Last night, while I was working on a short story, my flash drive suddenly crashed on me. I spent hours trying to get my flash drive to work again; I didn’t even get enough sleep last night because of it. So, throughout the night, I spent most of my time trying to get my flash drive back to normal. Nothing happened.
After only a few hours of sleep last night, I decided to go to a nearby Staples to hopefully ask someone, namely a tech expert, to at least try to get my flash drive working again. I couldn’t risk losing everything from that flash drive; I had two completed short stories, two incomplete short stories I was in the middle of writing, and, of course, my unfinished current novel. I’d be losing my mind if these documents in that flash drive were lost. Worst, I’d end up like Margot Kidder (RIP to this lovely actress, by the way) back in 1996 when her laptop crashed while she was working on her memoir and then disappeared for four days. I was afraid that something similar might happen to me as well.
Unfortunately, Staples was no help for me, in which I irately commented (mostly to myself) that Staples would go out of business some time this year or about a few years from now. Whichever comes first. I’ve always had a lot of issues with Staples, hence the reason why I refused to go back there ever again.
After I got home from my failed trip to Staples, somewhere a part of me was telling me to do something impetuously risky, mainly to run away without a trace and then sleep on the streets right next to piles of trash on the curb. I nearly had a manic breakdown this morning over a crashed flash drive. While I was trying to get my lockbox where I store my flash drives in there to open, I had a hard time unlocking it with the damn small-ass key. Feeling frustrated, I yanked open my lockbox with my bare hands and then broke the latch off. That’s what I get for being manic depressive, but at the same time, I am mature enough to accept my diagnosis for bipolar disorder and that I’m on medication for it. That very same day, I ended up with a broken flash drive and a broken lockbox. Everything breaks, but what am I going to do about that?
I then spent the rest of the morning mentally wallowing on my bed blasting heavy metal through my headphones to drown everything out.
However, something changed spontaneously.
When “Paper Tiger” by Arch Enemy played next on my Apple Music… I suddenly came up with a solution.
What I noticed is that all my other flash drives work; it’s just that this particular crashed flash drive wouldn’t work anymore, even after restarting my laptop many times and trying to use Disk Drill, it never worked again.
So, I remembered that one of my other flash drives still contain a backup of my novel draft. When I checked my draft, everything I’ve written so far in that novel is still there, exactly where I paused to take a hiatus from it. I still have my current novel in progress, which became an instant relief to me.
As for my short stories: the good news is that two of my completed short stories are already published on this blog and on Medium. I’m just glad that I published those short stories, albeit with very limited viewers just for self-explanatory safety reasons. So, those two short stories were not an issue to me since they were already done and posted.
I may have lost my incomplete short stories I was still working on from that crashed flash drive. However, that didn’t stop me.
Thanks to my eidetic memory, I decided to rewrite and revise those two short stories of mines. It wasn’t even a big deal to me; those incomplete short stories are meant to be only about 2k+ words anyway, which isn’t a lot. I was able to be halfway finished with this one short story that I won’t reveal until I’m ready to post it here on WordPress and on Medium, not even revealing the contents of it yet.
Yep, everything turned out great for me!
I was able to come up with a solution to fix all of this, as well as fixing my mental health.
I still have my current novel in the works and I can just rewrite my short stories since it’s really not that big of a deal.
Once I got everything sorted out, I decided to download Google Drive as a backup should any of this happen again sometime in the future. That way, I won’t lose all of my hard work and dedication to writing.
All that matters now is that I did not suffer from a manic breakdown over small broken items. I can always work my way through to coming up with improvising solutions for anything that isn’t a big deal.
I’m sure that I’m not the only writer who went through this entire ordeal; I’m sure that other writers went through this similar issue as well.
It goes to show:
Not everything lasts longer, though what lasts longer the most is your hard work, dedication, and, of course, perseverance. And that there is a backup to everything.
I did not give up and I never will.