I have no problem deleting files, texts, emails, blog posts, tweets… anything.

I am a confident, swift, positively gleeful deleter if I don’t feel the need to keep something around, either because it has served its purpose… or failed to serve one in the first place.

Sometimes I delete things too soon, which requires reproducing them — but they’re usually better the second time, even if I drive myself insane in the process. If I have to request them from someone else, however, I end up feeling like the kind of heedless, irritating person who throws out a birthday card with cash still tucked inside.

Sometimes I delete out of some combination of thoughtfulness and cowardice because of the reaction something fosters in others (or might foster in others — I don’t hedge my bets), or I delete because I am confident I shouldn’t have sent whatever into the ether in the first place.

I’d like to say my tendency to delete has kept me out of hot water… but while you can delete things, you can’t actually un-say them.

I’d like to believe all this deleting uncomplicates my life… but I just fill in more where I delete, and complication returns via a sort of queasy, inevitable osmosis.

But I think I delete because I like tiny control.

I like to wrest order from disorder in temporary, yet giddy ways… though I don’t recognize them as that at the time.

It isn’t lost on me that when things seem truly crucial — work email, client email, pictures of family and friends on my phone/camera/laptop, texts full of loving, ridiculously gushy words from my gift of a new husband — my delete-happy ways fall by the proverbial wayside.

And I can’t ignore the reality that I most often delete to alleviate discomfort or self-disdain: when I say something badly or offend someone without thinking (or with thought, but just stupid ones); when I blather on and don’t recognize it in time; when I recognize the need for an edit after the fact; when I am temporarily uncomfortable in my own skin and figure that tapping out words or images or ideas will give me a bit more room to breathe.

It’s chicken.

I mean, sometimes it’s organized and smart and together. But it can definitely be chicken.

I don’t like to be an ass, as much as I may show tremendous facility for it. So I try and clean things up the same sort of vigor with which I’d attack a client paragraph with my virtual red pen: let’s get life down to the best of what it should have been, and hope that I don’t yammer on quite so much the next time.

But I will.

And something tells me I need to live with that discomfort a little more than I’m willing to now, even if I want to run up a tree like a crazy squirrel, dodging the feral cat of my own lameness.

(See? That metaphor was terrible, and I didn’t even get rid of it.)

Because it radiates out into the rest of my life, this delete-happy way of approaching the world. Uncomfortable conversations don’t get… conversed. Stupid mistakes don’t get learned from because I don’t choose to truly walk through how I got there. I don’t like revisiting failures, even though I am a past-master at self-deprecation. But I only think about it if I can make fun of it.

And ask, if you dare, my domestic co-pilot how much I love staring into a Google spreadsheet and calculating costs down to the dollar to set our family budget. You’ll learn that I don’t really want to know just how much I overspent on that really lovely block of Parmesan for really lovely Carbonara and also? I would like to not know AND buy it again.

I delete what I should learn from. I delete what is worth looking in the eye. I even delete what I could accept about myself, instead of feeling like I dodged a bullet by not having to look in the mirror. I delete before I figure out it’s not so bad, or that there might be a solution… other than obliteration.

Does it really go away, anyway?

I’ve become this for what seemed like the right reasons, but perhaps it’s time to be a little less of it for the right reasons.

Deleting my deleting.

And dealing.