Confessions of a Serial Deleter

Much as I am laidback about most things, I can be quite the opposite when it comes to doing away with clutter. I have this compulsive need to ‘delete’, whether it is messages on my phone, emails in my inbox, files on my hard disk, or even posts on social networking sites. Once they’ve served their purpose they need to be consigned to the bin so I can get on with life, peace of mind and sanity intact.

When I worked full time, my desk was always the really neat one; nothing out of place, not a scrap of paper to be seen. Most people believed I didn’t do any work, apart from obsessively rearranging the pencils in their stand and watering the plant on the window sill. I was the editor of a magazine and those were the days we still corrected hard copies of proofs, and I would dispatch the reams of paper that landed on my desk with decided haste. All that unnecessary paper offended my sense of order. Quite naturally, I welcomed the world of digital editing with glee.

How can I explain the supreme satisfaction of deleting a file on the computer once it is done with? ‘Click, click’ I go in all the multiple folders where copies of the file are stored (because I also have this fear that a file will go missing before it is meant to) and then triumphantly to the recycle bin where with a final flourish all evidence of a file is removed. Or so I like to think – I’m sure someone more computer savvy than I am will be able to retrieve the files in a few seconds. But that is not the point.

Deleting a file indicates to me a job well done. It’s been tackled, dispatched to the client, and payment received (that is a very important criterion for final annihilation) – what use is it to me anymore? Why do I need it cluttering up my computer? I’m similarly ruthless about deleting emails and rarely have more than ten in my inbox, and they’re normally about jobs in progress. Once the work is out of the way, into the trash they go. And once I’ve forwarded one of those cutesy emails that people keep sending me to hapless others on my contact list, I promptly delete it. Let it clutter up someone else’s inbox.

I know there are people who never delete anything, preserving archives several decades old so they can reproduce evidence of every rash thing anyone has ever said to them. I met one of these the other day; he fished a four-year-old email out of his mailbox as if it had arrived yesterday. What’s more, he knew exactly what it contained! I stared, awe-struck. What did he do with all that old mail, I wondered. Re-read the messages when he was bored? Pat himself on the back for past achievements? Remind himself of lessons learned?

People like me will probably never understand. I even threw away hand written letters and cards back in the days when they couldn’t be tucked tidily away in the recesses of a digital gizmo. Well, naturally. Think of all the space they would occupy! My husband prudently stays out of the way when I am on one of my periodic missions to rid our home of clutter. He thinks I may be moved to dispose of him in a zealous fit one of these days, but luckily for him, I don’t dispense with valued relationships as easily as I do scraps of paper.

And yet, more and more these days, I find I am trying to remove the extraneous things, and people, from my life. There are only so many meaningful relationships that one can nurture, and while it would be an ideal situation to only interact with the few that matter, we can’t really avoid the superficial connections around us.

In the same way, while getting rid of physical clutter may be simple to achieve, spring cleaning the mind is much more difficult. If only one could mentally delete files with such ease – think of how much more efficiently the mind would work. Erasing outworn emotions, despatching worries and anxieties to the rubbish bin, cancelling grudges and fears...it would be like working with a clean slate. Or an empty hard disk. I haven’t reached that stage yet. For all my delete-happy ways, the hand hovers indecisively when it comes to formatting the mind.