EXTREME MAKEOVER - LIFE EDITION
by Jen Frankel

Strangely, my first thought was "Great... now I can disappear and completely reinvent myself."

Years later, when I was feeling locked into an uncomfortable and disorientingly meaningless routine, a friend told me that what I really should do was run away to Australia and work for a year on a horse ranch. He said he could just picture me out there under a big sky, getting lean and healthy, sun freckling my face and toughening my skin.

It was a very attractive picture, but it scared me. Was I really so willing to give up everything and run away into the total unknown for the sake of a fantasy that might not even be mine? And worse, what was it I was staying for, if my current situation made me so unhappy?

More recently, painfully recently in fact, I suffered another loss. I gave my little sweetie Lucky -- also known as my MacBook -- a good hard knock and watch its little brain slowly die as I sat staring in disbelief.

I rushed it to the Apple Store hoping that my hardware problem was easily solvable with the application of a networking cable and new hard drive. But this was no small glitch. I had done the drive in seriously, and left with a referral to a data recovery company.

Just to mock my technological dependence, I heard a story on the radio on the trip over about how Macs have a built-in feature sensor that locks down the hard drive to protect it from damage if it's dropped from a height. It's so delicate that a dozen Macs can be strung together to form a more sensitive seismograph than exists anywhere elsewhere in the world.

The upshot of that is that if I'd actually dropped my computer from a window, it would have had a better chance of surviving than the sudden short sharp shock it actually took.

Now, I wait for news of the patient's death or miraculous revival; the technician gave it about a 50/50 shot, and the cost will be about a month's rent, payable only on recovery. Priceless, if they can get my data back. Otherwise, I lose (at a conservative estimate) about six months worth of writing I neglected to back up -- including about a third of my new novel that I'd just cleverly revised to have David Bowie song titles as chapter heading.

The horror for me is not the loss of so much creative work. It's that when I had my good cry in the car after dropping my machine off in surgery, I realized I was feeling a sick sense of relief.

Now I could reinvent myself, lift the burden of labouring on my writing. I could become something totally different, not an artist, not a composer or poet. I could do... something else.

It shamed me, the feeling that by destroying so much of my work I had somehow freed myself. I saw that I needed to seriously evaluate a lot more than my failure to back up my writing, as I've been advised about a million times. I had to look at whether or not I was really living as I wanted to.

What does a person go through when they, for example, enter witness protection, or flee a dangerous relationship, and by force of necessity reinvent their entire past to suit a new personna? What do you leave behind, and when is it actually the expression of ultimate freedom?

Was I being offered an opportunity, or a chance to see just how important my work is to me?

I don't know yet if this is a chance to reinvent, but I know that I am only a fraction of what I want to be. I hardly know what that is -- but I think that the complacency of my existence has been fundamentally shaken. If not for it to be used as a time to begin again, will the experience be wasted?