my 5th birthday. Books, so many many books. Entire closets full of them. Clothes I hadn’t worn since I weighed 98 pounds in 2003. (Also another story.)
Four months before the move date, I decided to start packing. After dinner, with my husband in the living room, I chose a three-shelf bookcase in the bedroom. This bookcase held books, yes, but also newspaper clippings from my time as a journalist in college. Fan letters. Old photos (topless in the Sand Dunes, no less) and greeting cards. Religious items I picked up traveling in Turkey and western Europe. Foreign coins in a small wicker box, with a tiny suitcase lock and key.
I slid a photo album off the shelf and was gripped with searing pain in my chest. I mean I was breathless. I stood up, walked around, told myself it was gas. The pain moved around a bit. I was sweaty, panicking. Did I tell my husband to take me to the hospital? No.
I wound up in the ER a day later, after talking it through with a friend. I hadn’t had a heart attack, in fact there was nothing wrong with my heart whatsoever, except that it was breaking. Maybe it was breaking free.
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I gave away three bicycles, six black Hefty bags of clothes and shoes, two beds, one couch, a TV, a deep fryer, a cast iron skillet and an entire kitchen’s worth of plates, bowls, cutlery, pots and pans. I gave away a linen closet full of sheets and towels. Some of these things I donated to the thrift store that outfits women in a safehouse in town. Some I donated to Sudanese refugees starting families. The bicycles went to Community Cycles to be turned into usable forms of transportation. The books went to the used bookstore (now I have so much credit there, I’ll never use it all.) It felt freeing. No one I know would want any of this when I die.
I packed up my letters, cards, comic books and stowed them in a storage shed along with a few bookcases and boxes of books I couldn’t bear to part with. And my 1943 salesman’s wall map of Chicago, complete with pushpin holes that I nabbed for $10 at an estate sale in Albany Park in 1992. And my DUMP TRUMP hand-painted glitter sign.
But there was something lurking. In the garage. It haunted me. It was my digital identity.
I got my first email address when I was a year-one grad student in 1991. If memory serves, the system only worked within the university itself. It was novel, and I used mine to send the guy I had a crush on excerpts from The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook. “I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone.” We howled.
I kept every computer I ever had. Every hard drive. In the days before the Cloud, that means that I had every email I’d ever sent or received, from every email account I’d ever had (.edu, AOL, local service providers, etc., etc.). I had a diary of a life well-lived if not well-remembered. Old boyfriends, love letters, wedding planning (from the first time around, terrible marriage, great wedding.) Family bullshit. Freelance work. Drug arranging. Hangover pontificating. Choreography notes and reviews. Terrible half-written short stories. The start of a novel. I once made an org chart of how everyone I knew had slept with everyone else I knew. I do wish I still had that; it was funny. All of the trappings of my life on the cusp of the analog/digital changeover.
It was a big stack of computers. Laptops, sure, but also desktops. A Sony Vaio that seemed impossibly small at the time, complete with a kicky leather satchel picked up in Italy. Monitors, too. And keyboards.
I backed my car into the driveway and put it all into the trunk. Then I drove it to the hard-to-recycle materials yard, pulled up to the curb, and loaded it all onto a plastic cart that groaned. I wheeled it inside and told the nice man that YES I WILL PAY YOU to shred my hard drives and recycle the metals, and yes I would like to watch, thank you very much.
It took quite a while to extract all of the 13 hard drives from their ancient casings. One had to be smashed with a hammer, and I just wish I’d been the one to pummel it.
The shredding machine looks like it belongs on a 1950s submarine. It’s gunmetal, dirty, and makes a most beautiful sound. I watched through its grimy window as, one by one, my digital past was fed into its jaws. I saw the metal crunch, like in a very miniature car crunching machine. One by one, the hard drives were reduced to metallic ribbons, 1s and 0s pried apart forever. Forever. It was so fucking satisfying. It was such a relief. I was free.
About 10 years ago, I threw all of my paper journals into the trash bin and watched with the same kind of relief as the garbage guys emptied it into their truck. Someone asked me if I’d be sad later. No, I said. That was some painful bullshit that I don’t need to remember anymore.
