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A lot of us have been sharing our lives in various ways online for a couple of decades now. Maybe for you, it’s been through day-to-day social media sharing and engagement. Maybe it’s mostly through email. Or text. Or whatever have you.
For me, I’ve taken to the blogosphere (is this even a word anymore?) on Medium here as my arena of life sharing. The life of a personal blogger is an interesting one. I’ve been sharing through this medium of Medium now at a high rate for just over four years and have racked up over 1400 public entries.
I’ve left a very long trail of mental/emotional crumbs out there for anyone and everyone to view on a whim. Before recently, I’d never really thought much about it, but when it struck me, I realized how much was out there.
I can’t speak for you, but I’ve changed a lot since last month, let alone four years ago. Some of those posts from way back are fine, but I found that I couldn’t identify with a lot of them any longer. I couldn’t claim them as my own. It was as if they were written by someone else (and in a way, they were).
It’s easy to forget that those moldy old digital crumbs from days, weeks, months, and years (decades?) past are still there just as much as they ever were. And maybe for you, it’s fine. Having a big archive shows your movement as someone who tends to think through things on the written page.
But for me, I was in need of a refresh. It felt like those old posts were weighing me down and keeping me in the past. And since I’m starting a new chapter in life as I prepare for seminary and professional pastorhood, personally, it was the perfect time for a reset (pardon the alliteration there, it just worked out that way and I’m going with it).
That shocking moment when you press ‘delete’
And so a couple of months ago, I did it. Medium is really great about letting you back up your posts, so I exported them all first. And then I went through this complicated process to get them onto a free WordPress site (because Squarespace, where my personal site is hosted, only allows imports of WordPress files).
I then archived them away. They’re still accessible online, but they’re harder to find. I don’t actively hide them, but for a Joe of the street, they have to go to my site and dig around.
And then came the moment of truth: emailing Medium staff and letting them know that I was ready to pull the trigger. They emailed back to make sure that I wanted to delete all 1400+ posts (as well as all of the claps and comments and SEO juice that went with them).
I thought hard. (Real hard.) And I said yes. And then they were gone.
It was weird opening Medium the next day and seeing a blank publication. And it’s definitely negatively affected my readership levels — I think it messed with the algorithm or something. And since the archived posts don’t have as much engagement as the original Medium posts did, their SEO ranking tanked. But after a couple of months of regular posting, things are ticking their way back to where they were. And I feel a whole lot lighter. I feel more creatively free. Less tethered to the past.
And so, deleting your past archive may not be for you. Seriously, as I said, it can be a great thing having a long trail of work and keeping it where it is. But if you’re in my boat, it’ll be so worth it.
In fact, I did it on Twitter as well. I used this tool — Tweet Delete — to take a digital woodchipper to my past tweets. Not that I ever posted on Twitter much, but over time, I’ve clicked some hearts and retweeted some stuff that I feel icky about now. Nothing too bad, just… Not representative of where I am today.
We shouldn’t let our online history convict who we are now.
Now, I’m not talking about the super nefarious unlit alleys that people get themselves into online. That stuff, in particular, isn’t going away. Even the things we ‘delete’ never actually truly go away. But topically speaking, the nature of life is that we change so much over time that it isn’t fair how easy our old digital ghosts can show up unexpectedly to haunt us.
Just something to think about. If you’ve been sharing and oversharing as I have for some time now, it may be a good time to grab whatever kind of digital chainsaw you can and do some cutting (just be sure to back up your work!). It’s totally fine to take some time to gain control of what you make available to the general public, cut the fat, curate what you can, and start fresh.
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This post was previously published on Jonas Ellison and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Jonas Ellison is a writer and a blogger based in Chicago, IL. His daily(ish) publication, On Living, is one of the top single-author publications on Medium.com. You can also find his work in The Huffington Post, Observer, Fizzle, NoSidebar, The Mission, and more.
