Operation Inbox: Saying Goodbye to 17,000 Emails
On deleting emails, high school math class and feelin' weird.
I didn’t do a lot of “new” things this week except go to the doctor in Spain for the first time. And that went surprisingly well!
So, I’m trying something new and sharing this essay about a recent project I’ve been working on: Operation Inbox. There might be more of this if people like it, idk! Let me know either way.
I’m clearing out my email inbox.
It’s been about three weeks of slowly and steadily deleting emails. When I started, I had 18,474 unread emails and 30,978 emails total.1 Now I have 3,907 unread emails and 13,486 total. It’s certainly progress, though I understand that having nearly 4,000 unread emails could put some people into cardiac arrest.2
I’ve been sort of down lately, feeling trapped between past and future rather than liberated by the feeling of living in the present. And then I feel guilty for feeling trapped instead of grateful. In part because of this, I feel rather attached to some of these old emails, like they represent a time when things made more sense.
Even though, of course, things didn’t make any more sense then than they do now. But I have to hold onto the idea that they might have: I’m not just unmoored in the middle of the ocean, just a little farther from land than I meant to be! (The emails are the land! This metaphor is kinda rough.)
If I can just get back to spring 2018, when I was submitting work to literary journals. To October 2016, when I first read about Elon Musk on Wait But Why and we were all convinced he was nothing but incredible. If I can just get back to 2012, when all of my emails were university recruitment emails. As if I had no anxiety or problems then.
Calculus Woes
The oldest email I have is from August 24, 2012. It is from my AP calculus teacher senior year of high school, informing me and my parents that my current grade was 82.7. In high school, I was the type of person who would have been devastated by a grade like this. I search my calculus teacher’s email address in my inbox and find the validation I needed (still need, admittedly): May 31, 2013. My final grade was 98.8.
AP Calculus was hard for me. I used to cry over all of those numbers and operations. It was the last class of the day, so my head was already full of English and history and music notes and lunchtime conversations. To focus on numbers after all of that, to really focus, sometimes felt impossible. I always said I hated math, but I sort of miss its certainty now.
And it makes me think, too, about all of the things in our lives that felt all-consuming at one point, or so routine that they felt inseparable from the concept of life itself. Preparing for my AP exams felt so high stakes. My senior year of high school, I took over the dining room table with my notes and homework and school assignments. They were always out, always a mess. Even more chaotic than the state of my Gmail inbox a few weeks ago. Sorry, Mom and Dad.
The strange thing is, I wasn’t doing any of this to get into a specific college, to achieve any particular goal. In fact, I felt clueless when the time came to apply to college. I just wanted good grades for their own sake. I cared about them more than I did about learning, more than I did about what college I went to, more than I did about a lot of important things.
It’s odd now, because they don’t matter. I rarely think about math, and no one wants to know what grade I got in AP Calculus in my adult life. I feel like kind of a prick for even telling you in this newsletter. In the end, I got the A. But even if I hadn’t, would life really have been such a disaster?
Another relic of mine I came across in this email mission: an ancient tweet, joking about finally finishing a college project that had “almost made me end my life.” I was being dramatic, tongue in cheek, obnoxious and unserious. And you know? Now I don’t even remember what the project was. It was such a big part of my life, it felt like it sort of was my life. It seemed crazy to think I could ever forget.
I Feel Weird
I recently saw the poem “In a Field, at Sunset,” by Carl Phillips, who just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Very sad and simple.
When he asked if I still loved him, I didn’t answer;
but of course, I loved him.
He’d become, by then, like the rhyme between lost
and most.
It seems like “lost” and “most” should rhyme. Like maybe they could, if we tried hard enough. Or maybe they did, once, but something changed. It is a normal part of life, for things to change, to die, or – sometimes harder – for them to not quite either live or die. Maybe those are the times that make us feel most lost. The most… weird.
For three years in college, I lived with my best friend. Sometimes, one of us would say to the other, “I feel weird today.” It wasn’t an efficient way to convey information. Like, “My stomach hurts” or “I’m feeling stressed about my history test” might have been more useful. Might have allowed us to dig to the root of the problems and find solutions.
But feelings don’t have much regard for efficiency. Sometimes, we just felt weird, and trying to find the words to encapsulate the specific weirdness, and where it was centered and where it came from, wasn’t worth the time. Wasn’t really possible, with, ironically, all of that vague weirdness weighing us down.
And now we live in different countries, and we text each other “I miss you!” every once in awhile, and try to see each other once a year. It’s not the same. That’s both okay and weird and a little sad.
But there’s a solace in all of this too. The obstacles that feel insurmountable now probably are surmountable. Perhaps even forgettable, someday.
Persevering through hard things, be they calculus class or an ambitious art project profound loss, can change your life trajectory. Failing can sometimes teach you even more.
Being close to a person, to people, shapes you, shifts you – sometimes shakes you or breaks you, and gives you a chance to put yourself back together in a new way. Maybe you keep these relationships and maybe you don’t, but you can keep the things you learned, the ways you grew – even the old email exchanges, if you want them.
And it’s okay to sometimes feel a little weird about it all.3
Question of the Week: Deleting old emails has become a good way for me to procrastinate on bigger tasks while still feeling sort of productive. What are some of your favorite (pseudo-productive or otherwise) ways to procrastinate?
Recommendation of the Week: Did you see this article in the New York Times about how many Asian-American women are named Connie, after the news anchor Connie Chung? It’s a beautiful read (written by Connie Wang, and photographed by Connie Aramaki, of course) about how many Asian-American families immigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s-1990s wanted to give their children the best possible lives. Perfectly timed for Mothers’ Day. The little video at the end made me cry haha.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the Connies I spoke to describe their mothers in similar terms: as leaders, brave, athletic, creative, successful, idealistic, capable. These moms were architects, editors and medical professionals, who’d often had to abandon their careers and reinvent themselves upon moving to a new country, who looked at the television and saw how things might be different for their daughters.
Also, though, this Instagram reel about Type B people who think they are Type A people felt like it was specifically about me.
Plus 32,689 promotional emails and 2,369 social emails, now down to 11,974 and 1,914, respectively.
By coincidence, my Spanish teacher had me do a reading about “digital hoarding” last week, and I felt a little bit attacked. “I’m working on it!” I wanted to say. But I also didn’t want to say anything, because I didn’t want her to know how many unread emails I have. I can’t believe I’m telling you now. I’m working on it!
And, in my opinion, it’s okay to keep the emails. In my case, it’s more that I needed to get rid of thousands of messages from entities like dictionary.com and my university’s career center and a wine subscription service I thought about signing up for.
This was great and really resonated - my procrastination task is also deleting emails! Makes me feel so productive