Only My Story Had Changed

It had been a productive day and I felt good about my accomplishments.

Around 3:00, my energy tanked and I decided to take a break. I went for a three-mile walk and when I returned home, I was ready to re-engage. But it was late in the day, I only had about an hour until I’d be making dinner, and creativity and deep thinking were not on my agenda.

I looked at my desk and asked myself, “What could I complete that would set me up for tomorrow morning?”

I had some bookkeeping and tracking tasks still sitting there, neither of which took much mental energy.

“Let me do those,” I mumbled to myself.

I have two spreadsheets: one is an annual summary and the other contains all of my income and expense data. I update them at least monthly, making my end-of-year tax preparation relatively simple.

I learned that lesson the hard way.

It was the beginning of the month, so only a few income entries were needed. I opened the summary spreadsheet and immediately noticed that the full data spreadsheet wasn’t listed in my 2026 folder.

“Where’s my full data spreadsheet? I just used it three days ago. It should be in the list of recently opened documents.”

I was still calm.

I looked again in Excel, then opened File Explorer, and finally checked the Recycle Bin. Nothing.

“Where is it?” I muttered more than once.

Calm was starting to leave me, quickly replaced by panic. Back to Excel. Back to File Explorer. Back to the Recycle Bin.

“It has to be here. I just used it.”

Then I remembered I use a backup service. Maybe they can recover it for me.

The thought returned some of my calm, but still left room for stories to drizzle in—slowly at first, then a full-blown takeover of my mind.

What if they can’t recover it? What if it’s lost forever? It’s five months of data I’ll have to recreate.

I could already see myself surrounded by receipts and bank statements, trying to rebuild everything from scratch.

I was hopeful the file could be recovered, but I didn’t know for sure. And because it was late in the day, I wouldn’t find out until the next morning.

I didn’t want the question to linger all evening. I wanted certainty, and I wanted it immediately. I didn’t want to wait.

And it got me thinking about how much we love certainty in our lives. We don’t like mystery. We don’t like not knowing.

When we’re faced with uncertainty, we rarely leave it empty. We fill it with assumptions. We fill it with predictions. We fill it with worst-case scenarios. We write endings to stories before we know how the story ends.

I had gone from “I can’t find my spreadsheet” to “Five months of work is gone forever” in less than fifteen minutes.

The interesting thing is that nothing had actually changed. The spreadsheet was either recoverable or it wasn’t. It was either sitting somewhere on my computer or it wasn’t.

The facts hadn’t changed. Only my story had.

I sent an email to my tech company and decided to look one last time.

There it was….. and, it had been there all along.

Except it had somehow been renamed “Bob’s.”

How in the world did I rename “Full Data Income and Expenses 2026” to “Bob’s”?

That will remain a mystery.

What struck me most wasn’t that I had found the file. It was how quickly I had written a completely different ending.

Most of the time, our suffering isn’t caused by what we know. It’s caused by what we imagine. It’s caused by the stories we tell ourselves while we wait.

Sometimes those stories turn out to be true. Often they don’t.

Either way, I’ve learned that when certainty isn’t available, panic isn’t a good substitute. Sometimes the wisest thing we can do is simply admit:

I don’t know yet.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, the answer turns out to be hiding in a file called Bob’s.