I Accidentally Deleted My Most Important Piece of Writing

Photo by Juan Jose for Unsplash

The Incident

I had just sat down at my laptop to write when a notification popped up at the corner of the screen. My MacBook was letting me know its disk storage was almost full. I would have to free up some space or risk losing what I was about to write.

“No biggie.” I thought, “I will just delete some old files I had backed up earlier.”

I clicked Finder and started picking out some files. Before moving them to the trash, however, a thought came over me.

“I should be very careful here.”

After all, I had been carrying some of these files, especially some old sentimental high school essays, laptop to laptop, drive to drive for several decades now. “It would certainly be worth it,” I thought, “to double check and make absolutely sure they had all been backed up.”

I diligently got up, found my external hard drive, plugged it in, and searched for each file before moving it to the trash. Eventually, I emptied the trash, deleting the files permanently.

When the cleanup was finished, I felt quite proud of myself. I had freed up almost 40 GB of space. I felt like my laptop was proud of me too, beaming with its new capacity, prepared to embrace new tasks.

I was finally ready to begin the piece I had originally sat down to write. I was a few sentences in when a little wave of nostalgia rushed over me. During the cleanup, I was reminded of an essay I had written in high school at age sixteen, and I very badly wanted to read it again.

It was a first-person narrative about immigrating to the United States from India at six years old. I wrote about flying on an airplane for the first time, missing my grandparents, remembering another way of life, and eventually struggling to merge two distinct identities in a completely new world.

Few creative assignments in grade school had inspired me to write like that one did. I poured my heart and soul into it. So much so that I think I exceeded the word limit; the grade I would eventually receive on it didn’t mean much anyway. I had collaborated with the muse, perhaps for the first time ever. This was bigger than an eleventh grade report card.

Surprisingly, I received an excellent grade on it. The inspiration I felt had clearly moved my teacher too; she even requested a copy to show future classes as an example.

While the response to it was validating, the essay eventually became significant to me for a much deeper reason. Though I had journaled practically every day since I was seven or eight and had written several well-developed essays throughout school, I had never truly seen myself as a writer.

When I began to write my own story, however, I felt for the first time I had something of worth to say. It seemed I had a unique perspective compared to my peers. I had experiences others found fascinating. I had insights that could teach and inspire. “Maybe I could write something important,” I thought for the very first time. I suddenly ached to relive that moment of discovery. I clicked on my external hard drive and began typing “My First Date with America,” the title I had given my essay.

M…y….

Nothing turned up.

My heart practically stopped. Before the dread bubbling up inside had a chance to take over, I quickly turned to rationality. Surely, this is incorrect. I had just seen the file.

I rapidly cleared the search bar and began again.

M…y….

Nothing.

I collected myself, took a few deep breaths, and searched for a few other files I remembered deleting. Alas, they didn’t seem to exist anymore either. It didn’t make sense.

After feverishly searching through every folder on the hard drive as a last attempt, just shy of fully crashing out, I noticed two small tabs in the top left corner of the window labeled “This Mac” and “Pink Gal” (the name of my external hard drive). The selected tab was “This Mac.”

Now I had an answer, just not one that gave me any consolation. Instead, it confirmed my biggest fear: those files were gone forever.

It turned out that in a particularly misfortunate series of events, I had neither backed up the files nor searched the hard drive correctly. What I thought I was searching had actually been the entire MacBook which, of course, showed the file I was yet to delete.

Grief filled me up and I let out a hefty sob as I slowly came to terms with this new reality. I would never again see those formative works of art a little version of me had so earnestly created. Though she didn’t know it, sixteen-year-old Sitara was inadvertently contributing significant pieces of identity to a version of herself she had yet to meet.

I just couldn’t believe how in a few short moments, despite taking every precaution, I had lost this precious evidence of what I felt and how saw the world and myself as a teenager.

I researched. I called a data recovery specialist. There was nothing I could do now.

The Reconciliation of Creation & Loss

“Maybe I’m being dramatic, but it literally felt like losing a loved one. Maybe not exactly the same but a different flavor of the same feeling. It’s like free-falling with the sudden realization that time only moves forward and you’ll never have again what once was,” I recounted to my therapist a few days later.

“You’re allowed to be sad over this,” she countered.

I took her permission and spent the next few days conceding to the gloom. A few days later, I was driving back from the grocery store. On the freeway, under streetlights, against an inky, prematurely dark winter night sky, I felt little glimmers of peace and inspiration again. Leaning into it, I began reflecting on the lost piece.

“What had I really lost?” my mind began. “What was it exactly?” An answer emerged. I didn’t want to believe it at first; it was too comforting and I was intent on punishing myself a little more. But the more I gave into it, the more definitive it became.

At the end of the day, what I had fundamentally lost were words.

I had lost words, just words. The ideas and impact, the soul of the essay, remained. In fact, they were kind of immortal. I had read the essay back so many times in the past decade, I knew exactly what I wrote about, and how it made me feel, as well as the experiences I was trying to share with my readers. In fact, I could probably recreate the main point of each paragraph from memory.

The impact as well was not lost; this was evident in how much I mourned the piece. Like the emotions I kept from beautiful poetry I had once read or passages of favorite books, I remembered and would always remember the feeling of writing and reading back those words, even if I never saw them again.

Words are malleable. Words are interchangeable. Words can be written again. Words can also be misremembered. Words can lose meaning. Words don’t always translate.

Maybe it was okay to lose words if the sum of their parts did its job. Those words will not exist in that order again, but they once did and that changed me. That magic would not be lost as long I lived.

What’s More

If I hadn’t deleted those words, they may have remained safely fossilized in zeros and ones for a very long time. What’s less guaranteed, however, is that I would have engaged with those words in any meaningful way again. I’d like to think I would have, but it’s not a certainty.

Confident in my assumption that it was available to revisit as I pleased but caught up in the ebbs and flows of everyday life, I may not have ever seen the essay again. There is a slim but not impossible chance that its death actually made it more meaningful. It reminds me of a poem I wrote around the same age.

“As with the setting of the sun, the falling of leaves, or the final days of the year, perhaps the beauty of a thing is greatest when its end is near.”

I’m engaging with the ideas of my essay now precisely because I know I can’t see its form ever again. I’m giving it a memorial — a celebration of its life that it may never have otherwise received.

Most importantly, I’ve made peace with my loss. As a sensitive, overly sentimental artist prone to hoarding every ticket, t-shirt, and trinket carrying the minutest semblance of a memory, it was a good reminder of the impermanence of the world I actually inhabit and how much attachment can hurt.

Also, I have since rewritten what I remember of the essay. Its reincarnation, like all avatars, has a different body but houses the same soul. The lessons picked up along the way are not lost, just dressed in different, ephemeral words.