When everything was lost

Yesterday I accidentally and irrevocably lost 7 years of business-related files. Every document I’d ever created for my business, gone. Every iteration of past and current logos, all of my business cards, all of the working files for my client questionnaires (we’re talking hundreds of hours of building those out), my formatted portfolio; every passion project I’d created purely for my own joy-inducing experience, gone.

(Let this be your reminder that iCloud is a synching service, not a backup service 🙏🏼)

At first, after multiple hours trying every measure to bring back what was gone, I just sat there completely incredulous at the enormity of the loss. Like, how? Then I cycled through various states of blame, obviously starting and ending with myself, rage, devastation, and back to blame; moved through a panic-induced process of backing up everything that was left (truthfully, most things were fine, just the one folder got deleted), and then turned to my fail-safe soothing practices: Alanis, a shower, and talking outloud to myself to process what had happened.

When I felt just resourced enough to dive back into the files that remained I saw that the only, and I do mean only personal project files that I’d saved elsewhere were the files I’d created for The Integration Journal and all the resources I’d collected to support it. We’re not quite at the meaning-making stage of this grief process yet, but if we were… I mean…

It would have made SO MUCH more sense to save my Integration files in the folder that got deleted than in the one I’d actually saved them in. But I didn’t. That has to mean something. Well, maybe it doesn’t have to, but I’m choosing to believe that it does.

So here we are (2 weeks later because I needed to take some space), stepping into whatever this may be. I have visions and hopes and goals for this Project, but for now we’re starting small with a blog post, a landing page, and the soft launch of the Integration Journal (more on it here).

I’m happy you’re here.

I hope you go backing up your files now that you’re finished reading this.

I’ll see you again soon.