My Name is Leigh and I'm a Digital Hoarder

School started last month for most of us—my family included. My son is in the 10th grade now, which sounds fictional, but apparently it’s real. One minute he was wobbling through pre-K with Goldfish crumbs on his cheeks, and now he has to tilt his head down to look me in the eye when asking questions I can’t answer about Algebra 2 and airsoft gear.

Maybe that’s why, in the run-up to back-to-school chaos, I finally pulled the trigger on a new desktop computer. My old Mac—loyal but laggy—had been running on the “click, make a sandwich” cycle long enough. It had served me well for six years with its 4TB hard drive, but transferring data packets in the cloud for hours on end had worn it down in the slow, creeping way we outgrow jeans we still swear fit.

So, after steeling myself for the budget hit, explaining to hubby that this was necessary, and asking ChatGPT dozens of questions comparing processors and ports (thank goodness!), I closed my eyes and clicked “buy.”

I was told the new Mac didn’t need a big hard drive because “everything’s in the cloud.” Which is adorable. Clearly, they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

Also—and I mean this with every fiber of my analog soul—I am so sick of not owning anything. That 2TB hard drive is just one more reminder that we now forever rent our digital lives. Subscriptions for apps, subscriptions for fonts, subscriptions for storage… even music I “buy” isn’t really mine. I can’t make a mix tape anymore—not the kind that sounded like a soft hiss and a heart poured onto a fragile magnetic ribbon. Those tapes were how we shared joy and heartbreak with friends and sweethearts.

Now? If Adobe gets bored or decides to cancel me, they could revoke my apps and I'd lose my job by lunchtime. And we’re all just supposed to smile and accept that. But I digress.

When moving old Mac to new Mac, I realized very quickly: it would never fit. The JPGs and MPGs alone number 228,000. I have backups of user folders from every computer I’ve owned since 2010. I have every tax return, invoice, Leigh draft, Christmas card photo, and sooo many copies of the video of BabyJack laughing at me fake-sneezing at him in the highchair.

Why? Because the moment I delete something, I will need it. This very minute, my younger brother is looking for a new job for the first time in TEN years and his resume was one of those "Why do I still have this?" files I deleted from the old machine.

So of course I bought a 16-terabyte external I lovingly named “MonsterDrive,” because 16TB feels virtually limitless—for now. And, because my tech-nerd big brother understands technology and me, he gently suggested I also get an SSD—with no moving parts, the kind that might still be humming quietly on Jack’s desk in 30 years when he’s introducing his own children to “all the baby pictures your Mimi saved.”

That new and ridiculously tiny drive—about the size of a deck of cards—now holds 4TB of the most precious clutter of my life. And for those keeping score at home, that’s the equivalent of 3.3 million floppy disks.

Yes, I’m still-doing-floppy-disk-math-on-the-OregonTrail years old. I was there when computers clicked and whirred and made us feel like something magical was happening behind the screen.

Still, I’m not embarrassed by the pixelated Museum of Leigh I’ve curated. The beauty of digital photography is that can take 50 shots to get one perfect one. The problem with me is that I can’t bring myself to delete the other 49. Because what if one of them captured a millisecond of BabyJack’s soul that the others missed?

But someday—and I say this with a touch of momancholy—Jack won’t have to rent a dumpster to clean out my house. He can just smile at the memory of his weird old mom… and press “delete.”

Or just maybe... he’ll open that tiny little drive, drag the tax returns to the Trash, then swipe through a few thousand photos, and realize his momma didn’t want to lose even a bit... or a byte of the people she loved.

So, to all you parents who just whispered, “Hmm... I do that too,” with phones full of nearly identical photos—the blink, the smile, the slightly better smile—and who never delete any of them, because what if that’s the one…

Maybe that’s not hoarding. Maybe that’s legacy.