phew, purging is hard work sometimes

today the universe, or rather the university, gave me a deadline that forces me to pick up my feet about something i've let drag over the last year or so. since i dropped out of university (perhaps permanently this time) i've been aware that sooner or later my university email account would be deactivated. as i've mentioned before, i have a bit of a hoarding challenge associated with my ocd. one of the biggest challenges for me is to part with information, or potential sources thereof. i'm constantly battling the obsession with knowing everything that's offered to me, and the compulsion or ritual that i feel i need to carry out is to intently read & understand (& if possible remember)every piece of information that comes my way. as you can imagine, this means there are many piles of newspapers & magazines, and unread books & lecture notes, and all kinds of physical repositories of information scattered throughout everywhere i frequent. it pains me to part with anything that i may need to consult later, or that represents information i may need to come back to at any point. how this translates to email is that correspondence contains information, and i have a hard time parting with messages.

so this impending deadline. it's tuesday. that's right, i basically have today and tomorrow to go through the entirety of the last 11 years of inbox messages & folders, and make decisions about what to forward, redirect, and delete. it's a process i've been avoiding for years. literally.

generally the way my ocd compels me to sort through this kind of stuff is to thoroughly read most of it, before feeling safe deleting it. because of the time crunch, however, i risk losing everything if i proceed in this way. combine that with the genuine desire to avoid giving in to my compulsions, i've been ruthlessly sorting through email the last few hours. i've taken breaks for sure, but mostly i've been just deleting, unsubscribing, canceling accounts, redirecting mail, etc. so far i've updated okcupid account, unsubscribed from some list-serves, and closed my eHarmony account (that one was particularly satisfying, since i closed it by saying, 'thanks, but i've already found someone who really understands me, just like the people on your commercials'). i've also forwarded, then deleted my birth family messages, and deleted a junky mail folder without even reading it.

now comes the difficult parts. i have three folders full of messages from three very important ex-lovers. one is from a best friend who evolved into a lover who left me... we were unable to stay friends and i sometimes feel those messages were all i had left of him. my Muse reminds me of him - only without the angst & self-loathing he embodied - so i know that there will be all kinds of awesome contained in those letters. i'm very tempted to read them before i delete them, or even just forward a copy to my active email account. i need to leave that decision for a bit and come back to it. the second is from my former common-law spouse, someone i hand-fasted with, planned children with... and i kept every single email we ever sent each other. that huge folder of messages contains an entire story arc of our complete relationship - right through to the bitter end. i'm pretty sure i can delete it now. i'm tempted to go back and read a few of the cutesy pre-dating flirtation emails, but i think that would ultimately just lead to emo. in fact, i'm going to delete them right now before continuing this post.

and it's done. wow. i'm going to dance and laugh and just take this moment in before i come back to do more. and there's more to do. the last difficult folder contains years worth of emails between myself & a friend/lover who had a non-relationship spanning about four years - my longest actual relationship, though we never officially dated, whatever the fuck that means :P i think i'm still holding on to that one because we have some unfinished business, or at least i do. i'll let you know what the hell i do with that one. but first, food.