All systems down 

My laptop crashed last Tuesday, taking all my photoshop working files down with it. I know, I know. “You should have had it backed up to iCloud”. Well, I did actually. But somewhere down the line, iCloud stopped backing up files my desktop, so it was goodbye work. Adios. Sayonara. I think I went through the 7 stages of grief all within a single day. 

Shock that my laptop has broken for the second time in the past 5 years. Utter disbelief that 5 months worth of photoshop files are gone. Bargaining and wishing I could have lost the files in my downloads instead. Guilt that I didn’t realise iCloud wasn’t set up properly. Anger that this happened to me after I had quite possibly the worst week in quarantine so far. Deep, deep depression knowing that this was going to affect our book score. Acceptance and choosing not to use this as an excuse not to hand in a book. 

It’s been a week now since my laptop died and I’ve had some time to step back and reflect. I find it quite ironic how my laptop broke down literally days after I did. The week of the 18th of May was the worst I’ve had in a really, really long time. I decided to take a break, seeing as it was our last chance to for a while, and I envisioned a week of reflection, and contemplation on Marley and I’s book. But how can you sit at home and relax knowing your partner is working hard on your book? It’s literally impossible. I just kept thinking, how do I need to recharge when my partner’s battery was full? 

Cue a week of guilt, and emotional exhaustion, and miscommunication. So I shut down, and I lost my sense of excitement about everything, really. Just like my laptop lost those files. And when you lose something like that, it’s really really hard to get it back. 

But this is where the story turns around. Guilt turned into understanding. Emotional exhaustion turned into a deeper connection with my partner, and miscommunication turned into transparency. Shoutout to Marley- thank you for pulling me out of the hole that I didn’t even realise I was in. 

But we knew that this alone wasn’t enough, we needed help. We walked (virtually, of course) into Marc’s office, and we left with a new plan. 

Marc told us that Marley and I have a super power that we’ve been treating as our kryptonite. We have 4 more hours in the day to work than everyone else because of where I’m quarantined currently, and we haven’t been making the most of those hours. 

Now we have a shiny new Trello board where we keep track of all of our tasks for the week, and if that wasn’t amazing enough, it has a really cute blue and pink marled theme. 

We took something that was broken, and made it better than it was before, and we’re ready to see that reflect in our new set of book scores.