It’s late and all the world has dropped dead again.

I didn’t start this with a gallery of photographs of myself out of vanity. I was pondering all the different versions of myself I have been and these photographs are the only tangible evidence I have that I was ever any of those incarnations at all. I know that I am the person in all of the above photographs and paintings. We share memories, we share interests, we have shared a life. And yet – I am not her as she is not me.

There are countless ways we could try to count how many times I have died. Shall we count boyfriends, lovers, and therefore the version of me who loved them? Shall we count jobs and the version of me that attended them? Shall we count hair colours? Though that last one might be tricky — I’ve had blue hair, pink hair, orange hair, brown hair, platinum blonde hair, grey hair, purple hair, black hair, auburn hair…

I hold quite an old fashioned view, you see. I believe that we are all like wet lumps of clay – and the lives that touch us, leave little marks upon us. Some will barely leave a fingerprint, an intangible mark. Others may leave their engravings on us, etched into us like deep scars on our being. We – unfortunately – cannot control who leaves what marks upon us.

I am the amalgamation of everyone I have ever been, and I am the result of everyone who has ever left an imprint on my life.

I never keep a toaster or kettle under a cabinet; because my Auntie Carol told me not to. I sing Pack Up Your Troubles most mornings; because Eric did. I still make scrambled eggs just like David did. I stroke people’s cheeks when comforting them; just like my mother did. I hear my high school art teacher beseeching me to “push your lights, and pull your darks!” when I paint. I still call French toast “Tubby Toast”,  because that’s what my father called it when I was sad. My security number is my late friend’s service number.

And yet — none of these previous versions of me exist, in any realm other than photographs, and I suppose, perhaps other people’s memories of them. Hell, I doubt I’d even get along with some of them. Many of them were deeply unhappy, troubled. A few sought out affection wherever they could get it. I wonder how they would feel about the version of me writing this? I wonder how the version of me in five years, will feel about the version of me writing this?

I could curate you a Museum of Past Selves, of artefacts and memories and wax work figures of everyone I have ever been.

And so could you.

I’m twenty-four years old right now, and already I have a small wunderkammer worth of people I have been, and am no longer. By the time anyone gets around to reading this, I suppose I will be twenty-five. (Hello, future!). If you’re around the same age as me, we will fall into the same bracket –

We were the generation whose baby and toddler photographs weren’t shared on Facebook; but who can clearly remember the launch of the iPhone. We definitely had some VHS tapes at some point; but we probably also remember AOL chatrooms and almost certainly spent many hours of our teen years on MSN. We’ve watched and grown into adults as the Internet changed from being something you “did” for a while on a computer, before going off to do something else; to being something we could carry in our pockets; to being something we cannot live without and even our coffee machines are connected to. I remember mother printing off AA maps on real paper to go on road trips to places we hadn’t been before. How quaint.

I never had too much interest in social media as a teenager – a fact that, a little longer in the tooth, I am incredibly grateful for. I was pretty horribly bullied throughout my time in high school; so the concept of giving my tormentors access to the safe space of my Kerrang! magazine cut out covered bedroom walls was unwise, even to my teenage brain. I did start using it more as a student though – sharing photographs of nights out, and obviously well thought out jokes, and pictures of then-partners and my cat doing silly things (no, that’s not a euphemism).

Lately though – something about it all haunts me a little. There, easily accessible with a few clicks, was a record of everyone I have ever been; and I am no longer those people. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t a bad person, I never killed anyone, I’ve never so much as had a parking ticket. I don’t think I ever intentionally set out to hurt anyone – but I don’t doubt that I hurt people, I did. I have existed in various incarnations of myself which were unhappy, drinking too much, self harming, in unhappy relationships, in toxic friendships, trying to be someone they weren’t and realising that actually, pretending to be someone you aren’t is easier than being yourself when yourself is a drunken, anorexic mess. I never explicitly documented those less than savoury elements of those past versions of me whilst I still was that person; but the person I was was shaping the decisions I was making, the clothes I was wearing, the posts I would upload. I’m not embarrassed as such – though doubtlessly, many of the images of myself shared online were a bit silly, in 20/20 hindsight – but rather ashamed of those versions of me; even though I am now acutely aware I had to be those people, as less-than-ideal as they were, to become this version of myself right now.

