SadGirl Days in a 2TB iCloud Plan
On digital archives, printing wedding photos in less than 10 mins, and the emotional cost of keeping everything
I have permanent access to versions of myself I can never return to. They exist across TBs of photos and videos, scattered through iCloud backups, Lightroom folders, duplicate hard drives and camera rolls I can’t quite bring myself to clean out. Screenshots of menus and recipes I never made, blurry cocktails, airport windows, badly lit selfies, apartments I no longer live in — tiny digital remnants of entire emotional eras, all sitting quietly inside a device that periodically informs me I’m running out of storage.
This week, while trying to clear storage off my iPhone after months of avoidance, I found myself reopening old videos almost compulsively — not because I was looking for anything specific, but because I wanted to see what version of myself would walk back onto the screen once I pressed play. It felt less like revisiting memories and more like opening mystery boxes. Some videos made me smile immediately, some made me physically recoil, and some felt emotionally neutral in a way that almost offended me considering how devastating those moments once felt. A few cracked something open so suddenly that I had to put my phone face down on the bed and stare at the ceiling for a while before continuing.
I’ve started calling these stretches of time my SadGirl days. They usually happen inside my apartment while I work from home — answering Zoho Cliq messages, joining calls two minutes early, making coffee, half-cleaning things, ordering food, doomscrolling a little too long, watching light move across the room while pretending not to think too hard.
They are not dramatic breakdowns or cinematic moments of collapse. In fact, what defines them most is how strangely functional they are. I still meet deadlines. I still review another set of deliverables and emphatically ask, “but what does this say about the brand and our people?” I still plan review meetings with my team, share industry gossip and news with my colleagues, and organise coffee catch-ups with friends.
I still respond mostly politely. I still remember to put laundry in the washing machine and order (allegedly) compostable garbage bags in sizes small and large. But emotionally, everything slows down just enough for grief to become audible again.
And contrary to what the name suggests, I don’t spend all my SadGirl days spiralling through old photos and videos. Sometimes I barely open my camera roll at all. Sometimes the sadness attaches itself to music, or cooking, or cleaning the apartment at midnight, or sitting silently on the balcony too long after it starts raining in May — a classic Bangalore summer phenomenon. Sometimes it looks like hyper-functionality and overwork. Sometimes it’s eating the exact same comfort meal three days in a row and watching terrible television while ignoring texts for hours before suddenly becoming social again. Each set of SadGirl days takes on a different life of its own. They are never exactly the same because grieving a future itself is never particularly consistent or disciplined. It shapeshifts depending on what part of your life it finds access to that week.
And yes, I document them too.
SadGirl days are less about sadness in the dramatic sense and more about suspended emotional weather. They are the days when I stop trying to optimise my healing into productivity or neat lessons or evidence of growth. They are the days I allow sadness to exist without immediately trying to convert it into wisdom.
For a long time, I thought healing was supposed to look linear and disciplined — therapy breakthroughs, routines, closure, emotional maturity, eventually becoming someone who could speak about the end of a seventeen-year relationship in clean, processed language. But the truth is that some of the most important parts of healing have happened during these quieter stretches of suspended emotional weather. Sitting alone in my apartment with coffee going cold beside me, reopening old photos while trying to literally make space on my device. Deciding what gets archived, what gets deleted, what survives another storage cleanup, and what I’m finally ready to stop carrying forward with me. Learning the difference between memory and baggage. Realising that grief changes texture over time. That some things become softer while others remain strangely sharp. SadGirl days have become less about wallowing and more about exposure therapy for my own life. A slow reacquainting with the archive of who I was before everything split apart.
And somewhere inside all of this, I realised that people like me — people who grew up alongside the internet, camera phones, social media, cloud backups, and the instinct to document everything — don’t just remember our lives. We archive them. Previous generations had physical limits imposed on memory. A handful of photo albums, maybe some VHS tapes, perhaps a box tucked away in storage somewhere. But digital natives were taught, both explicitly and unconsciously, that every moment was worth preserving because someday we’d want to look back on it.
So we documented birthdays and vacations and soft mornings and stupid jokes and the exact way sunlight fell across apartments we thought we’d stay in forever.
