I have been away from Overwritten for a while and I am going to now explain why. It is lengthy:
The best thing in my life right now by far is my wife. There is a lot of mutual respect and love, and we take a lot of strength from each other. Things during the last six months have been great, though there was a lot of friction and I am sorry to say, major fights during the first year or so at random. Since then, both of us have grown up a little and it has been pretty good.
Things have been bad on other fronts though.
1. Robbed twice: I was robbed at gunpoint a year ago while heading to a factory. The cash taken from me was a sizable amount, and it put a significant dent on my savings. Then, ten months ago, I was robbed again. This time I was carrying four months rent in cash which I was scheduled to pay.
So that was fucked.
It got worse.
2. Accident: I got into a terrible accident. My car was smashed on the side by a speeding Mercedes, which hit my car and flew and hit a tree. No fatalities nor any injuries, but it was a huge financial hit repairing the car. The other driver was intoxicated but in this country you are lucky to get away with your life. I wasn't compensated.
3. Fire: After my car was repaired, it kept giving me issues. Apparently there was some issue with the fuel distributor on top of the engine. So after the workshop told me the car was repaired, I drove for thirty minutes until I stopped at Shell for some petrol. Here, something terrible happened. The fuel began leaking from the distributor and the car caught on fire.
Yes, at the gas station.
Panic ensued. Cars pulled out of the petrol station in a panic and police and emergency response people came to put out the fire and save the station or it could have exploded. Long story short, everything including the engine burned.
I had to sell the car for scarp and get a new one. My savings were now gone and it was affecting my business.
4. Chased by terrorists, threatened with murder, rape, blackmail: So my wife was working at mental health facility near the sea port, which is a bad part of town. We didn't know at the time, but the area is filled with gangs, bad political groups, and the Taliban. Yes, the motherfucking Taliban.
So this mental health facility we later learned was being used to sell drugs or something. Well, we suspect. Anyway she had been at this place for a few months, when her and her female colleague started facing weird office sabotage. Things were destroyed in the office etc. Then, they started getting emails and text messages from numbers that couldn't be traced. I tried. The police tried.
The messages started with sexual harassment and then threatened rape, gang rape, violent murder, death by rape...
Because my wife worked at CNBC, she had been hired to have her media contacts shed light on the mental health facility. We feel the terrorists were either threatened, or were unable to work their drug operation because of new high level employees.
At work she was getting messages commenting on what she wearing how she was walking etc.
So my wife stopped going to work for a while and we started getting messages that they had followed us home and they would kill her and kill me our families.
At first we thought it was all bullshit.
Then they told us they had followed us home.
We still thought it was bullshit.
My wife started getting nightmares. She woke up crying and shaking because the moment she woke up she read an email from them that named our street address and described our house.
We hoped it was bullshit and the Taliban or whoever the fuck it was had read her address and were just trying to scare us.
Then, one day it was confirmed they were tailing us.
You see, we had gotten frightened and hadn't left the house. They told us that they noticed we hadn't left the house in a few days.
Then one morning we went somewhere.
Then we got an email that told us exactly what time we had left and where we had gone.
We got scared and my in-laws who had been insisting we live with them for a while were adamant we stay with them.
We stayed with them for nearly a month I think.
My work really suffered. Already suffering from all those losses, my business went to the brink. I didn't know what to do.
When I was working, I couldn't really concentrate.
I couldn't leave for work because my wife was scared and I was worried about her.
She had resigned from that hellhole, though she didn't want to lose the income. At this stage they were asking us for money.
Eventually the threats died down and we moved back home.
But we were both not the same.
So my wife took us to Nepal for an ultra cheap yet fun vacation. Nepal from here is like Canada from the USA, so the cost of traveling is minimal, but Nepal is a beautiful country with lots of jungles and cheaper than living here, yet you are on vacation.
That mended us a lot.
Now we are back and I am trying to get things back together. My business has suffered and I am just working like a maniac on my writing jobs. Things are a bit touch and go in terms of finances, but at least we are still alive.
I am feeling quite depressed at this moment about everything so I am just going to share it with you guys. I feel like a failure. I am 34 and I have nothing to show for it. This last year took everything away that I had built.
The whole thing has been so shocking, which is why I have avoided talking about it here.