When My Brain Plays Mean With Me…

So last night, around 10:30pm, I decided to do some work. I opened my laptop and clicked on Word. Steady Beat, my current WIP was open and I scrolled to the end. Only to discover the last thing I’d written wasn’t there. In fact, about a thousand words were missing.

I thought, shit, maybe I wrote those words on the desktop. I got up and walked downstairs to my office, my heart thumping fast. Opened Word. Opened Steady Beat . Scrolled to the bottom on the file.

It’s only 1500 words long instead of the 3000 words on my laptop. Shit. Where are my missing words??

Head back upstairs to the living room, my laptop and my curious husband. I tell him what’s happened. By this stage, it’s close to 10:45pm. I look for the correct file, thinking I must have opened the wrong one, or that I’d saved it as a different title without thinking.

Nothing.

Still can’t find the words I’d written.

I start to panic. My throat gets tight.

I tell my husband I can’t find the words, struggling to keep the panic out of my voice. I fail.

He asks me to let him see my laptop. (For those that’s don’t know, my husband is an IT Guru. There’s little he can’t do on a computer). He spends the next hour and a half trying to find the missing words. He can’t find them. I know I’ve written them, so where are they? He makes the grave error of telling me to “just write them again”.  In a moment of blind rage, I tell him what I think of that idea and he discovers exactly what it’s like to be married to a creative person who has lost something they poured their soul into. I pour my soul into every word I write and his suggestion to “just write them again” is NOT want I need to hear right now. I need my IT Guru husband to say “Oh here they are.”

He doesn’t say that. What he says is, “I don’t know where they are. I’ll run a program to undelete everything you’ve deleted on your laptop this last week. It’s going to take a while.”

It’s past midnight. twenty-five minutes past midnight to be exact. On a Sunday night. On a rational level, I understand I’m not the most popular wife in the room at that moment in time. On a creative level, I don’t give a rat’s bum. I need my words back. WHERE ARE MY WORDS???

At 12:50am, my husband tells me the program is running and it’ll take an hour or more. He suggests we go to bed and try and sleep.

Feeling sick, confused and depressed, I clean my teeth and climb into bed.

My head hits my pillow.

And then I have a thought. A wholly unsettling thought.

I scramble out of bed, ignoring my husband who repeatedly asks what’s wrong. I hurry down the hallway into the living room where my handbag is sitting on the armchair facing the TV. I pick it up and withdraw the notepad I keep in there, the one I write in when words come and I’m no where near my laptop or computer.

I open the notebook.

And there are the words. The words I’d written on Wednesday while waiting for my daughters to finish a school-holiday dance camp. The words I had yet to transcribe into my laptop.

There are there, waiting for me.



Suffice to say, I apologised to my husband when I walked back into our bedroom.

All he could do was laugh. God, I love him.