Illustration by Catherine Chan
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If your e-mail ends in Yahoo, Hotmail or Sympatico.ca, I see you. We were early adopters. And now, if we’re still clinging to our once-era-defining handles, we’re Luddites of the highest order.
I set up an e-mail account in university. But that doesn’t mean I trusted it to do its job. In April of my fourth year, Ottawa was blanketed with winter’s last storm, so my then-professor suggested I e-mail him my final assignment.
I guffawed. What ludicrousness. There was no way I was going to trust the lion’s share of my grade to the internet. So I got in my car and white-knuckled it across the city. A 20-minute drive took well over an hour and a half, before I finally slipped my manila-envelope-clad essay through a little iron slot.
Why do we take our local wonders for granted?
In the years since, e-mail became a de facto filing system for my entire life. And soon, an extension of my identity.
Asked to provide contact information – to friends, employers, promotional campaigns, charities – I’d recite my Yahoo address with alacrity. That e-mail was encoded in my DNA alongside my childhood phone number. Anyone I’d come into contact with over the years could find me at the same digital co-ordinates where I’d planted my flag at 22.
In real life, I’m a minimalist. Ruthlessly unsentimental. Baby clothes listed on the resale market when my daughter outgrew them. When my dad died, I limited my memento to a single item: a favourite watch. We donated the rest.
But my digital inbox was a maximalist’s dream. I filed everything. Not always neatly. Not always logically. But it was all there.
Maybe I could be unsentimental with physical objects because I was hoarding everything digitally. My e-mail was a stand-in for a cobwebby attic.
“Cruise Life,” a folder from my years working at sea, contained correspondence with friends I’d met sailing around the world. Dozens, if not hundreds, of emails to my parents, sent from a tiny crew internet cafe where I watched waves crash against a porthole as I dashed off quick missives from below deck. A US$20 internet card bought you 20 minutes – 10 of which were gobbled up by the dial-up modem.
“Making Waves,” a folder dedicated to my first book. Correspondence with my then-agent, elation at getting representation. Devastation when the would-be publisher shuttered and rights returned to me.
A folder labelled “Fertility,” stuffed with all the hopes and dreams of starting a family. My now 14-year-old daughter the result.
The list goes on. Jobs accepted and outgrown. Relationships maintained, then fizzled out.
Over time, my e-mail became the keeper of all my secrets.
But not too long ago things began to glitch. Emails would seemingly disappear. Sent items were getting snatched up in recipients’ trash folders with alarming regularity. And the spam. A relentless influx. Hot dates, miracle cures, it never ended.
Our tea ritual kept us close even when my wife was dying
The idea of making a switch felt inauthentic. I was my e-mail address. But I needed my e-mail to function. And, if I’m honest, that once-modern Yahoo suffix now felt. . . dated. A digital tell that I hadn’t kept pace with the times.
Change of this magnitude was no small thing.
To start, I was shocked at the sheer number of businesses I needed to alert. Newspaper subscriptions, phone companies, mortgage holders. Then there were schools, doctors, workplaces. The list of people who needed to reach me – to invoice or communicate – ran well into the double-digits.
My address book came next. Some people I spoke to regularly, others to whom I was barely tethered and only by the thinly stretched thread of a once-familiar e-mail address.
I migrated what I could. Went folder by folder, dragging files that felt freighted with meaning. Some things didn’t transfer cleanly. Attachments went missing. I made choices. Promotional emails from 2009? Gone. Threads with long-lost acquaintances? Deleted.
It felt like a purge, liberating and final in equal measure.
Yet, somehow, I felt more sentimentality at changing digital addresses than I ever did picking up stakes and moving physical homes. In a world of change, there was a comfort in knowing I was, in theory, in the same place I’d always been. A collision of past and present, stored somewhere in a digital cloud.
Now that the hard work is done, I’m getting used to my new, swankier, more relevant e-mail address.
Yet, despite my best intentions, I can’t bring myself to shut down the old one.
I check it maybe once a month now. Sometimes less. It’s mostly the digital equivalent of junk mail piling up on a crumbling stoop.
But every so often, there’s something real. Proof that these digital co-ordinates – so central to my identity for so long – still matter. At least a little.
My new address still doesn’t feel like home – at least not yet. But maybe I’ll grow into it.
Either way, you can still find me. The old me, and the new me. Both somewhere in the cloud.
Suzanne Westover lives in Nepean, Ont.