I pride myself on having old photos backed up somewhere, and I also cheekily threaten some friends with posting their old photos but the irony never escapes me.
It always seems much easier to laugh at others’ old stuff than face your own. So, my younger self went on an innocent purging spree of any photo I found somewhat embarrassing. I even tore up some old writing from notebooks and deleted old blogs I had from about 2014.
The purging spree might also have been down to a fear of judgement or a desire to curate an image but that feels like the least of my worries now. The notion that an old piece of work is not fit for existence seems very archaic to me now. Archiving is crucial — it’s why sites like The Wayback Machine exist, to recover our lost memories by preserving scraps of what might otherwise disappear.
I get frustrated with my younger self when I recall some obscure memory, a project, a piece of writing, or a particular photo I can’t quite place. I end up questioning whether my memory is playing tricks on me. Did this moment even exist, or is my mind exaggerating it?
Luckily, I recovered some of the important photos, but most of my old write-ups are gone forever. The writing was probably not all that impressive and less polished than it is now (not that it is all that right now, but you get me), but that is perhaps what I crave. There is a sense of growth in the cringe that comes with looking back. Progress feels more real when you have tangible old pieces to measure yourself against.
What this experience taught me is that there’s nothing wrong with ‘over-backup’. I’m not at the hoarding level where I refuse to delete anything, but I pause and think before aimlessly purging now. Maybe one day I’ll even celebrate the cringey stuff by sharing a crazy photo or video. The funny thing is, I feel less ashamed of sharing an old cringey piece of writing than I do a photo but that’s a thought for another day.
We’ve all had an embarrassing era: a deleted Tumblr page, old blogs, or near-ancient Facebook albums. I think we should embrace the “mess” as part of the story. I wish we all kept more of it — the raw, messy, and authentic proof of who we’ve been — because perfection was never the point.
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