Who Gets to Keep the Memories?
An ongoing goal of mine has been to cull all of my photos for their eventual placement into real-life, physical photo albums. This has been a rather large task since I got my first digital camera at the ripe old age of 12 and am part of a generation that has thrived on photo-documentation. Combine that with the numerous phones I’ve had over the years and an increasing storage limit - I started with around 30,000 photos to go through. I’ve since gotten that number down to about 10,000 (8,000 of which are on my current phone and still awaiting a culling session), but I’ve already run into a pretty big issue during this exercise.
I don’t know what to do with the photos I have with people I no longer speak to.
I’m not talking about the people I just grew apart from. I have fond memories, recognize we took different paths, and simply fell out of touch over time. I can look back on those photos and not feel particularly conflicted because growing apart is such a slow and natural process.
The ones that give me pause are the ones that include people I no longer talk to for a particular reason. These fall into one of two categories: Photos with family or friends who I don’t talk to anymore due to a specific event or conflict, and photos with exes.
I’m really not sure what to do with photos including these people, and by extension - the memories themselves. Even inside my own head I feel conflicted as to how I should revisit these people and these times in my life.
On the one hand, the easy route would be to simply delete those photos and skim over their presence in my mind. They are no longer a part of my life and are tied up in some less than pleasant memories, so there is no reason to reminisce on any part of my life that included them.
On the other hand, the photos capture a moment in time where I most likely did hold affection for this person and they for me. Photos where I know I was undeniably happy at that time. Selfies and random one off photos are easy enough to throw away, but photos of us together on trips or photos of us doing an activity, capture so much more than just the relationship I had with this person.
Furthermore, despite how the relationship may have ended, this person undoubtedly had an impact on my life. Maybe they taught me a new skill, made me laugh, or forced me to learn to stand up for myself. And since I like my life today, it feels like I owe them the tiniest bit of gratitude for that much
Our memories are intensely unreliable and they fade fast without constant repetition. If someone isn’t in our lives anymore, we won’t be able to easily recall much about them without any sort of trigger or reminder. Therefore, if I delete the photos I have with them, I am much less likely to revisit my memories of them in the future.
Consequently, the act of going through all my photos feels like an exercise in choosing what I remember, of choosing what memories I would like to preserve and have at the ready for my future self. I have to ask myself the question - do I want to remember this person at all?
And I don’t know the answer. At first, I thought I should at least keep a few. I’m allowed to remember a time when I was happy with this person. But then I felt guilty and ashamed, for letting them stay even in a small corner of my memory. Maybe the key is to leave them in their current digital limbo but not grant them the honor of physical reproduction? Or maybe it’s best to collect them all in a folder all on their own and simply click ‘delete’.
Maybe by the time I get through the rest of my photos I’ll have figured something out, but in the meantime, I would love any opinions on this!
The sky somewhere between Utah and Illinois…no people makes this one as unproblematic as it gets…