On Storage
I started the way everyone starts now: with storage.
My phone was full. A polite alert kept appearing in the corner of the screen, the digital equivalent of a cough behind the hand. Almost out of space. I ignored it for weeks, then months. Finally, one quiet afternoon, I plugged the cable into my Mac and decided to be responsible. Adult. Organized. I would clean my photos, download them into folders, free myself from clutter.
It felt like housekeeping.
At first it was easy. Screenshots of directions to places I’d already been. Blurry photos of menus, receipts, strangers’ dogs. Accidental bursts of the inside of my pocket. Delete, delete, delete. I felt efficient, even virtuous. This was what growth looked like now: a lighter phone, a tidier digital life.
Then the years began to scroll backward.
The photos sharpened. The colors deepened. I appeared—constantly—sunburned, dressed beautifully, smiling with my whole face. Rooftops in cities I once couldn’t pronounce. Pools that caught the light like mirrors. Champagne flutes, cocktails sweating in my hand. Friends’ arms around my shoulders. Strangers’ arms too. Nights that looked expensive. Days that looked endless.
If you had found my phone then, you would have thought I was winning.
I laughed in almost every photo. Not the polite smile you give to a camera, but laughter caught mid-escape, mouth open, head thrown back, eyes closed. I had become very good at that laugh. I collected experiences the way some people collect stamps: parties, substances, flights booked on impulse, conversations at sunrise with people whose last names I never learned. The photos were proof. Evidence. Alibis.
I paused the transfer.
Something in my chest tightened, not dramatically, not enough to stop me, just enough to be noticed. I told myself I was being sentimental. Nostalgia always stings a little. I kept going.
That version of me believed one thing very strongly: that her greatest fear was losing her mind.
I used to ask people that question at parties—What’s your biggest fear?—as if it were a parlor trick. I liked how it cut through small talk. People leaned in. They told me about death, loneliness, obscurity. They told me about being ordinary. They were surprised by the question and flattered by my seriousness. I was intense, they said. Refreshing. Different.
My answer was always the same. To lose self-awareness. To go insane without realizing it. To believe in something that wasn’t real and not know the difference. I said it lightly, theatrically even, as if it were a philosophical concern rather than a personal terror.
The irony is that this was already happening.
Looking at the photos now, I see what I couldn’t then. The signs weren’t dramatic. There was no single image that screamed danger. Instead, there was repetition. The same night, remixed. The same eyes, slightly dulled, doing their best impression of sparkle. The same smile doing more and more work.
I thought it was normal to wake up exhausted no matter how long I slept. Normal to need stimulation to feel anything. Normal to be funny because silence felt unbearable. Normal to feel vaguely unreal, as if life were happening one step to the left of my body. I called it being high-functioning. I called it being adventurous. I called it being young.
I did not call it depression.
No one around me did either. Or maybe they did, quietly, and I didn’t hear them. I was always moving. Always leaving. Always celebrating something. If someone tried to slow me down, I found a way to make it a joke. Defensiveness, I would later learn, is very charming when it’s wrapped in humor.
Healthy people, I think now, must have sensed it. Or maybe I pushed them away before they had the chance. The ones who stayed were often just as unanchored, just as allergic to stillness. We recognized each other instantly. We called it chemistry.
As the photos transferred, I reached the day everything broke.
There is no picture of the moment itself. No one photographs a video call where the future collapses. I had prepared a speech that morning—calm, articulate, gracious—about why I was quitting my job. I believed I was in control. I believed I was choosing myself. Instead, I was fired. Swiftly. Politely. The call ended. The room was silent.
At the time, I told the story like an anecdote. A plot twist. Can you believe it? I made it funny. I made it sound survivable. I booked another flight. I went out that night.
Only now, years later, do I understand how close everything was to the edge. How much of my life had been suspended by momentum alone. How intensely unwell I had been while believing—truly believing—that I was seeing clearly.
That is the most frightening part to reckon with: I thought I was self-aware then too.
As the last photos finished downloading, my laptop made a small, satisfied sound. Task complete. I closed the lid and sat very still. The apartment was quiet. No music. No plans. No audience. Just me, breathing evenly, unremarkably alive.
This version of me lives differently. Calmly. Boringly, by old standards. There are fewer photos now, and fewer reasons to take them. The laughter still exists, but it doesn’t need to perform. Peace, it turns out, is visually unimpressive.
And this is the realization that landed with a dull, final thud: my greatest fear did come true. I did lose myself. I just didn’t notice when it happened. I mistook chaos for freedom, intensity for aliveness, escape for joy. I thought I was killing it in life.
I was killing myself.
Cleaning my phone didn’t free up space. It gave it back to me. Not the kind you measure in gigabytes, but the kind that lets you sit in a quiet room without needing to run. The kind that makes clarity possible. The kind that makes the past legible at last.
When I opened my camera roll again, I noticed something else. It wasn’t empty. It was full — just in a different way. Entire weeks of the same small subject: my dog asleep in impossible positions, my dog watching me from across the room, my dog blurred mid-movement, my dog existing. No parties. No proof. No audience. Just a quiet record of days that didn’t need explaining. Photos I never took to show anyone, only to remember.
I unplugged the cable and picked up my phone. The alert was gone. In its place were photos of a small, ordinary life I no longer needed to escape from.