this is gonna sound dumb

[transfemandgay]

This is gonna sound really really really stupid but bare with me.

I had a folder on my laptop that was 13.3 whole gigabytes of porn. Like okay whatever standard for a teenager I'm sure. I've been doing this for a while so I created no backups and any backup I did have was either stored online or on a USB so it couldn't be found, this folder I just hadn't gotten to. The folder was several months old and had a collection of a lot of mainstream and obscure (mostly obscure) stuff that I liked from subreddits and twitters and porn sites and imgurs and instagrams and discords and whatever. I do not remember where a majority of it came from and I have no way of tracking where I did get it from, except the accounts I can name off the top of my head. And even tho I didn't exactly look at all 13.3 gb a lot, there were some images and videos I went back to regularly and enjoyed.

Now I just accidentally deleted all of it. All of it. The entire thing. I've tried data recovery tools and so far they've brought up nothing. So it really is gone forever.

Here's the stupid part. It feels like a part of me just died. Like I actually felt like crying and having a breakdown over losing all that porn. And I've told myself over and over even before this that "You don't need to save that one image because holy shit there are literally thousands of the same image on the internet." Now I just feel dumb because it's just porn. I didn't lose any pictures of dead relatives or sentimental memories or something. I literally just lost a bunch of porn that I liked. And I obviously know why it hurts but I don't know if I should feel... idk... valid?? that it hurts?? This just happened less than 2 hours ago so that's fun.

[Sam W]

Hi transfemandgay,

You mention you know why it hurts, can you say a little more about that?

Honestly, sometimes our reactions to things can kind of blindside us or feel like they don't make sense, and that's absolutely okay. Too, something I'm noticing right now is that the general stress a lot of us feel about the world can sometimes come out in weird ways, like being upset over something that doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

[transfemandgay]

I mean the collection I had was several several months old and full of things I like that are pretty hard to find. A lot of them were trans girls or drawn trans girls from accounts I didn’t bother write down. Some were videos with no source. I was in the middle of moving it to an external or online storage service before I made a mistake and accidentally deleted the entire thing. I worked hard to find all of that and I actually did like the stuff that was in it. So obviously it hurts cause I lost it all but like I just feel stupid for feeling like this about it at all.

[Sam W]

Ooof, gotta love the pain of accidentally deleting something you were trying to save. I've been there, and it sucks. It also makes sense that it stings a bit more because finding porn representing trans girls in a non-awful way can be a bit of search. I think it's absolutely okay to feel frustrated or upset over losing something, even if you know it isn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.