So much heavy stuff has happened in the last few months but what broke this camel’s back–though in no way was it the gravest event–was the fact that this website got hacked. When you work for yourself, you have to be your own editor, publicist, accountant, and IT specialist. Generally, I don’t mind wearing so many hats but this week everything took a nosedive. Even figuring out the kind of help I needed proved difficult; articulating it proved more challenging; finding it was an absolute bear. Today, I finally hired someone and awaiting their results had my stomach in knots, my head fogged up. I hadn’t realized how much this blog had come to mean to me until it got all mucked up. The tech fairy kindly sorted everything out and updated my software but now I have to master the new system, which feels like learning how to tread water when I’ve been swimming across lakes for years.

It’s the same feeling I had last spring when it took a day to set up and learn an iPhone after I’d clung to the same Crackberry for a decade. I kept mumbling to myself, This will make things faster, right? Ultimately, it did, but first I had to dump a lot of time and energy into what still looks like a black hole in hindsight. Like so much about true adulthood, the hardest work is rarely remittable or detectable though it confers a secret satisfaction. I think about the Pilgrims, as I so often do when the modern world bogs me down. They didn’t have antibiotics but they also didn’t have computer viruses. What a strange world we now occupy: so isolated and so boundary-less, all at once. It’s enough to make this goody cry.