I have a need to save pretty much all the personal-data stuff that is naturally generated by my life. Notes with friends on scraps of paper from middle school? Yup. Random photos I took on my phone? Yeah, they are memories of sophomore year of college. Chat conversations? Well, these are auto saved by many chat services these days, but I'd keep copies manually in the days before AIM kept its own logs. I never want to delete a text message that made me smile, and it's hard to throw out even a logistical note my mom jotted down.
So what does this mean? For one I have tons of physical and digital archives of this stuff and it takes up space in those realms. Also means I can dig into some of those and have some serious floods of memories. What if maybe I should let some of this stuff go - keep what is special and unique, and tie the memories to those fewer things? I want to appreciate all the good experiences and people that are/were in my life, but I have to let go what is past to be best able to focus on what I have right now that is also so good.
