Crisis in Faith

Not that faith. Not real faith. In fact, if I'd embraced my UUism and lessons from Buddhism, it wouldn't have been much of a crisis.

But last night, when we realized that Yahoo had erased, obliterated, annihilated, deactivated one of my email accounts--the one that included all of my professional work from all my museum jobs, an account I obviously don't check often because I haven't needed them--I too felt erased in a way. That professional identity--with all my contacts, my documents, my work history--gone in a flash. And I had wanted them more than I had in the last 6 years because I'm starting a new volunteer position as an educator at an historic house museum and am writing curricula and other materials. So I tried to log into my old account. But Yahoo's new policy is to deactivate email accounts, erasing everything, if you haven't used it in four months. And they never told me.

I cried myself to sleep, in the glow of the computer light.

Because Mama was convinced that somewhere, somehow there was a backup, that she had been careful, conscientious, and cautious six years ago.

And she had.

Only not with the email account, because it's not possible to download Yahoo, but with my work files, which were carefully labeled on a CD which she'd backed up to an external hard drive, way back when. So, even though the emails and contacts and such are gone, I have anything that I wrote and stored on my own computer.

Bless Mama, who stayed up very late to retrieve the documents. (And she is now double-backing up and/or printing out all manner of things--a decade worth of pictures, 500 pages of a cookbook, the entire text of this blog, our address book.)

Though, I tried hard to convince myself it hadn't mattered in that 12 hours I thought it was all lost. Telling myself that I needn't be attached to those files because I could make new ones, or even more importantly, be attached to that old professional identity, which had little to do with my life today. If/when I ever go back full time in museum education, here in a new state, my contacts will have moved on, my documents will need to be updated, everything will have changed. The security blanket of data that I have held on to--the one that offers the protective cover of tools should I ever need or want to go back to that work, proof that I'm capable and employable--really holds little safety or protection, I realized. But it had held, very tangibly, who I used to be. And that is what I mourned last night.

Looking through the documents this morning--pre- and post-visit activities, tour confirmations, docent training manuals, public program announcements, class syllabi, lecture texts, conference presentations, grant proposals--brought back all sorts of memories from about a decade of work. It was both bittersweet, remembering all that I used to do, but also confidence-building, here as I begin a new journey.

Beyond learning to have faith in myself (and in Mama!) and in the way things unfold, I was reminded not to put too much stock in perceptions (or ideas/beliefs about myself, career, past) or in things.

Especially computers.

(Yes, some of you will note that, in the end, a computer did save the documents. True enough. But I think it's more the symbolism of it. I could've had printouts of everything, too. Might, even, in the basement somewhere. It's the faith in the belief that I needed these things, truly needed, not just wanted because I'm attached to them--that I couldn't be happy or survive without the documents, or my recipes or blog or even pictures--that was false (even if we're still gonna back it all up, because there's more than one lesson we're working on here.) That, and Yahoo sucks.)