We are what we delete

Hi, internet. It’s been 13 months since I last posted here.

I spent some of the weekend dusting off my dashboard and making inconsequential tweaks to the site layout and design. In the middle of the tidy up, I came across this tweet:

Yes, friends, I’m afraid it’s true. We are what we delete.

Nein Quarterly

Never mind the fact that it’s by a satirical account with an affection for German philosophers, the tweet prompted some serious thoughts in me about what the things we refuse to keep say about us, in our archival work and in our lives.

A younger me would have deleted the two lonely posts I made on this site back at the start of 2018 and justified it as a ‘fresh start’. Really it would have been because I was low level embarrassed that my failed promise to blog on the regular was not only preserved through the telling months of silence that followed, but that it might be doubly highlighted to the very small number of you brought here by today’s post. Current me thought fleetingly about deleting them, too, but current me is an archivist, and I understand that gaps can have meaning too.

So what have I been up to for a year? Living a life. Getting better at my job. Not blogging about it and, I guess, making fewer promises. All I can promise now is my spotty presence at this place on the internet.

See you in a year?