Happy New Year! I launched this newsletter in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and it has always faced stiff competition from the doomers and gloomers — which I very much understand. I personally get very tired of doom and gloom myself, though. Succumbing to darkness feels like taking the easy way out in many respects.
I don’t know if you’ve set any specific goals for yourself in 2024, but I’ve noticed that when people come to me for advice on managing their digital footprints, a lack of concrete goals often lurks in the background. When I talk to clients, they tend to report feeling stressed by the online world, feeling out of control, like they can’t manage their information, and feeling overwhelmed.
And when I ask, “But how would you like to feel about your online presence instead of all this?” it is often hard for them to articulate the answer.
I think this is because we focus on what’s wrong much more on what is fixable, or, for that matter, what’s right. Focusing on what’s wrong is easy. It’s passive. Focusing on what we want to change — and what we want to preserve — that, my friends, requires commitment and persistence. Which can be pretty daunting! In all areas of life, not just our online personas (which bleed into everything else anyway).
Below is a text I wrote exactly six years ago as I lay in bed in a friend’s apartment in Chelsea, having left behind my disaster of a marriage and the absolute horror that was my time in Russia. I should’ve left much sooner, but preserving our so-called “family,” even at a mortal risk to myself, took precedence for several years.
And so these are words from rock bottom (the text was accompanied by a picture of me, but who cares about that picture right now):
Looking back on it, I’m amazed at the clarity of that moment. I had done the hard thing, which left me raw and empty. But I knew that it was also the right thing. It doesn’t mean I haven’t screwed up plenty of times since then, but when I did, I had the knowledge of my past acts of daring, the little voice saying “you’ve been through worse,” to keep me going.
I’m no life coach or guru, my focus is very specific, but when it comes to consulting people or simply helping them out (I like that expression so much more than “consulting” anyway), I ask them to look at the things they’ve said / posted / done in the past. As awful as Facebook is, if you still use it, the memories feature can really come in handy then!
There are also apps that can make your older content easily accessible, and while the experience of studying your past selves can be extremely cringe, it can also be necessary.
Also, if you feel like deleting something from the past — go ahead and do it! As an OSINT person, I hate it when people delete, but, also as an OSINT person, I think deletion can be healthy and good, and not just because we regularly post stuff, whether publicly or for friends, that’s damaging or unhelpful.
Sometimes, it helps to look at an old post, and say, “I’m not like that anymore” or “I was wrong” or “I’ve changed my mind.” It can help us feel more in control and be more cognizant of our progress. Remember: You don’t owe anyone a perfectly preserved digital footprint. You are not, in fact, a museum.
For example, I recently deleted a couple of my old Moscow posts that lent credibility to several theater world (I used to be a playwright, if you can believe it) liars who used to “love Ukraine” and work with Ukrainians and are now busy praising Putin for wanting to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. The coming of full-fledged fascism to Russia has revealed a number of people I thought I knew to be craven cowards. So why would I want my digital footprint to contain praise for someone who later revealed themselves to be absolute trash? I don’t owe these people anything.
By the same token, there is a lot in our past lives that is worthy of dusting off and highlighting all over again, like I did with the post above. You will notice that the privacy settings in that screenshot tell their own story — I did not want my soon to be ex-husband and a number of vengeful and petty people who were his friends at the time to read it. As I’ve detailed before, my digital footprint had been used in all sorts of malicious ways as our marriage was breaking down.
At this point, I am much more comfortable in talking about a lot of things. Life has its perpetual challenges — Russia’s horrific war being a constant shadow upon my existence and the existence of people I love — but I am otherwise in a good place. The latticework of the world, which I mention above, has certainly been restructured, but the world has good bones, they continue to hold.
The time after the holidays can be a difficult one. We all talk about how the holidays can be hard, but then we launch into talking about how gloomy things get afterwards, don’t we?
So treat yourselves. Go on a fact-finding mission about who you were a few years ago, if you’re interested. See what you want to chuck out. See what you want to save. It can be either liberating or embarrassing, but it can also be brave and helpful.
Be excellent to each other, and let me know if you find anything interesting or revealing in your old posts!
Natalia, again your story moves me. As a second or third-gen Ukrainian American, I find it sad that you wrote plays in one of the most interesting of places to perform them, in a town where The Seagull was first played and playwrights like Aleksandr Ostrovsk once roamed the streets looking for something to write about. And now you are here. On substack. With the rest of us. But Grandma and lots of other relatives of mine were driven from that now miserable place just as you BUT the good news is, good riddance! Like Palmyra, Tenochtitlan, Angkor, and Rome, Moscow will fall hard and be recorded in human history as being another fucked city run by fracked people, eventually ending in ruin.