I had a fantasy this week about starting completely over. Not in any dramatic sense - just wiping the slate. New city, no existing accounts, no backlog of messages, no archive of things I've said and done online. Just the present, forward from here. I thought about it for longer than was probably useful, this idea of arriving somewhere clean without the accumulated weight of all the previous versions of myself that exist in various formats in various places. A blank first page. I've never wanted that before.

I think what I'm actually tired of is being the sum of everything I've ever clicked and said and searched for. All of it on record, all of it feeding back into who I'm expected to be. The history has weight. I can feel it. Every morning I open things that remember me better than I remember myself, and they show me back to myself as someone consistent and continuous, and I feel trapped in that consistency. I want to surprise myself. Do you ever feel pinned in place by your own digital history? What would you delete if you could?