Back in the Saddle
Guess where I am right now? And no, a surprise reader didn’t take pity on me and send me to Tahiti for my health. But that’s all right. I wasn’t writing for pity. I just needed to vent. And I got so much better from you all…
Thank you, everyone, for reading and caring enough to answer very kindly and gently. I really, truly appreciate it. Thanks, also, to those who went even further and sent me a surprise email of warmth and encouragement. I’m always stunned by this community. Why aren’t my friends here at home like that??
So. I’m sitting at my kitchen table, listening to the rhythmic steady rain outside and making tons of mistakes on my brand-new laptop.
This is what happened, in short: my computer wasn’t booting properly as usual and I’ve been tearing out my hair in frustration as of late. This morning, in my trying to fix it, I discovered I had inadvertently wiped my entire hard drive clean. Everything, everything, EVERYTHING was gone. Hundreds of photos, edited text, my freelance folder, my bank of blog posts in Word, my Quicken program where I kept all my invoices for tax time, my edit of the EditQuest web copy…all gone. I had had no inclination to back anything up beforehand because I didn’t know I was just about to obliterate everything. Thankfully, I have a memory stick, and on that was my EditQuest theme and a couple other things for the site.
Colin was out while I was being stupid, and when he came home I was sitting at my desk in utter shock. I started to tell him what I’d done but mostly what busted out was hysterical laughter, which almost instantly turned into blubbering. I couldn’t believe what I’d just done.
At the same time a very tiny, but significant, part of me felt relief. Oddly enough, I felt free. I had nothing, and I had to start over. When this happened to me in university, when I’d just spent hours writing a paper and then lost it, for example, I would be hard-pressed for a very long time — fuming, steaming, livid, unacceptable to accept what had happened — to sit myself down and start over.
But this situation was so much the icing on the cake, so much the very last straw to an already trying week, that it was funny. I could do nothing. The computer was dead. I had no control.
And that is the story of how I came to be at the kitchen table, busily typing away on this laptop. It’s going to take some getting use to, this keyboard, but I am functional, and even…happy.
Somehow, this terrible thing, which has forced me to start entirely anew, which has caused me to lose so much of value, has wiped away the horrible week. As quickly as I descended, I’m back from the abyss. And I think I feel this way because I suddenly realize what it means to really let go. I feel clean. I feel newly determined, too. Sometimes it takes seeming utter defeat to awaken the warrior’s heart.
As ridiculous as this might sound for such a “small” event, I feel I know now what’s important in the grand scheme of things. And it’s not stuff on my computer. Once I got over the shock, I realized I won’t die even though my treasured photos are all gone. I can find that web copy because it was emailed to me and I can edit it again, and probably better, now that I have a fresh mind. Although my records of my invoices are gone, I wasn’t that far behind in printing them out and I can also check our bank account for deposits to tell me what they were. Plus, no one owes me money right now (good and bad thing!) so I am not worried about forgetting any debts. Anything else I’m missing that I might need again can be rebuilt.
Life goes on, they say. So I’m back in the saddle, sword in hand, ready to do battle. Bring it on.
Filed under: miscellaneous | 31 Comments
Tags: Add new tag, computer, stress
The universe is a strange place, ain’t it? After all the stuff that gets dumped on us (and we dump on ourselves), the thing that breaks us actually makes things work out. Some kind of psychological shift to keep us from going completely bonkers?
Glad to hear you’re back in the saddle, but please be careful with that sword.
Want to hear something stranger? Out of habit I came to my office to turn on my computer. And it *worked.*
One last time, I had to check…but no, I see nothing on the hard drive from before. I’m not a techy, so there may be some way of seeing old stuff, but it really seems as though I wiped the computer clean and installed Windows anew.
There’s still nothing on it, but it’s running. Bastard!! [sword-wielding action]
Ah well. Change was needed. My computer was meant to fail repeatedly and die yesterday. In which case, I was also meant to buy that shiny new laptop.
