Life has an interesting way of piling on challenges and additional obstacles to navigate, huh? On top of everything going on, my laptop recently wouldn’t start up at all so I had to drop it off for repair and learned that unfortunately my hard drive was toast and all the files which we thought could be recovered were in fact either missing or corrupted. So not only did I lose five Tarqaron videos that were soon to be edited, but I also lost all of my assets that I had accumulated including logos for different series and thumbnail templates that I had fine-tuned. So that’s a bummer, yet another setback. But hey, it’s not the worst thing to happen to me this year. Since my hard drive has been replaced, I at least have a functioning laptop to work with now. So while it definitely sucks to lose some great videos and all those assets, I can still bounce back from this pretty quickly I think.

There’s not much of a “bright side” to this since I’m $150 poorer and all I have to show for it is the same laptop minus some important files. Ha, lesson learned, I guess. I don’t know why I was an idiot and didn’t have this stuff on my external hard drive to begin with, though. A bright side is that I’m off from work for the next eight days, so I’ll be able to focus all of my efforts on getting myself to where I want to be. I have a lot that I want to get done over this next week, so I’m going to use this blog to hopefully hold myself to it. I want to get my resume/portfolio properly put together, get my damn car fixed, work on more Tarqaron videos despite the lost ones, and start filming videos for my solo channel again. And hopefully take some time to actually relax and enjoy time with friends as well (though I do really enjoy making videos, the amount of time they consume tends to make them resemble “work” in some ways – minus the income).

Overall, I don’t feel like I’m doing too bad mentally, though. I have these pockets of sadness that really bum me out when I think of fun times with former friends, but I have to take solace in the fact that there are a lot of truly good, authentic people in my life now. I’m more grateful now than ever for everyone who brings positivity to my life and everyone who is really there for me. God, I have such a greater appreciation for just simple kindness these days. It’s not too much to ask and yet there are still so many who choose to not be kind. This year I feel like I’ve already experienced both how cruel people can be and how kind people can be. It’s just really refreshing to be experiencing more of the latter than the former recently. Here’s to the bright side.