It was a learning curve I had to take, but does that mean that every prospective partner, every boy I fall for, every colleague, every boss, every professor – should be able to see the evidence, the Museum of The People I Once Was? Surely them hearing of it is enough? What good can it do your new love to see you kissing your old one? What benefit does it give for your new friends to see you dancing with your old ones that you haven’t spoken to in almost half a decade?

Of course, it works in reverse too. Our social-media driven culture encourages us to follow and add everyone we can, everyone even tangentially connected to our lives. Your ex is never truly gone, because you can stalk them on Instagram anytime you want. Those people you spoke to for fifteen minutes at a Society meeting two years ago? You’ll be watching their Stories forever more. And one of the girlfriend’s of one of the people who added you because you spoke to them for fifteen minutes at a Society meeting two years ago follows you too; and she’s friends with your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, and loves posting photographs of them. You end up in a giant swamp of what feels like super-interconnected soup from which there is no escape and no reasoning; these people who should have just naturally drifted away as versions of you die (and versions of them die) and life changes and you grow; are now people you actually know stuff about, because social media exists in stasis. There’s no growth, no fluidity, no change. Good grief, a guy who asked for my number in a bar in 2017 (yes, as in, four fucking years ago) went on a spree of liking everything I had ever posted on Instagram the other day. I’m sorry, guy, but I’d forgotten you existed until then. Because I was supposed to forget you existed. Because you crossed paths with me four years ago, and asked a version of me that no longer exists for their number. It becomes the Court of King Caractacus of people you have absolutely no reason to remember but cannot forget…you’ve got a direct message from the fascinating witches who put the scintillating stitches in the breeches of the boys who put the powder on the noses of the faces of the ladies of the harem of the Court of King Caractacus.

I suppose the obvious solution would be to only add or follow the people you would genuinely go out for a coffee with. But of course, that doesn’t truly work either, because social media is a numbers game – you want the most likes, you want the most engagement, because that way more people see what you’re doing, and if you own a small business or are an artist, those things are invaluable. So, the pay off for this advertising becomes the inability to ever forget anyone you’ve ever met.

I worry. At the grand old age of twenty-four, am I old enough yet to worry about those dastardly kids these days? But, I do worry. I worry for myself, and I worry for my peers – and I especially worry for the generations younger than me.

What does falling in love look like when you can look back through an archive of every person your new love was before they even met you? What does making friends with your new work colleagues look like when they can scroll through every version of yourself you have been since you were a preteen? How can you truly grow as a person when you’re stuck carrying the weight of the visibility of every version of yourself you have ever been? What does moving away to university to reinvent yourself look like when everyone can see a perfect library of the old you? How many times will one ill-advised comment you made at fifteen and too young to know any better come back and bite you? Maybe we all ought to wipe the slate clean once a year or such, just delete everything we have ever uploaded and start again. But then, that would destroy the social media apps most popular feature – the Memories tool. Yes – it encourages us, and rewards us with likes, to share and focus on the people we used to be rather than the people we are becoming; because apparently stasis might not be good for us, but it is good for the algorithms.

I have died. I have died, annihilated, trashed everything, and begun again, over and over and over. I don’t even notice I’m doing it. It happens so slowly, until all of a sudden that you is shed like an exoskeleton, removed like snakeskin, revealing a new version of the same creature underneath. And in shedding my outgrown exoskeleton I have lost friends, relationships, interests, fashion tastes – also trashed, annihilated. And so have you. And that’s good. We couldn’t grow if we kept the exoskeleton that’s now too small for us.

Perhaps that’s what social media becomes; just a room of abandoned, outgrown exoskeletons piling up on top of each other, threatening to fall over and crush us on one hand; and luring us in to examine what we used to be on the other. There’s no need to be as connected as we are, to everyone we ever spoke to on a night out or the barista in the coffee shop we liked in a city we don’t live in anymore. It’s literally, unnatural. It’s not how thousands of years of human social evolution wants us to work.

I closed down most of my accounts. I won’t tell you to do the same; but perhaps it is a healthy thing, to sweep all the photographs you took of those skeletons hiding in the closet into the recycling bin. To share the memories you wish to, in person, with others.

And on the topic of versions of myself I am no longer — I imagine I’ll find this piece of writing again in a few years, when I will have shedded off another few exoskeletons and probably be looking back at this version of myself with hindsight, in the depths of a hard drive or some Internet archive. In which case:

Hi, me. It’s me. I hope you’re doing well, and I can’t wait to meet you.

I am undead undead undead (and so are you). / Megan Bellatrix Archibald by meganarchibald is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0