Hi Steph,
I decided it was finally time to come by here and comment. Don’t know why I haven’t before. But ‘HI’.
And I landed on your last post (from Brett’s blog) and went ‘holy crap!’. Came back again and here you are. All well and good with that new laptop. Congrats!
That was *so* the universe at work. Now a good idea might be to write that ‘grateful list’ (if you haven’t already : ) ). The power of positive thought (even when things are sucking) can be quite powerful. As I’m really starting to find out.
A couple of months a ago I found out I have a huge ovarian cyst. Like grapefruit huge. But I didn’t obsess over the bad thoughts. I’ve been totally “of *course* I don’t have cancer, I’m so fine, I *don’t* want surgery, It’s shrinking, I’m thinking positive…”
I went for a follow up ultrasound a few days ago. And it has shrunk. I don’t know by how much or anything but I’m starting to ‘vision’ it the size of a golf ball right now. Then a pea. Then gone. Will know more when I see my doctor again, but I just *know* it was because I didn’t ‘go there’ with horrible thoughts. (Well, that’s what I choose to believe.)
Since you shared so much in your last post, I’ll share that with you. Bravo and rock on girl.
(And get to planning a vacation for the future!! Even planning one is a helluva lot of fun. So important to take that time. Even a little one.)
Karen: Welcome!
My hubby is all about the positive thinking. That’s what his website is: positive-attitude-tips.com. I’m surrounded by this sort of thing, but I have always found it challenging to catch myself and turn my thinking around.
But holy crap!! That’s awesome news about your healing yourself! I believe you are doing it, too, and I totally understand and believe in the power of the mind and positive thinking. You’re right, I know. It’s actually so cool. With our minds, we have everything at our fingertips.
And you’re right about that vacation. I just have to get past my limiting thinking about money. I’m working hard on that one, because it’s sort of related to everything…I will admit, the hard work to change is so daunting!! I guess I have to start with believing and being positive that I can indeed change in the first place.
PS. I have a gratitude journal. The list is made.
Quite often data can be retrieved after it’s been lost, if you take it to a tech who can do something magical (and likely expensive) to get stuff back – at least the photos and the financial records.
With the new computer, you’re going to start backing up regularly, right?
Glad you’re away from the abyss and safely back in the saddle – is it Western and are the designs embossed or hand carved?
Hey Alex,
You bet I’ll be backing up!! And Brett is going to be getting my hard drive to look at – if I decide to take him up on that, and that I really want it done. Right now, I feel incapable of caring!!
I feel as though I just want to give all that stuff away to anyone who can use it, clean off my desk, and just move on.
The saddle…well, I picture it like Aragorn’s. It’s…Middle Earthian.
(I watched the The Return of the King last night).
@ Steph – yeah, I’m working on that ‘money thing’ too (but vacations are *very* important to me). I have none coming in right now (but have some socked away…part of the plan) in my attempt to get my own thing going. Now that it’s almost September, I’m having to ward off the money-panic-attacks.
Hopefully Naomi and Havi will help me kick things into high gear.
Are you doing their course?
And don’t think I’m all new-agey either. I can be as cynical as the next person (some of Friar’s rants could be my own). But I’ve been trying this positive thing for a while now and my head has been a much more pleasant place to be.
@ Karen: Oh, I so totally want to do their course. I had to ask, though, speaking of money, if they would be doing it again. I just forked out a lot of dough for the EditQuest design and text, and we’re already living off our credit. So the laptop went on the card, too. I think the course is totally for me, though, totally worth it and suited to me and that it will also make me money in the end. I also don’t think it’s expensive. I will have to make it happen somehow. Heh, by thinking positively??
Karen – That’s an awesome story! I love hearing how people overcome their situations just by applying positive focus. Fantastic!
So many of us seem to focus on our problems and how to overcome limited or negative thinking. However, it’s usually not required to start moving things in the right direction.
