Hi there. Just a heartfelt thank you from me to you for your readership and support. Gratitude is the attitude and I wish you love, nourishment, and wholeness.
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It started in the middle of the night a few days ago (mighta been a few weeks, what is time?). I was up nursing and delirious, and wondered, “what was the first email I sent?”
I searched.
It was a short email to my best friend Kathleen, written on the Spring Equinox in 2005. That was more than 18 years ago. Damn I’m old.
Almost two decades of emails since.
I snooped further into my first weeks of gmails from a gleaming new account, opened less than a year after the feature launched. It was a stake in the ground for an emergent identity: what I was (a college senior) but more importantly who I wanted to and might become.
It was funny to see my tonality, my writing style, and my relationship approach at the time. My emails were goofy but direct. Mildly urgent but chipper and honest. Tré in media res. At that time, email (née e-mail) was akin to what texting is now, but also more like handwritten letters (in that you didn’t expect an immediate response, or even one at all).
The most unexpected find from my mid-night dig was the signature I saw at the bottom.
“Simplify, simplify,” a cryptic excerpt from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the quintessential privileged white guy lake read. (kidding but not)
I can’t be sure, but it looks like I mistyped an extra space before the second “simplify" which, for some reason, I also capitalized. I took the liberty to shorten an already short quote, coring it of meaning like seeds from an apple. God bless the hubris of youth.
Why on earth would I have chosen this as my first-ever email signature? What was I hoping to convey about my supposed moral high ground or perhaps inspire with my perceived insights on life?
At age 21, I didn’t personally own much. Some things I do recall: a lumpy full-sized futon that was disproportionately unwieldy to move; a bulky Dell Inspiron laptop; some ill-fitting thrift store finds I refused to give up; tons of plastic and funky jewelry. I caretook many more things that had been bought for or gifted to me. But not, like, tons and tons of stuff. Not enough to simplify.
Certainly I owned a large share of big feelings, a tousled nest of nostalgia in which I placed many memories, and a decent (though not atypical) track record of relationship missteps. I also had some hoarded grudges. All of this stuff was loosely wound together by tangled threads of anxiety and wonder. I was not simple; I was a lot though, in fairness, I knew it.
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