You've got mail...

You can probably learn a lot about a person by going through their old emails.

As part of my ongoing effort to let go of clutter—and hopefully free up some space in both my home and my head—I decided to tackle a different kind of mess: my invisible storage.

You know the kind. The storage quietly clogging up the internet, your RAM, your hard drive, your running speed... or whatever it is that gets clogged. (I'm clearly not a technology person.)

Instead of doom-scrolling or losing three hours of my life to Instagram reels and YouTube videos that I won't remember tomorrow, I decided it might be a good idea to clear out the 15,000 emails spread across my various Gmail accounts, some dating back nearly 20 years.

Can you imagine if all those emails were physical objects? Flyers, letters, printed photographs, receipts, newsletters from stores you've never shopped at again? They'd probably fill an entire recycling depot.

But back to what you can learn.

Deleting all those emails turned into an unexpected walk through my written life.

There were emails to my first husband about appointments for our kids, family vacation plans, birthday parties, sporting events, and dance recitals. Shared family gatherings, births, illnesses, deaths, new pets, plans with friends, Christmas, travel—you name it. All the ordinary, beautiful chaos of family life and marriage was sitting there in black and white.

The emails also revealed the periods when I was struggling.

There were messages from the years I worked four jobs, trying to make ends meet and contribute financially. Emails arranging childcare so I could attend a birth, followed by others cancelling plans because I was too exhausted to function the next day. Looking back, I wonder how I was upright at all.

Then there were the online purchases that tracked the evolution of our family. Cloth diapers became sports equipment. Sports equipment became men's clothing for my boys and women's cleats for my daughter. There was the registration for the one year my middle child wanted to try sleepaway camp, and the plans for the months my eldest went to live in Newfoundland with his aunt and cousins.

Every stage of life had left a digital breadcrumb trail.

Then came the breakup. The reshaping of our family. The divorce.

Then the second wedding. The unstable marriage. The second divorce.

Those emails belong to a very different woman.

You probably wouldn't notice it in any single email. There isn't a message titled, "Dear Inbox, I am becoming someone else." But taken together, the changes are impossible to miss.

These days, most of my emails are about paddle races, university planning with my daughter, condo board updates, kitchen renovation ideas, West Coast Trail planning, discussions with colleagues, and the occasional online purchase that I absolutely needed at 11:47 p.m.

There are emails about fitness and wellness, new areas of interest in my thriving work practice, volunteer opportunities, and ongoing conversations with my children's father about our kids.

It's all there.

The good, the bad, the embarrassing online purchases, and the newsletters I apparently thought I'd read someday.

All of it.

A walk down memory lane, one delete button at a time.

So now I'm curious.

What's hiding in your old emails?