Think of those limiting and negative thoughts like darkness in a room (your mind). When you want to get rid of the darkness in a room, you don’t try to figure out the dark, or try to discover a way to push that darkness away. You just simply turn on a light.
It works the same way with our thinking and beliefs. Just exposing our minds to consistent positive thoughts through affirmations, visualizing, gratitude journals, and other techniques, will eventually turn that light on in our mind. The darkness will be gone without having put any focus or energy into trying to figure it all out.
Although I don’t think Karen was trying to figure anything out, that she was just focusing on healing and thinking good things instead of negative things, that’s a good analogy, hubby!
To continue it, though, you have to understand that in the dark it’s not so easy to find the light, as easy as it is to know you just have to turn it on. You have to feel your way over, and it takes some time. You did say *eventually,* and I know you’re working on this yourself, but sometimes it seems that you’re saying, “All you have to do is…”
On the other hand, I’m always focusing on how hard it is, I am the one always trying to figure it out, pointing out that it’s just so damn hard, while you acknowledge it’s hard but totally move past that and just keep thinking positively, reminding yourself of “all you have to do.” I admire that in you.
I would agree that if often appears hard to find that light switch, but we do have a way to get directions. If you’re finding yourself in a negative thought pattern, you can say to yourself “Ok, this is what I don’t want or like, what would I want instead of this?”
This is a great way to figure out the direction of that light switch. Once you know what you want, you’ve got a target to try to move your thought focus toward.
To put it another way. It’s trying to focus on the solution or the end result you want rather than keeping your focus on the problem or situation at hand.
That’s one of the cool things about the subconscious mind. It can work backwards. Tell it where you want to go by keeping your focus on the end result and it will start working out the solution on how to get there. If you keep your focus on problems or things you don’t want, it still works the same way and it will try to figure out ways to keep those problems and situations happening because it thinks that’s where you want to go.
It didn’t come back as a zombie computer, did it? Because that would be pretty sweet.
I am so very jealous of the shiny new laptop.
P.S. If zombie humans eat brains, what do zombie computers eat?
P.P.S. “Zombie” is a very strange word.
Also, nice. redesign. LOTR is even better than zombies.
@ Hubby: I simply have nothing to add. It was a perfect comment. You’re right. As usual!!
@ Shawn: hmmm, computer zombies eat hardware? Considering how useless I was without my computer, I’d say they also ate my brain.
And yes, I think LOTR kicks zombie ass!
Shawn: After you said zombie was a strange word, I had to look it up. Here’s what Wikipedia said: There are several possible etymologies of the word zombie. One possible origin is jumbie, the West Indian term for “ghost”.[1] Another is nzambi, the Kongo word meaning “spirit of a dead person.”[1] According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the etymology is from the Louisiana Creole or Haitian Creole zonbi, of Bantu origin.[2] A zonbi is a person who is believed to have died and been brought back to life without speech or free will.[3] It is akin to the Kimbundu nzúmbe ghost. These words are approximately from 1871.
Steph,
I have a challenge for you. If you will accept it.
Try to go 24 hours without calling youself anything negative or derogatory.
If you catch youself doing it, you have to immedietly write down three positive things for every negative or mean thing you said about yourself. Deal?
Wendi – are you sending me to my room?
Deal.
You’re right. I have noticed I’ve been putting myself down a lot in my self-discovery and Colin pointed out my increased negativity lately, too. Alex’s recent post also touched a nerve.
I’ll try to be more conscious of it, and if you catch me, you can indeed send me off to my room.
You handled that brilliantly. I don’t know that I could have. Right after my son was born, my internal hard drive crashed. I lost every picture I had of my daughter from the past two and a half years. Two-thousand pictures gone. No backups. I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of money (it took nearly a year to pay the credit card) to have a drive recovery company pull them free. Now I’m a backup nerd. Never again.
I’m really sorry that happened to you, but I’m glad you’re free.
Steph – Thanks for the information. I would have guessed that it came from a voodoo related culture, and maybe it did through the creoles. Now I’ll have to go do a little research of my own.