And now all of it lives somewhere. In iCloud, Lightroom, Google Photos, archived chats, synced folders, old hard drives, duplicate backups I barely understand but continue paying for monthly because the alternative feels strangely violent. At some point, upgrading my cloud storage stopped feeling like a tech decision and started feeling like emotional procrastination. Every month, I pay a small fee to avoid deciding what I can live without. The workflow itself is absurdly confusing in a way that feels accidentally profound: Lightroom wants to optimise local storage while keeping originals in the cloud, Apple wants to offload files but preserve previews, WhatsApp quietly saves fragments of entire relationships into camera rolls unless you tell it not to, and somehow everything duplicates itself endlessly across invisible systems until nothing ever really leaves. Maybe that’s what unsettles me most — not the memories themselves, but the permanence of them. The way modern life allows every version of you to continue existing simultaneously. 20s-you. Wife-you. Coloured-hair-you. Girl-filming-her-partner-cooking. Woman-rewatching-that-video-alone-two-years-later. I don’t know if I’m preserving my life or just postponing the uncomfortable, necessary, and probably healthy act of making space for what comes next.
The most absurd version of this happened on Valentine’s Day earlier this year, when I spent the afternoon scrambling to get my wedding photographs printed for divorce paperwork. Not reminiscing over them dramatically, not crying over old memories, just sitting on a day meant to celebrate love while every cell in my body felt betrayed by it, emailing JPEGs, resizing files, and making sure everything met filing requirements before a deadline. I eventually sent the photos to Blinkit’s photo printing service because apparently modern adulthood means you can emergency-print photos of a younger, naïve, hopeful version of yourself in under ten minutes if you live in any part of Bangalore.
After that, I had to courier the photographs to my lawyer along with copies of our wedding invitation and marriage certificate, which I miraculously still had because I store everything. Not just sentimental things, but screenshots of my own despair, itemised phone bills, vouchers, emails, archived chats, notes app fragments, receipts, confirmations — tiny digital remnants of entire emotional eras that are now so deeply imprinted in my brain that I don’t even need to reopen them to remember exactly how they made me feel. But I keep them anyway.
Maybe that’s another thing digital natives quietly became without realising it: archivists of our own evidence. We documented love obsessively, but also confusion, anxiety, emotional spirals, and the slow collapse of certainty. Without realising it, we began capturing the exact moment disbelief sets in, and eventually, the moment we stopped internalising shame that was never ours to carry in the first place.
We learned to screenshot things before they disappeared, preserve context, save timestamps, hold onto records not just because we were sentimental, but because somewhere along the way memory stopped feeling trustworthy on its own.
And there was something deeply surreal about the fact that the same folders I once opened to post anniversary tributes or revisit happy moments were now being mined for legal documentation. The same wedding photographs that once represented permanence were suddenly attachments in an administrative process designed to formally dissolve it. Maybe that’s part of what feels so disorienting about the end of a long relationship. When you spend nearly two decades building a life alongside someone, there are very few versions of yourself that exist independently of them. My late teens, entire twenties and early thirties are there. Salary credit screenshots, pictures of IKEA furniture tags taken hastily and never purchased, the first photos from the day we brought home the cats, pictures of a Chandigarh chair I was mercilessly teased for wanting, sofa fabric swatches for a couch we once dreamed of, dinner reservations, fights in parking lots, mangled spellings of names during airport pickups, Sunday mornings that once felt so permanent they barely seemed worth documenting at all. The relationship didn’t just occupy part of my life — it structured entire eras of it. That’s the thing nobody tells you about being someone who documents constantly: one day the archive outlives the person who created it, or at least the version of them that did.
But SadGirl days are entirely mine — and maybe that’s what makes them feel strangely exhilarating at times. Beneath the grief and suspended emotional weather is the unfamiliar experience of becoming fully answerable to myself again. My routines, my apartment, my silence, my mess, my healing, my decisions about what stays and what finally gets deleted. For the first time in a very long time, there are parts of my life being created that belong only to me. And maybe that’s what SadGirl days really are for me now — not wallowing exactly, but sitting quietly among the evidence of all the selves I’ve been, trying to decide what deserves to follow me into the next version of my life and what I’m finally willing to let disappear.
P.S. I still haven’t deleted anything, figured out my cloud storage workflow, or successfully cleaned out my camera roll. Wish me luck.
Disclaimer: I use AI as part of my drafting and editing process. The ideas, experiences, perspectives, and final direction of the writing are entirely my own.