Disaster Has Struck

I'll start this post out by expressing gratitude that I am not in nearly as bad a crisis as I have been other times of my life... my house didn't burn down like before, I'm not in jail and/or prison, (One day I'll explain the difference for those of you who don't know.), and nobody that I know personally has died recently.


Having said that, I have nonetheless been dealing with a form of devastation that makes it feel as though all three things have happened. To fully understand, I will need to bore you with the details of my daily struggle with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety Disorder (which are Siamese twins in the mental health world, joined at the hip, heart, and brain).


My father was a severe obsessive-compulsive, and anyone who knew him well can verify that. However, those who know me well and have observed my struggle will tell you (as they have me) that mine is worse than my father's.


In many ways, I hide it well. It's my instinct to hide my weaknesses, so most do not realize that I have such a severe case unless they spend a lot of time with me. Otherwise, they may simply think that I am "fussy" and/or a "control freak".


I've had this problem since I was a child, the need to start over when making a spelling list if even the first stroke of the letter "A" in spelling my name was microscopically crooked. I would go through 20 sheets of paper to make a ten word spelling list, and it took me forever. Perhaps that is why my grades did not always reflect my true mastery of any subject - getting my work done on time - or at all - was very difficult for me.


I wasn't always as afflicted as I am now. It has gotten worse over the years with each passing trauma, including the illness and subsequent death of my father when I was 15, witnessing something terrible in my early 20's, a near-deadly house fire that destroyed everything merely hours after I had moved to a new city (no insurance) when I was 26, the untimely deaths of several co-workers I became close to over a ten-year span, the VERY stressful failure of my business more than five years ago, and the subsequent imprisonment for same.


Since then there have been some other, minor things that have aggravated the problem... my roommate almost dying of a subdural hematoma and reliving my father's illness while trying to save my roommate's life, getting robbed at gunpoint on Valentine's Day while delivering pizza, things like that.


To keep this post from being too awfully long, I will discuss some things in other posts that have occurred. Anyone in the mental health field would probably find this all very interesting. The rest of you may be bored by it, so I don't expect everyone to read all of this.


Anyway, keeping in mind the aforementioned things: a couple of weeks ago, after returning from Atlanta, I was updating some software for a database that I have been working on for a client for the past year. I had my data backed up, of course, so when the entire database got wiped out by a glitch in the software, I thought I was okay.


Unfortunately, the same glitch that wiped out the original database, corrupting the files beyond repair, also wiped out the backup. It is a very unusual situation, and the developer and I spent the entire day trying to get it back. He apologized to me profusely as I sat in tears on the phone. I know he felt awful, and I almost felt bad for him for feeling so terrible, but mainly I was just trying to keep on breathing.


A situation like this is bad if it happens to anyone. For me, it is $3,000 in bonus money that I won't get because I won't have the project finished on time, money I was counting on. What's worse, I have to start over COMPLETELY from scratch (which I already have), and work my way back up to the almost-completed stage before I can continue and finish the project and get even my basic completion fee for the project, which I have only half-collected. It will take me until the end of the year to finish.


What's worse, the feeling of shock and devastation brought a flood of feelings and memories into my mind of past disasters. I actually had the same feeling of panic for about a week after this happened that I had after almost dying in a house fire. The feeling of total devastation and losing everything was right there with me again, as though I had just lost everything I owned, even though I haven't.


I cried for two days, didn't go anywhere, didn't eat, didn't sleep, just felt sick. I didn't Tweet much or do much of anything. I was despondent and just felt dead inside.


I still find myself not believing that I really have to start all over and do this again, this year's worth of work. However, I found myself in a conversation with a Walmart clerk who said something to me that brightened my outlook: "Well, hopefully, in the process of doing all of that work this year, you've learned some things that may help you do things more efficiently this time around. Maybe it won't take you nearly as long to re-do it as it did to do it the first time around."


You know, she's right. What took nine months to do the first time will only take about three months to re-do. What amazed me, though, is to have such insight from such a random stranger, a Walmart employee no less! Most people paint Walmart employees as caricatures of southern, uneducated dingbats. I have found that, like most stereotypes, NOT to be the case, especially after that comment that was made to me a couple of weeks ago.


In fact, after doing most of my shopping at Walmart over the years, I can say that the Walmart employees around here are some of the most helpful, intelligent folks I've ever met. (Yes, I know many who think it is politically incorrect to shop at Walmart, but I don't have the financial luxury of being politically correct when it comes to my shopping habits, so there will be no boycotts of Walmart in my household.)


Still, it's been a terrible thing to deal with, and I'm still struggling  to stay out of a major depressive funk. I don't get this depressed often - it takes something major, like a house fire or a death or incarceration - to get me like this, and this feels worse than many other things that have happened that were far worse than just losing a database. Maybe it's because I'm older at 41 and feel that I don't have time to waste. Maybe it's because I'm tired of having to start over all the time. Maybe it's because I am disgusted by the fact that I can drop my iPhone into the toilet and have it survive, only to lose an entire year's worth of work due to a software upgrade.


Oy, vey. And I'm not even Jewish.


A.