LOST
About a year or so ago, I had a ton of my personal possessions stolen from me. It was in the middle of a move; I had packed up most of my belongings but left some behind with a dear friend. They had an unscrupulous handyman who broke into the trunk of my friend's car on the day she was going to mail the rest to me. I didn't have insurance, so it was gone for good. I haven't had the funds to replace any of it--my financial situation right now won't allow for such frivolities. It was mostly my gaming consoles; I had brought my laptop and other important belongings with me.

I was doing fine until about a month or two ago. My computer was dying a slow, undignified death. I had seen it coming for quite a while. It was a laptop with a nearly-flat bottom and a downward-facing fan; what the stooge who designed it that way was thinking, I'll never know. Despite my best efforts to aid ventilation, it would get incredibly hot on the bottom. Pieces of the chassis started to break off, and one of the corner hinges ate it, too. I set up a second fan to help cool down the computer (and myself), but that just seemed to push dust and hair into the fan. Slowly but surely, my computer's performance took a nose dive until the entire hard drive became fried. I took it to a professional service to see what they could recover, but all the data they pulled off of the drive was completely corrupted. For the second time, I had lost everything.

FOUND
Somehow, losing all of that helped me, in a way. They took away my distractions, helped me focus and center myself. I've become a lot less addicted to material goods and a lot wiser about protecting what I still hold dear. But most of all, it left me feeling like a survivor.

Of course, it wasn't all positive. I've been in depression for quite some time. One night, I found myself in a peculiar mood: I wasn't suicidal, but I felt like giving up. I wasn't going to take my own life, but if death had decided to come I would have let it wash over me. Lying on my back with half-lidded eyes, I slowly began to let things go, releasing them to the cosmos. I surrendered both positive and negative things alike--my pride, my ambitions, my identity, my neuroses and defense mechanisms. I bade them each adieu as if they were fond but distant friends. But then I realized that I couldn't do the same with my relationships--to my mother, father, sister, or boyfriend. I just couldn't do that to them. As hermited and sociophobic as I am, I still live for others. As I realized this, I began to feel something that I thought I had lost forever: my sense of charity. Years ago I had a love for helping others, but after giving too much of myself and others taking advantage of me, I had burned out. I felt it pouring back into me, along with everything I had given up, and I felt positively giddy.

As my laptop died, a wind of fortune blew my way. My grandmother had died a couple months ago, leaving her farm and house to my grandfather. He is old and rather stubborn, but after injuring himself with nobody around for miles, he soon began to see the folly of staying out there all alone. So, he started to prepare to move into a retirement home, an apartment in the city. To do that, he began to downsize, offering their belongings to their kids. I found out about this two days after my hard drive fried, and my father managed to snag their old laptop. It's a Dell Vostro 230, Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz, 3GB RAM, running Windows 7 Home Premium. It has hardly ever been used; my aunts and uncles helped them write a couple Christmas letters on it, and they probably checked their e-mail a couple times. However, since they've always had it running on dial-up, I haven't had a real opportunity to test it and see what it can really do.

TL;DR: Lost a lot of stuff, and my laptop fried. Gained peace of mind and a chunk of my old identity. Got a new desktop computer. If anyone has copies of any art I've commissioned from them, I'd appreciate getting it back. ^_^;;