Yes, I am a nerd of the highest level.
Back-up nerds, computer nerds, zombie nerds, LOTR nerds…nerds are good, mkay?
Oh Writer Dad: I’m so sorry about that! I so understand about having to load up the credit card. This laptop, although relatively inexpensive, was still more than we could afford.
No way am I paying to get the info off the hard drive. As for the stuff I worked on that I lost, well, I’m a bit wiser now and perhaps can do an even better job the second time around. It’s more lost time that I lament in that case. I am not even sure I care anymore about that stupid hard drive. Everything happens for a reason. And to be honest, all the photos from our camera are on Colin’s computer. The ones I lost are from my family and friends and I’m sure they must have them somewhere. Even my business stuff I could recover from my clients as far as invoicing goes… Well, on reflection, I lost a lot. It all sucks. But as I said, it happened for a reason (God wanted me to have a new laptop!!), and I can’t look back.
Amazing attitude. I don’t think I would handle everything being wiped out nearly as well!
@Dube: I’m amazed too. Normally I don’t handle things like this that well and it takes a while for me to get over. This time, though, well…I don’t know! I seem okay. And the best was that today someone picked up the computer, printer, monitor, speakers, keyboard, and mouse, everything. I feel sooo free!! The guy’s in the military, and as a hobby he fixes things up and gives them to kids who need them. The only thing with a problem was the computer, but I just felt the need to give him everything. The laptop came with a printer/scanner/copier, so I’m all set. I have a spare mouse and keyboard, too, if I want.
A terrible thing turned good. Now all I need is a fat cheque to pay for the laptop!
Great story! The human brain acts very strangely sometimes. I think I’ll back up my computer now.
@ Eric:
Steph, proof that God has a sense of humor! LOL! Well, glad your slate is wiped clean and you are back in fighting form – yahoo! Definitely give your drive to Brett. When my computer smoked and blew up the first time, I thought years of data were lost. Not so! The O/S was fried but pulled my hard drive enclosed it in a case and was able to keep using it as an external back-up drive. Your files are most likely still there. Rock on!
P.S @Karen JL, Hugs and healing thoughts, golf ball, pea, gone, gone, gone!
@Karen: a sense of humour, indeed! Even I had to laugh. I swear, I can’t believe how nonchalant I am about it. more than anything I feel rather relieved. I’m not sure if it’s because i could replace the computer right away, or if it’s just that I truly had a moment of higher thinking: none of this really matters. in fact, it’s better!
I am able to start fresh, and my computer and all the perfectly working accessories went to someone who needed it! I said to Colin, I don’t want to throw this all out, I wish I could give it to an unfortunate kid or a school or something. Then the phone rang and as you might have seen from the comment to Dube, I got exactly what I wished for! (I wish everything happened so immediately!)
Well done for the positive response. My work computer (not networked, but where I do most of my writing) died spectacularly about six months ago. Fortunately it didn’t have any of our pictures on it, but it did have all the drafts of the book I was writing, complete with associated correspondence, notes, research papers, images and archive material.
I walked around in a daze for a while, unable even to tell anyone what had happened. When I did tell T he immediately took the hard drive to one of his techie friends who was able to salvage fragments of what I’d lost, but I had to reconstruct the greater part of it, and it’s still not complete. Fortunately my research sponsors were understanding, but believe me – I feel your pain, and admire your resilience…
@hawthorn: Just reading about what you lost made me feel terrible and I can totally understand that frozenness, that frustration. I am sooo sorry!!
Every now and then I think, am I forgetting about something I might have had on there? Why am I not freaking out? Am I suppressing?
I don’t know but it’s quite possible that my brain is still in stress mode, unable to deal with anything right now. As a defence mechanism, it’s only letting me think of one thing at a time. First meeting that work deadline, then getting that ebook for EditQuest done, and the text as well. It seems that nothing else will fit at the moment!