Moratorium (Identity Part 1)

I think I'm having an identity crisis again.

The problem mostly arises from having too many emails. As of now, I have at least six that I use or plan to use regularly. That number rises to at least ten if you count all of the old obsolete emails that I made for a specific purpose and no longer need anymore. In total, I have too many emails to count. Presently, I can think of at least four for blogging, two for spam, one for college, two normal use emails, and two work emails. I want to get rid of a few so I'm down to a manageable level again (one for work, one for school, one for personal, and one for spam) but most if not all of these emails are still attached to some other purpose. I can't get rid of my college email yet because of ongoing college application stuff, one of the spam emails is something that I still use for Google Drive, and some teachers still contact me through one of the old regular use emails. I don't know what to do.

I honestly just want to be able to close them cold turkey and have a fresh new start.

Moratorium is one of four stages of identity crisis proposed by James Marcia beginning in the 1960's. In order, the stages are foreclosure, identity diffusion, moratorium, and identity achievement. Both the Wikipedia and About.com pages on this subject give a condensed but thorough explanation of the topic, which will probably be more understandable if you read it yourself than if I paraphrase it here. Essentially, moratorium is the "status of a person who is actively involved in exploring different identities, but has not made a commitment." I think this fits pretty accurately to where I am now, because there is the person that I "am" and the person that I want to be, and it's hard for me to reconcile the two. I wish I could just leave the old identity behind, like (beware cheesy simile) a butterfly leaving its old husk of a chrysalis, but I'm still tied to it by my present situation and the people I know.

I suppose it would be eventually possible to leave vacation responses on all the old emails directing them to the new emails, but that wouldn't explain the change of identity. And even still, just today, I made a new email under my old name. Perhaps it is possible to maintain two identities, but I just want to closure of being able to snip all those threads holding me back at the moment (or so I feel). I want more out of life, and I don't feel like I'm getting that out of who I am now.

Usually when I write about things here, I get an idea of how I'm going to move forward, but I'm still feeling just as lost as I was at the beginning of this. I might implement a few of those changes, but I still don't know how I'm going to resolve it in the grand scheme of things. Maybe if I just wait it out, the answers will come to me, but I just want to do something about it. I don't know. ◊

UPDATE: I've consolidated most of my emails and it already feels a lot better! It took quite a chunk of time, in which I just went through all my accounts and set up vacation responses or updated the login information, but I think it's well worth it. Phew!