I am one of the most cautious persons on earth. I hardly ever take risks. I know, yawn, boring.
Yet I fell for a computer tech scam.
Yep. I did.
And like countless others, I knew better. But it hit me when I was tired, not feeling very well and at one of those, ‘I lost my mind’ times, that seems to happen a couple of times a year.
The emotional aftermath of this is something few people write about. There are countless articles on how to avoid scams. Some outright terrifying shame on you articles and the like. All of which do not serve a woman who just wants to create stuff and live happily ever after.
Women process these situations differently than men. Men would be angry and attack. Women go into the ‘shame-blame’ mode. This is just a general observation of people of my generation.
We also take this very personally. It is computer rape. I feel violated. It severely altered my perspective of the world. It is going to take a long while to come back from this.
I immediately took action to correct my faux pas, all the time battling the shame and blame I felt for having so easily been deceived. Damage control took a week. A week of not much sleep, no exercise, poor eating and feeling BAD.
No one but myself shamed me. Not the police. Not the Fraud Protection Centre. No one pointed fingers at me and went TSK TSK. No one rolled their eyes up at me and groaned. No one blamed me or said I should have known better. The turmoil was within.
You cannot be proactive about everything in life unfortunately. You can’t know every damn thing. And even if you do, you forget most of it. Most of us just bump along this rough old road called life and dig ourselves out of pot holes and messes.
A lot of good came out of the ordeal, as I find most things have a silver lining. It forced me to get things up to speed. To examine areas that need cleaning up in my life. It taught me that computers are like swiss cheese and colanders and almost impossible to completely plug up. I have a new and deep empathy for fellow victims. I learned an awful lot. The HARD way.
The best thing is it convinced me to work even harder on my creative stuff. I’ll show you! You scammers who try to steal my joy!
I received a knockout punch. Now I get back up, dust myself off and get back into the ring. Life is too short and too precious to lose your joy and your reason for being. You have to get back into the game.
