Your Files Will Be Deleted

I’ve been ignoring Microsoft's emails lately.  Warnings that I’m out of space on my OneDrive and that my files will be deleted.

Sounds urgent, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what I used OneDrive for… I thought it was just the shared drive where I’d uploaded a few too many photos from one trip to Florida.

So, imagine my surprise when I finally signed in and found SO much more than family vacation photos.

Turns out my OneDrive was a backup of my old computer.  The computer I used between 2020 to 2022.

There, buried in the OneDrive, is everything I wrote from before, during, and after my bipolar breakdown. 

Thanks to ignoring so many emails, and a refusal to pay for a storage service I didn’t even know I was using, I was left with a day to organize my entire writing history from those years I’ve been so skittish to go back to.

I spent the day immersed in my own words. 

Starting with when I got out of my hopefully last addiction treatment, when my north star seemed to so clearly point towards writing a book.  I have my early work and notes from when I first joined my writing group.  I have drafts of all my website content, the original sketches for its logo, and Adobe Stock images for its backgrounds.  There were over 40 blogs, both the ones that have made it onto my site, which I posted on so regularly in the beginning, and far more of those drafts, which, despite evidence of endless finessing, were never deemed worthy of the publish button.

I can see when I start to turn manic.  A few months after I hit my one-year sober anniversary, my writing upticks and turns furious in a way, carrying a new sense of urgency that I can now so clearly label as mania.  Amidst these documents are abandoned drafts, some of them working manuscripts, others just sentences I can’t even understand now.  I guess I should clarify that when I say “working manuscripts,” I use the term very generously and lightly, as these packed Word Docs are way less polished drafts and way more musings of a mad woman, furiously writing at a time when it felt like she was Rumpelstiltskin, and every word she spun on the page was gold.

I can feel the heartbreak as I try to write after the breakdown, struggling to string words together.  Penning letter after letter that I’d never send to Blake, telling him how heartbroken I was and how much I loved him.  I forgot about those letters.  I started writing them shortly after I moved to Boston.  I never had any intention of sending them, but I needed somewhere to pour my heartache, because back then, I thought it might drown me.

To say going through all this was heavy… would be an understatement. 

I’m still grappling with my breakdown and the effect it had on my life. How it cost me everything, everything I’ve fought so hard to get back now.   It’s been moving away from Boston that’s allowed me to even peel back the corner of beginning that work.

But I know I still have some work to do there.

I'll admit that for now, I’ve been focusing on building my new life here, as opposed to lingering on how the old one burned to the ground.

But then, there it was, like it never really left… it was just waiting.

It’s funny, because I wouldn’t say that now is the absolute right moment for all this to come back to me. I wasn’t ready to confront the past today.

But, there it was, hidden in my neglected OneDrive.

In the end, I deleted over 500 documents.  And then, when it all got too heartbreaking, I spent the $21.43 to increase my OneDrive storage space for the year.

I’ll hold onto the past a little bit longer. On OneDrive, at least.