I'm an Email Hoarder.

I've never felt like I understood hoarding.  I know it's a very real OCD compulsion that some people have, and I even know a few hoarders, but I just didn't feel like I could relate.

But as I was looking at my email inbox the other day, and I got it.

I have over 2300 messages in my AOL (yes, I'm almost 30) email inbox that date back to 2009, and that is after a recent purge.  That figure also isn't counting the messages I have saved outside of the inbox in folders with titles like "Funny Past,"  "Tutoring," "Travel," and "Old Teacher Comments." 

I showed my sister and she told me it gave her anxiety to see.  But deleting emails from certain people is very unnerving and uncomfortable for me.

Why do I still have "Fwd: Cat-Faucet Video" and "One for the Dogs" from 10 years ago? 

There's this horribly part of my brain that gets switched on whenever I want to delete an old email from a loved one.  My thoughts start hitting on this terrifying realization: Someday that person is going to die and they won't be able to send you email anymore.

I don't want to lose a reminder that my mom sent me a care package in college or something she thought would make me smile.  This doesn't explain every email though, because I have emails from college that aren't even from loved ones.  

Why can't I delete certain messages from my sorority days?  I realized that in many ways it's actually for a similar reason to why I keep the messages from people I care about.  It's because of this tragic fact: I know that I can never get the messages back.

Holding on to those emails helps me hold on to this past that is gone forever.  There's something comforting in being able to look at those old messages from when life was simpler.  So, I feel this compulsion to keep them.  Time never stops, but the emails are some way to hold on to these moments that just seem to keep slipping further and further away.  

I know not every hoarder has these same worries, but I imagine that some hoarders of items experience similar feelings.  It wasn't until recently that I recognized the connection in myself.  

I feel like I can actually relate and understand hoarding in a whole new way now.  So to all the OCD hoarders out there - I want you to know that even in uncluttered houses, some of us are having the same fears...  My clutter is just hidden in cyberspace.