A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Eighty-Five

In large part, my computer serves as a prosthetic for me.  As I have mentioned before on this blog, I am severely disgraphic, which means that writing by hand is actually a painful, slow, and difficult process for me.  As a bonus, what I write is mostly illegible and looks like the scribbles of a young child first learning to write, but that is almost a seperate issue for me.  The point is that my computer allows me to easily write.  Using my phone can work as well, but is far more difficult for me, and often frustrating.  My computer is an essential tool for me, and has been since I was quite young.  Indeed, back in the early nineties when I was in high school, the school insisted I have a laptop to use in class and for all my assignments.  This was when laptops were quite new, expensive, and also heavy.  My first weighed close to ten pounds, as I recall.

Anyway, I rely on my computer to be able to write.  I can make due without it, but it is making due.  I do not have the same capacity when I don't have access to my computer.  It is, for me, as I said, a prosthetic to help compensate for a disability.

A few weeks ago my brother, who has worked in IT most of his adult life, asked me to run an update and, when it would not run, determined i needed another hard drive for the computer.  In his effort to install that hard drive, he had several issues, the end result of which is that I need a new computer.  At present, my computer does work, in general, but it is clearly dying and needs to be replaced.  It is an old machine at this point (nearly ten years), so I was thinking it would need to be replaced soon, but it was still functioning fine until my brother intervened.

He began to talk with me about getting a new computer and to discuss what I need and want, and so forth, all without ever taking real responsibility for breaking my current machine.  He has repeatedly said that parts "disintegrated" when he was working on them, and I overheard him discussing that he might not be able to actually build a new computer for me because of various other issues.  He did not actually talk to me about that, so I may have misheard something.  If I am correct, I find it very concerning he did not speak to me about it before going into it with other members of my family.  It is not uncommon for him to speak with our mother preemptively about things he knows will upset me so he canake certain she is on his side whenI find out, but I hope he can understand it from my perspective, because not having a computer is, for me, like not having the hand I use for writing.

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