I have a difficult relationship with my email. When I was practicing law, I would check my inbox every morning with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Messages sent overnight would be there, waiting to change my plans for the day. They might be upbeat messages from friends or clients about their lives. It could be a decision from a court or agency that needed to be appealed from or celebrated. It could be a new client with an urgent matter I needed to address. Something was always there.
For quite awhile after I left the practice of law, the emails continued. Clients would contact me for suggestions of a new attorney. Other lawyers would email with questions about clients or a case I had handled. A few friends would just check in to see how I was doing and fill me in on their lives. Without realizing it, I began to look forward to those emails. It was a link from my rather solitary writing life to the world I’d left behind.
Overtime, of course, the email slowed as clients became established with their new legal counsel and my knowledge of their matters became too stale to be helpful. Even the social emails from the people I used to see or talk to all the time became sparse. My eager morning ritual of reading my email became riddled with the depressing thought that I was irrelevant. Sure, I get the occasional email from a reviewer or fan of my books, but not many readers do that. As a result, day after day goes by without receiving any email other than from bots. This was hard.
This morning, I checked my email to find nothing but the notifications from my Google calendar and another automatically generated email on the rank of Foreseen on a non-retail site. But today, instead of feeling disconnected and depressed, I found it freeing. I get this day to myself! No one is dragging my attention away to celebrate with them or to give them advice on how to address their latest obstacle. I can do what I planned to do today. My life is no longer subject to the moment-by-moment whims of others as conveyed through email.
This is a wonderful feeling.