I've lost so much this year.
I honestly don’t even know how to begin writing this because every time I try to explain what has happened to me this year, it sounds almost ridiculous, like too many awful things compressed into such a short amount of time, and I don’t think I have properly processed any of it because something else keeps happening before I can even grieve the last thing. Earlier this year I lost my Google account, and when I say I lost my Google account, I don’t mean I simply lost an email address or had to create a new login. I lost almost my entire digital life from when I was in Year 7 until now. Years and years of photos, videos, emails, documents, schoolwork, notes, saved places, conversations, searches, playlists, memories, random screenshots, old friendships, old relationships, family moments, travels and different versions of myself that I had kept without even realising how important they would eventually become to me. There were things in there from when I was twelve or thirteen years old. Things I probably had not opened in years, but I always believed they were there and that one day, when I was older, I could go back and look through everything and remember who I was. I have always been extremely sentimental. I save everything. I collect, curate and organise my memories because I am terrified of forgetting. I am terrified that one day I will forget someone’s face, the way a certain year felt, the places I went, the people I loved, or the person I used to be. Maybe other people can lose photographs and tell themselves that the experience still happened and that should be enough, but my brain does not work like that.
To me, those files were proof that my life happened. They were pieces of myself that I had quietly carried for most of my life. Losing that account felt like someone deleted my childhood and adolescence without asking me, and I was already so deeply upset about it, but I was trying to be rational and tell myself that I had to accept it because there was apparently nothing else I could do. Then my mum lost my bag with around $10,000 worth of belongings inside it. Obviously the money and the value of everything mattered, and I am not going to pretend that it didn’t, because $10,000 is not a small amount of money, but it was also another collection of personal things disappearing from my life all at once. It was the shock, the frustration, the feeling of complete helplessness and the anger of knowing that something important was gone and that no amount of panicking, crying or replaying the situation in my head would bring it back. I think something inside me started to shut down after that, but I kept functioning because that is what I always do. I can be completely falling apart internally and still speak normally, travel, work, answer messages, organise things and act as though everything is fine. I have spent so much of my life masking what I feel that I don’t think people understand how bad I am doing unless I explicitly tell them, and even when I tell them, I still feel like they only understand a fraction of it. And then now my phone has been stolen. My actual phone is replaceable. I understand that. I eventually bought another phone, I can reinstall applications and I can slowly rebuild the practical parts of it, but the phone contained around 300,000 photographs and files. Three hundred thousand. I still cannot properly comprehend that number or accept that those things might actually be gone. It contained years of my life, ordinary days that I would otherwise forget, important moments, people I may never see again, places I may never return to, photographs I had been meaning to sort through, documents I thought I would always have, screenshots of conversations, stupid little things that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else but mattered to me because they were mine.
I know people might think that nobody needs that many photos or that I should have backed everything up better, and believe me, I have already punished myself with every possible version of that thought. I keep thinking about what I should have done differently. I should have backed it up. I should have organised it sooner. I should have been more careful. I should not have carried it there. I should have noticed something. I should have prevented it. I keep looking for the exact moment where I could have changed the ending, even though logically I know that someone stealing from me was not something I chose and that blaming myself will not restore a single file. But emotionally, I cannot stop. The Google account was already an enormous loss. The bag was another enormous loss. Now the phone has taken whatever emotional capacity I had left, and I genuinely feel empty. Not peaceful empty. Not detached in a healthy way. I mean the kind of emptiness where I feel like I have been crying internally for so long that my brain has gone quiet because it cannot keep producing the same level of pain. Sometimes I feel overwhelmingly sad and panicked, and other times I feel absolutely nothing, and the nothing almost scares me more because I know how much grief is sitting underneath it.
I feel as though my life keeps being erased in sections. Every time I try to hold onto something, it disappears. Every time I tell myself that I still have the rest, another part of the rest is taken away. It has made me feel like nothing is secure, nothing is permanent and nothing I love is safe just because I have been careful with it for years. I know memories are technically inside us and not inside devices, but I also know how human memory works. We forget. Faces blur. Dates disappear. Entire periods of our lives become a vague feeling instead of something we can actually return to. Photographs helped me remember details that my mind could not hold forever. They helped me return to people and places that no longer exist in the same way. They allowed me to see who I was before life changed me. Now I keep thinking about my future self wanting to look back at this part of my life and finding nothing there. The experiences happened, but the doors back into them have been closed, and I think that is what is destroying me. I am not only grieving photos, files, belongings or a phone. I am grieving access to my own past. I am grieving the younger versions of myself that I thought I had safely preserved. I am grieving memories I had not even had the chance to revisit yet. I am grieving the belief that if I carefully saved everything, I would never completely lose it. I feel angry at the thief. I feel angry about my Google account. I feel angry at my mum even though I know she did not deliberately lose my bag. I feel angry at myself even though I know I did not deliberately lose any of this. I feel angry at the entire year for taking so much from me and then continuing as though nothing happened.
The world does not stop because your personal world has collapsed. People still message you, plans still exist, work still needs to be done, and you are somehow expected to keep moving while carrying a grief that nobody else can see. I am so tired of being resilient. I am tired of immediately having to think about solutions, replacements, account recovery, police reports, SIM cards, passwords, insurance and what I need to buy again. I don’t want another practical solution right now. I want my things back. I want my photos back. I want the life I spent years documenting back. I want to stop being told, directly or indirectly, that these are only material things or only data, because they were not “only” anything to me. They were parts of my life. They mattered because I decided they mattered. Maybe this sounds dramatic to people who are not attached to memories in the same way, but I genuinely feel like something inside me has broken.
I am so depressed and so sad, but more than anything I feel lost. I don’t know how to rebuild an archive that took more than half of my life to create, and I don’t know how to accept that some parts of it may never be recovered. I am trying to tell myself that I am still here, that I am not made entirely from the things I saved, and that losing the record of my life does not mean my life did not happen. I know all of those things intellectually. I can explain them perfectly and rationally, but emotionally they are not reaching me yet. Right now I just feel like I have lost too much, too many times, too close together, and I do not have enough left in me to pretend that I am coping well. I think I am writing this because I need to say it somewhere honestly: I am not okay. I am grieving. I am exhausted. I feel completely hollow, and I miss things that I did not even know I would have to say goodbye to.
I don't know what to say or do. How can I rationalise all of this and feel better?
