digital hoarding

4 hours ago
3 min read

My parents gave me a powershot for my 11th birthday, which birthed little ken, my inner child that has forever loved blogging. I have been on snapchat since its origin, which is a terrifying statement to my fully developed brain. As digital sharing became more socially standard and my life experiences became more vast, my digital archives grew. I effectively have daily content from my life for over a decade, spread over 3 Gmail accounts.

I lived with 3 roommates for the past year, and the bill that I was responsible for was the internet. It sure was cool when I signed up for fiber and got a whole TB of storage! Another year I don’t have to deal with my problem of digital hoarding! Yahoo!

Well, if you didn’t hear, I moved into my first big girl apartment. I have decided to go low tech because I simply don’t want to pay for fiber by myself, that’s so much money that I don’t care to spend in order to have faster scrolling capabilities. I just can’t continue to justify it. This is already an anti streaming and anti spotify household. I’m happy with my radio and dvd player and I love the library. I can always hotspot if necessary (the irony being that I ran out of hotspot data while writing this, and the cycle renews tomorrow).

Which means no fiber, no extra storage. Womp womp. I was 50GB over capacity and had 30 days to tackle this project before I lost access to my email. Quite the predicament I have landed myself in with this one.

I’ve been avoiding doing this because I don’t want to delete any photos of my dogs ever. But goodness fucking gracious i have been taking nothing but dogs photos for over half my life. I love my girls. I was especially scared because of the videos of whiskey not doing well in the end of her life. She would pace around and pant through the night, I can see now how much discomfort she was in. It was heartbreaking to have lived it once, and even more uncomfortable to rewatch years later. That is not how I want to remember her.

Similarly, I had the Covid era drunk vlogs. Drunkenly narrating some of Ginger's worst moments or celebrating firsts with Whiskey. I had to create a boundary for myself, where if I was visibly drunk, it had to go. I cleared THOUSANDS of thumbnails with that rule. I’m so sorry to everyone who lived through that, shoutout to being here now.

It’s been a lot. Just a lot of a lot. This undertaking has consumed most of my time and mental energy this past week. A lot of kindness and compassion towards the versions of myself that did what she had to in order to survive. Thank you but also goodbye. How exhausting to live in a world where we feel the need to document everything. … anyway.

I miss my girls. It is hard being around without them. The grief has been heavy this week, and I just want to tell more stories about them. Ask me to tell you about how whiskey loved to wake up in the morning. How Ginger loved to chase her ball. How taffy was the biggest chiller.

Its been harder to delete any of the good moments, like the dozens of blurry photos of whiskey looking like an alien. I want to live in those special little moments forever. But those memories are special because I lived them. All of my experiences have brought me to where I am, I don’t need to retain proof.

My hope is to eventually create a physical media version of the most important memories, but for now I just need to make sure my email doesn’t stop working. As of drafting this, I have made over 50% progress and feel hopeful that the end is near.

Okay gonna go live in the moment and stop taking videos of everything Cerby does..

love you, miss you, bye

Ken and Cerbs