The Lessons I Never Wanted to Learn

My laptop has a screen again! I am very happy about this, although I can’t say that learning how to connect the laptop to my monitor hasn’t been advantageous. I think I spent $30 ($15 for the item, $15 for shipping to buy a non-operable laptop exactly off of mine from ebay. I spent something like $6 for a precision screwdriver set (because I can’t find the one I had) and spent probably an hour on YouTube watching videos (like this one) on how to replace a screen in a computer like mine. (I bought a couple more things, but ended up not needing them, and they will be returned.)

In any case, although I do like having a techie geek-girl streak, I had no desire to be working on my laptop like this. I would have much preferred not to have had to put the time and energy into seeing if I could have somebody fix it, then come to the conclusion that it was a much better deal to do it myself ($36 vs $200), then have to find the pieces, order them, research how to do it, and now take the original screen for electronics processing and the extra things to be returned. I would have much preferred that it had never gotten broken in the first place.

However, reality dictates that we work with what is and not with how we would have liked things to be. I ended up working around the broken screen in preparing my presentation, I learned a little bit about the monitor I have and its features, even though it’s over ten years old, and I learned that I can do a little bit with laptop repair. It’s not nothing; these things will go into the bag of skills I’ve accumulated over the years, and many of those turn out to be useful more than once.

It’s just that there’s part of me that would rather not have learned them, and a part of me that’s even a little resentful that I had to. The last couple years have been fantastically difficult, and there’s always been a choice there – lay down and die or take this and try to learn something from it. I’m still here, so you know what the choice has been, but I can’t say that I’ve necessarily been happy with the process of learning and growth that were part and parcel of continuing to try to put one foot in front of the other. On the other hand, I suppose there’s a kind of prayer that comes out of trusting in God to teach us those lessons I never wanted to learn.

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