WTF – When life decides to mess with you

So here I’ve been, flying high for the last couple of weeks, enjoying life, starting a blog and having a great time writing, moving along well with the process of going back to school… doing really good.

And then, today, I lose my phone.

I don’t know if you’re like me, but my phone is my life. Not just because it’s my main connection to the world – e-mail, text messages & social media – but because it’s my life manager. It’s my personal assistant.

My phone is my alarm clock – it nags me when I won’t get out of bed in the morning. It’s my calendar – it tells me what I’ve got going on, when, & where I need to be. It reminds me of all the things I need to do. It’s my fitness tracker, my meditation tool, my flashlight in the dark, my entertainment on the go (music, podcasts, books, audiobooks, TED talks). It’s my link to all the Abraham (content that I access daily either through the audiobooks I’ve purchased or through YouTube audios). I even track my period with my phone! Ok ok, sorry, I know, too much information. But you get the idea.

For me, losing my phone is 10 times worse than getting my wallet stolen. Believe me, I know. My wallet was stolen 3 years ago. That was devastating.

It was a shiny new iPhone too… the latest model. I just got it, literally one month ago.

Now I know you iPhone users out there are shouting “Didn’t you try the Find my iPhone app?” Yup! I had activated that feature. But when I tried to access it, Apple told me my phone was offline.

My phone is NEVER offline.

So lost… and most likely stolen. Great.

And all this happened right as I’m needing to leave work, at the end of my day, to go pick up my daughter from after-school care.

Panic threatened to tear me apart. “I don’t have time for this!”

I could feel the tears welling up as I stood in the Starbucks I had been in earlier, where I had most likely left it behind, looking at my laptop screen (thank goodness I’ve been carrying it with me lately), at the grey dot that should have been my phone, with the tiny words underneath it: “offline”. I ran back to work to use my office phone to call my carrier and go through all the steps of blocking the phone from being used, in case they cracked my 6-digit passcode. I even black listed it in case someone tried to activate it for their own use.

As the person on the phone makes me wait while she makes sure everything is put in place, and I’m anxiously watching the clock, knowing my daughter is waiting for me, and it’s getting so late, my thoughts go back to the day I received my phone in the mail.

I was so excited. I made a bee line to my local carrier store to get it activated and the guy said to me “Are you getting Apple Care with that?”. I laughed at first, telling him I’ve had my previous phone almost 3 years and nothing’s ever gone wrong with it. Then he says “Well, you never know what might happen.” And as I’m hesitating, he drives in the last nail: “You know, since you purchased it directly from Apple instead of getting it through us, you should get it. You paid a lot of money for that phone. I would insure it.”

So even though I was sure I would never need it, I went ahead and got the Apple Care.

So here’s the million dollar question: Since the Law of Attraction says that I get what I think about – you create your own reality, as they say – did I attract losing my phone by getting the Apple Care because it meant that I believed there was a possibility that something could happen to it, and so it did?

That’s gonna kill me. Well not literally, but it’s a puzzle I will never be able to solve.

So anyway, I finally get off the phone with the person from my carrier and leave work to go pick up my daughter at school. I drove like an insane person, trying to push down the tears and keep my focus. It’s dark out, and she’s the last child left. I made it only minutes before I start to get charged a late fee. But the daycare people were kind when I told my daughter, and them, that I had lost my phone. I must have looked distraught.

It was late when we got home, and feeling like a terrible mother, I fed my daughter the quickest, simplest dinner I could think of and let her watch Netflix while the war inside me continued to rage on. In one corner: crazy, panicked, desperate Mel who wanted me to just curl up in a ball and scream and cry in despair. In the other corner, the new Mel I’ve been working on for the past 2 years as I worked to integrate what I’ve learned on the Law of Attraction from the Teachings of Abraham. This Mel, knows that life is supposed to be good; that nothing ever really goes wrong; that you get exactly what you put out into the world; that I created this and that no one DID this to me.

This Mel kept reminding me that it’s ok; everything is ok. I’ve got Apple Care, so they can give me a new one. And I’ve taken every precaution to stop any further wrong doing with my phone. And everything on my phone is backed up to iCloud which means that I can get it all back and that none of the important data is lost. And besides, I’ve still got my laptop, and even though my cell phone is my only phone, it’s not my only means of communication. I’ve still got wifi at home, so I can still connect to the important people in my life to let them know that they can still reach me. And more than that, my daughter is safe and we are together, and we are fine.

And before I knew it, I felt a little better. I didn’t feel like the tears were threatening to overwhelm me and I could keep it together just a little longer while I went through the bedtime routine with my daughter. But every few minutes, the battle took me in the other direction. And on it raged.

Finally, as I lay down with my daughter and heard her long slow breathing, I let my tears flow quietly, just a little bit. And I realized there was a third part of me, watching all of this in quiet observation – logical Mel. This logical part of me, watched the other two duke it out and then looked back at me and said:

This is the part where you get to choose.

Do I choose to let myself feel terrible about this, and follow this old Mel down that rabbit hole I know so well?

Or do I choose to acknowledge that right now, in this moment, there is NOTHING I can do about my lost phone. Nothing. The only thing I can do, is let it go, and choose a better feeling thought.

Oh, I know there’s no way I can get back to that high flying feeling that I was feeling earlier today. But I can choose to feel… ok.

Tomorrow is another day, and I will do what I can to climb back up there. I know that I will most likely struggle to not let the panicked, falling-without-a-net feeling come back, but I will work as hard as I can to find the best feeling that I can find.

Because I HAVE to believe that all is well, and that everything will be ok.

Because I can’t stand to feel bad anymore. I refuse to do it. I’ve wasted too many days of my life feeling terrible for too many stupid, self-imposed reasons. I won’t do it anymore.

Take THAT, old Mel.

[EDIT: I found out, the next day, that Apple Care does NOT cover lost or stolen phones. I had to buy another one, and hope that my original phone is found in time for me to return this new one and get a refund. I did end up finding it – it wasn’t stolen, just misplaced. And I did end up getting a refund for the re-purchase.]