The Night Everything Went Wrong -But I Still Delivered

They say anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I used to think that was just something people said until mid-March 2024 when Murphy’s Law decided to play a full-blown symphony on my head.

At the time, I had 48 hours to deliver a writing job for a client. Normally, that wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I’d been struggling. I just wasn’t inspired. For days, my mind was blank. I tried journaling, taking walks, reading anything to spark something but nothing worked. So I decided to rest and wait till evening, maybe the early hours. That’s usually when the ideas flow best anyway.

Bad decision, as the deadline crept closer, the pressure mounted. Still, I stuck to my plan: write at night, edit by morning, and submit a few hours early I always build in a* 2-hour buffer* just in case anything goes sideways.

That buffer saved me.

The night I planned to start, boom national internet blackout. It hit almost the entire country. At first, I thought it was just my network, so I switched routers, tried hotspotting… nothing. That’s when the panic set in. I had no access to reference materials, cloud files, or even the client’s brief in full.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, my laptop started misbehaving. The screen froze mid-edit, then the fan began humming like a generator. I swear, at one point I just sat back, laughed, and said, “Okay, you win.”

But I couldn’t quit. I’d already lost precious time to creative block I wasn’t about to let tech and internet finish me off.

I wrote through the night offline, using every offline tool I had saved. I edited in the dark (literally and mentally), saved copies like my life depended on it, and waited for any flicker of internet. When it finally came back, I uploaded and submitted the work two hours past deadline.

I was certain I’d get a bad review or refund demand. But to my surprise, the client replied, “This is beautiful. Worth the wait.”

I exhaled. Deeply.

That experience taught me something important. Sometimes, chaos is inevitable. Life will throw madness your way no matter how well you plan but if you’ve built systems for moments like that, you won’t crash.

I still remember sitting there in the dark, shaking my head, thinking, “This must be what every freelancer dreads.” And yet, even then, I knew I’d find a way out. That’s what creating under pressure looks like ugly, uncomfortable, but sometimes... surprisingly fulfilling.

Murphy’s Law might win a round or two, but I’ve learned how to fight back. Especially when the work I do helps others that alone keeps me showing up, even when everything else goes wrong.

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