Dear Google Drive users,
Scrolling down my Google Drive is always a journey. Finding lost documents and assignments is an everyday ordeal, but, once in a while, gems will appear. All contained in a doc or slideshow, I see past versions of myself.
These previous identities are in my assignments from the eighth grade, freshman year, sophomore year and to this day. They are documents I made to talk to my friends, secret conversations hidden beneath the code of digital paper, abandoned and lost in time. It is like cleaning your room and finding artwork from when you were six. You can see the improvement, or perhaps, lack thereof.
The assignments that resulted in tears on the keyboard and hands on my head, joy, anger, sadness, disgust—the list looks like the cast of “Inside Out.” The slideshows for notes and the worst possible topic ever: stoichiometry (insert shiver from the crowd). From Christmas lists to videos from science inserted into the drive, everything that could possibly be in the drafts is there. Even pictures from yoga class last year! Copy after copy after copy, that was made and turned into Google Classroom (RIP) two years ago is sitting there, waiting to get deleted. The codon wheel I saved after losing my paper copy in the depths of my backpack, the NHS application documents, and the horror of Spanish 2 just sitting there. I’ve really got to clean it out; spring is fast approaching.
I think the fact we have to clean out our Google Drive should make a point by itself. What do you mean we have so many assignments that are online that we have to do a spring cleaning? BLASPHEMY! (Did the big words work? Is that not how you breeze through assignments? Big words?) Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, that you can see your past selves in the work you have created, even if it is just a month, a week, a day ago. The memory of that assignment or secret doc to talk in is still there, both in your mind and in your drive.
Sincerely,
A staff writer with way too much in their Google Drive.
