I lost everything.

A few years ago, there was a wildfire near my house, and we were evacuated. When that happens, you are suddenly faced with deciding what to bring with you and what you need to prepare yourself to live without. It’s a weird feeling to fill a small car with belongings and drive away not knowing the fate of the rest. The thing I reached for was my computer—all of my creative work, all of my kids' childhood photos. The rest, even my journals, I left behind.

Two days ago I was editing a photoshoot I did for my friend’s birthday, struggling with Photoshop because it kept crashing and the images kept loading corrupted. I decided to update Photoshop and try again. When Photoshop finished updating, I restarted my computer and opened it up, ready to edit an image or two before I had to take my daughter to figure skating class.

I went to load some images, and the entire drive was gone. Not even listed in the system. I clicked on a recent folder showing from that drive, and I got a big red error message.

This drive was my storage drive. This is where my unpublished novels lived, along with the thousands of photos I had, videos, documents—literally my entire personal history.

I quickly texted my brother to ask him what was happening, and he told me it sounded like the drive died.

It just died.

I didn’t know that they did that. I thought if a drive was inside a computer—unless something happened to physically damage it like fire or flooding—that drives just worked. How stupid of me.

I have some external drives and I have backed up things here and there, but honestly, I know I haven’t in years. What I do have, I’m not sure how much or what is on them. I haven't had time to really deal with any of it yet.

I was literally climbing into the car to drive my daughter to the next town over when I got the text saying it was a dead drive. I felt like I got kicked in the chest. I felt like I had the air knocked out of me. I have no recollection of driving anywhere, but I’m also pretty sure I didn’t blink the entire way.

I was devastated. But as the way my life goes, I don’t get to be devastated. I don’t get to take a moment, fall apart, or be messy. I have to be a tank, because if I don’t, then what? There is no one else to drive her to skating, and I had a journaling class to teach. I’ve never had the privilege of being able to put my responsibilities down.

In the way that I do, I take these moments in life and ponder the fuck out of them. I don’t really believe in “the Universe” or a higher power, but it was not lost on me that I had recently taken down almost everything else, all my social media, my photos, my YouTube videos. I purged all of my online stuff and I was enjoying it. I liked letting go of that expectation, that identity. It almost felt like something called my bluff… like, “Oh… you want to get rid of things, do you? Poof.”

Losing all of that, though… I think I would rather have amnesia and lose my actual memories, because that hard drive was realistically the highlight reel. It held anything good that ever happened in my life. My mind holds a lot of pain I’d rather forget.

I have been trying to find something in this—anything to soften it. I try to pull up my big girl pants and tell myself I am so good at handling disappointment, that I am such a resilient person. I try to be proud that once again, I get to be the one who copes with the hard thing. The one who does it all alone, who moves on in life without batting an eyelash because that’s what I do.

Maybe I'm better off without my past. Maybe it was weighing me down. Maybe it's what I do next that matters.

I know it might sound stupid to other people. Maybe it sounds shallow or something. I don't have much in life, I never have. The only things that brought me joy were my children and my creativity. Yes, those things are still there moving forward, but it does feel like the ground has disappeared beneath me.

I desperately want to fall apart and mourn it, but there’s nothing and no one to catch me.