Foundering

The other day, I had cause to seek out my Social Security card. I thought I did, anyway, though it turned out that it was not needed. That's irrelevant. It proved elusive, and once it was apparent that it was missing, the thing I wanted it for was entirely beside the point. My Social Security card- which is a critical document establishing my identity and which can only be replaced so many times in one's lifetime- was missing.

I pitched headlong into a terrible state of panic. I should say that this was at maybe 7 o'clock in the morning after I'd slept for no more than two or three hours, and I was coming off a period of some ill health. For those reasons and others, I was in a diminished state, and quite prone to just such a fit of hysteria. It seized me hard, and nothing mattered other than locating the card and restoring a personal state of calm.

With shaking hands, I thrashed around the room, tossing every receptacle which contained any papers and examining them. My mental state rendered my search methods inefficient, forcing me to re-search those areas numerous times. At some point it occurred to me that the card was very possibly concealed within an envelope. My motive would have been to protect the card, but putting it in an envelope would have also had the effect of making it that much harder to find.

Indeed, the Social Security card proved to be in just such a blank envelope. I had, as of the moment I found it, cost myself maybe twenty or so minutes (and probably some years off the back-end of my life). I was left with a disaster area of a bedroom (which I would have no choice but to straighten out later when I was just about to crash) and a resolution to make those critical documents easier to find even as I protect them against trauma.