Hard Drive Malfunction

As any other stories, it started on a normal day. I asked myself once:

“Why is it always during ordinary days that the worst things happen?”

I now have the answer to that question:

“Because we expect things to happen on extraordinary days, but not on normal days. It hits us harder when we don’t see it coming.”

To be honest, it wasn’t really a normal day, certainly a trivial day, but not an ordinary one.

The 8th of june 2020. I woke up earlier than usual on that day, I had to meet parents of children I would babysit in the summer. I didn’t really need nor wanted to work. I guess I was still an immature brat. A child who didn’t want to grow up. Even though I was already considered an adult by society.

I didn’t know the address of where the parents lived, so I used my laptop to find it. As I would often do when I go on the internet, I played games, watched videos and went on social media. One hour passed before I decided to take a shower. I then went back to my computer. Because of the sneaky side of the internet, I left in a hurry five minutes before my meeting which was held in a place ten minutes from home. I was bound to be late. Not only that, but the bike I picked didn’t work properly and my physical shape wasn’t as good as I thought. I finally arrived 10 minutes late, which wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, but which was for me something I never wanted to do. In my mind, you're only on time when you arrive 15 minutes early, otherwise you're late. Hopefully, I’m not as severe on others as I am on myself. If they warned me beforehand, people could be a few hours late without me minding it at all. The parents didn’t mind that I came a bit late and they were really understanding. Up to that point, it was still a trivial day.

I came back home about one hour later. I went straight to my room to go on my laptop. I realised I left my computer open on a pillow I had on my bed. The screen was all black, but I just thought it turned itself off. I tried to restart it, but it didn’t work.

I panicked. Not because I couldn’t go on the internet, or because I feared losing my laptop. I truly didn’t care about that. Even losing pictures, files and folders were only minor displeasures. The real reason I was panicking was because I knew the first story I truly finished was on that computer. I got to that point thanks to a forty days goal I set for myself. It had close to 300 pages and I forgot to save it somewhere else. Clearly the biggest achievement I ever did and it went down the drain. I felt devastated. It would have been the story which would have set me on the map as a good writer. In my mind at least. In any case, I have no way to know now if it was true or not.

It was as if all my efforts were wiped out. As if my life itself had no meaning. You might think I was overreacting, but I've been writing stories since I’m 12 and I never once finished a story. There must be thousands and thousands of unfinished stories in my room and on USB keys and the only one of them which I finally finished got wiped out because of a hard drive malfunction. I felt miserable... As if the sky was falling on me and the whole world was telling me I would never be a true writer, I would never live my life's dream. Have you ever had that feeling? Or something similar? Then you might understand what went through my head at that time. I was blaming myself for so many things. And I blamed pretty much everything and everyone. I wanted to give up. I didn’t see what the goal was if everything could disappear so easily. I almost gave up my dream of becoming a writer. To me it wasn’t just a dream, it was my life’s goal. The only thing I needed to achieve. The meaning of everything was for me to become a writer. As it seemed I couldn’t become one, it seemed as if my life had no meaning.

You must have figured out by now that it didn’t end there. I didn’t give up on my dream nor decided to live a mundane life with nothing out of the ordinary. I wouldn’t be writing this if it had been the case. I almost gave up, however, it went the other way. When something is bigger than you it can’t be destroyed so easily. My life goal did change a little, not to be smaller, but to be bigger. Something that can’t be crushed, but will probably take my whole life to construct. Being a writer is just one component. It’s still a key piece to build what I want, but I need to make sure it’s of good quality if I want great foundations. Time is key to perfection. I need to take my time and not rush into things if I want to succeed.

To go back to our story's main event, I have repaired my laptop since then. I needed to change the hard drive for it to work, so I lost everything I had on the old one. However, it’s not necessarily lost forever. First of all, I have the possibility to regain the datas on it if I send it to a specialist. I would need money for that, but it’s a detail I can work with. Although, I’m not even sure I will want to regain them when the time will come when I could regain the lost data. It feels it will be just like when a protagonist finds something they forgot to do before everything happened to them, it won’t feel important anymore. I could just rewrite the whole thing even if it’s a little different. Either way, I started other stories now. I’m still not an established writer, but I’m confident in the future. I’ll persevere until I'll be a great one and build the future that I want.

I have one thing I need to add, I found writing websites thanks to my hard drive malfunction. I didn’t think about them before, because I thought I would publish my stories book by book, not chapter by chapter. I used my sister’s laptop until mine had a new hard drive and got repaired. I found the first site when I was using hers. Which led me little by little to this site. If I see it that way, this incident bringed me here. Exactly where I am today. If it hadn’t happened I wouldn’t be writing here and it would have been the same if I had given up on writing because of it. I’m exactly where I should be, and it’s mainly thanks to that event. I’m still at the beginning of my story and I still have plenty to live. I’m not yet sure what will be the ‘genre’ of my life, but I do believe it will be a good deal of fun for me. I know one day I will look back to all this and understand how I got where I will be. Realising how a meaningless event for the future me could change my whole life. In the end, you should never give up while facing hardship. If you do give up, then you let the difficult time win over you. The only way to be a winner in life is to keep moving forward even through obstacles. Only then, will you truly feel accomplished, even if your goal isn’t achieved yet.