A Wish, In Three Parts — Part 3: None of It Was Mine to Keep

This is the last of three parts.

The first began with a prayer said under my breath before an exam I never wanted to take, and a regional win that quietly answered a question I had never said out loud.

The second followed a laptop I did not expect to win, earned through years of writing chosen freely instead of forced.

If you haven’t read those yet, they’re here: [link to Part 1] and [link to Part 2].

The message came from a friend, not a warning from the service itself.

Hey, have you checked your blog lately.

I hadn’t.

When I did, there was nothing left.

Years of writing, gone, without notice, because I had trusted a cheap hosting reseller instead of a proper provider.

No backup existed anywhere else.

What was actually lost

It is easy to describe this as losing files.

It was not only files.

It was the messy first article nobody read.

It was years of entries that never placed, written and rewritten long after most people had stopped reading them.

It was the trip to the capital where I first understood how uneven the starting line really was.

It was the entry I wrote plainly, without borrowed style, that somehow won against people I admired.

All of it existed in one place, and that place disappeared in an afternoon.

For a while, I stopped writing entirely.

Not out of anger.

Out of something closer to disorientation, the specific kind that comes from realizing something you built with your own hands was never as solid as it felt.

The question underneath the loss

I keep returning to one thought from all of this.

Somewhere between the exam I never wanted to take and the laptop I did not expect to win, I had quietly started believing the results belonged to me.

The trophies, the placement, the writing, the recognition.

I had earned pieces of it, certainly.

But so much of it had also depended on things I never controlled: a friend’s success drawing attention elsewhere so I could quietly recalibrate, a scholarship decided years before I understood what it was for, a hosting failure that had nothing to do with my effort at all.

If the good parts were not entirely mine to claim, maybe the losses were not entirely mine to carry alone either.

None of it was ever fully mine to keep. Maybe that was true before I lost it, not only after.

Where this leaves me

I am not writing this because I found a tidy lesson at the end of it.

I did not.

I still do not fully know what to do with the fact that years of effort can disappear because of a decision that seemed small at the time, a cheaper hosting plan, a shortcut I did not think twice about.

Some days I think the lesson is about backups, and responsibility, and paying attention to the unglamorous parts of anything you build.

Other days I think it is simpler and harder than that.

That wanting something badly enough to say a prayer under your breath does not guarantee you get to keep what follows.

That effort chosen freely still does not belong to you the way you assume it does while you are in the middle of it.

Coming back to the beginning

I still remember the sentence I said on the way to that first exam, the one I never wanted to take.

Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakeel, ni’mal maula wa ni’man nasir.

I am still not someone who would call himself especially devout.

But I have started saying it again, sometimes, not before exams anymore, just on ordinary days when I remember how little of any of this was ever fully under my control to begin with.

Somewhere else, I once wrote about a paper marked thirty out of a hundred, and about refusing to let a number decide the rest of the story. (If you haven’t read it: Thirty Out of a Hundred Did Not Tell the Whole Story.)

This is some of what came after that number.

Not a rewrite of it.

Not proof that it was wrong.

Just what happened next, for a while — a regional win, a laptop, years of writing — before all of that turned out not to be mine to hold onto either.

This is not a success story.

It never was one, not the regional win, not the laptop, not the years of writing that came after.

It is one section of something longer, written before I know how the rest of it turns out.