I couldn’t remember the name of a woman I needed to contact, so I typed a few keywords in the search bar of my Gmail account. This is my failsafe way of turning up old contacts.

Nothing at all came back. That was weird; I clearly remembered our correspondence from a few years ago.

Then, I noticed something even stranger. My inbox said it had around 12,000 messages. Unless it’s spam or ads, I haven’t deleted an email from this account in 13 years. My inbox should have more than 75,000 read messages.

What was going on?

I filtered the emails by date. There was nothing before 2017.

A deep sense of panic washed over me. Much of my work, contacts, personal and professional history lives in email. How did 60,000 emails just disappear?

It got worse.

I noticed my drafts folder was missing about 400 messages. Whenever I need to jot down interviews, observations or ideas I plan to use later, I start a draft email with a specific subject line. I started doing it more than a decade ago.

We can all agree that this is a terrible system. But I did not expect it to vanish into thin air one day.

I frantically emailed whatever contacts for Google I could find. While I waited for a response, I told my co-workers, fellow journalists who also traffic in hundreds of emails a day, that most of my digital record-keeping had mysteriously disappeared. Their faces registered the shock I felt, but then they reassured me that, surely, everything would be recovered. We live in the Age of The Cloud. Nothing is ever deleted from the internets.

I wanted to believe them, but in my sinking heart, I knew this was the curse that has haunted me.

I’ve been a saver (some might use a stronger word that rhymes with “boarder”) of written material my entire life -- letters, notes, cards, books, journals. Growing up, I kept a box in the garage filled with letters from my grandfather, notes folded into complicated shapes from my best friends in middle school and even Valentines from grade school. The summer before my senior year of high school, lightning struck our house and burned down the garage. Those letters turned to ash.

I restarted my collection of written memorabilia and again accumulated boxes in my parents’ garage -- yearbooks, letters, college term papers, grad school research. After the boxes collected dust for years, my father asked if I could please take my papers home. I mailed two large boxes from Texas to Missouri. A month later, I received a letter informing me that the boxes had been destroyed in a processing facility in Atlanta.

The curse.

This Gmail account had become the digital version of those boxes.

It was just a matter of time, I figured.

Maybe I should burn some sage to remove this hex, I suggested to a colleague.

Maybe you should go to the Apple store and see if their geniuses can help you, he said.

That sounded like a better plan. Oddly enough, my missing drafts were showing up on my iPhone’s Gmail app, though I wasn’t able to open them.

I headed to the mall, carrying my history like an albatross. Even the geniuses were stumped by my email apocalypse. Had someone hacked my account? Was there a problem with Gmail’s server? They had no explanation, and suggested I try to contact Google again.

I headed home dejected.

Nonetheless, I called Google support and a gentleman said he would send me a recovery link that would attempt to restore everything that had been deleted in the past 30 days.

A glimmer of hope.

Of course, the recovery link refused to launch. I should have accepted this fate hours ago.

I tried one last time. This time, it went through.

The rep said it might take up to 24 hours to recover the account, and that it wasn’t guaranteed to work. I turned off my computer and went to bed.

I had a nightmare of being kidnapped. As soon as I woke up, I logged in to my account.

By God, the emails now went back to 2015. They were coming back from the ether.

Bit by bit, the lost years started reappearing. By the next day, I had more than 76,000 emails back in my account, and all 700 drafts were also restored.

I still don’t know what happened or why, but I’m not one to question miracles.

Perhaps the curse is finally broken.

Matice Morris adjusts the camera sitting on a tripod under a glowing ring light. She moves the throw pillow behind her, pulls up her notes on her phone and takes a sip of water. She peers closer at her image on the small flip screen and wipes a smudge of lipstick from her teeth.

She pushes record -- beep.

It’s time to slay the dragons.

“Hi, you guys,” she says. Then, she’s stuck. Her chin trembles, eyes squint, her lips are pursed and the words refuse to budge.

“I’m going to start over,” she says. “I know I haven’t recorded in a while,” she starts. She hits a roadblock on the next word.

Morris, now 30, started speech therapy because of her stuttering in first grade. For 10 years, she worked with professionals to help her words flow more fluently. After middle school, she moved from Rockford, Illinois to a new high school in St. Louis. She spent the entire first semester eating lunch in a restroom stall. She didn’t want to start with the halting introduction again. Blank stares. Uncomfortable pauses.

Sometimes, she stutters on her own name.

By her junior year, she had made friends and had enough with speech therapy. She tended to stay quiet in groups and communicated mainly through texting and social media messages. Her words flow so much faster when she can type them, but still not as fast as her mind is thinking them.

Now, in front of the camera, she’s starting to sweat. She picks up a poster and fans herself.

“I’ve noticed a trend in comments of all you saying my stuttering has improved,” she says to nearly 30,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel.

But to someone with a lifelong stutter, that’s actually not a compliment, she explains.

“It kind of makes them feel like a failure when they have not improved,” Morris says. She’s posted more than 50 videos since she launched the channel 2 1/2 years ago.

She wanted to encourage other people with speech impediments and to share what it’s like to struggle to speak. She wanted to reclaim her voice.

It took her three years after graduating with a master’s in accounting to get a job because potential employers had trouble seeing past her speech challenges. One recruiter told her it would be difficult to help her because employers would assume she was mentally challenged based on her speech.

The obstacles made her more determined. She has always dreaded public speaking.

“My goal is to conquer my fears,” she said. “Even when I am nervous or stressed or scared about my stutter, I still make the video.”

Not only has she built a significant following online, she has self-published a book, “The Product of My Selfishness: The Stutter and the Story.” In sharing her struggles, she has inspired others who ask her for advice on how to navigate school and relationships. Among them, she deals with a few ignorant and hurtful remarks.

Morris pulls up the screenshots she took of a commenter who wrote that she would rather just learn sign language. When Morris responded, the poster replied: “thank God you wrote that because it probably would’ve took u forever to say it!” In her next response, the person curses at Morris and writes, “continue giving us, the ppl, a good laugh!”

At this point, Morris’ mother steps into the comments and tells her daughter to stay focused and remember the words of former first lady Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”

The video Morris is trying to make tonight is not going well -- probably because I’m watching her record it and making a stressful situation even more so.

“I might have to re-record this later,” she said, after switching the camera off.

She pulls up the last public message she received from the critic who taunted her.

“I want to apologize to you for my previous comments,” the commenter wrote. “It was never my intention to come at you in such a manner and it might have been delivered wrong.”

Morris smiled.

“She’s literally the only person who has ever apologized.”

Her biggest fear is speaking on a stage in front of a crowd. It’s far more intimidating than talking into her camera.

So, she’s now looking for an opportunity to speak live.

Another dragon to slay.

I’m not going to hold President Donald Trump’s draft-dodging grandfather who got deported from present-day Germany against him.

Similarly, it’s not fair to claim Trump is a racist by citing his father’s arrest at a KKK riot in New York in 1927. You can judge Trump’s racism based on his very own words and actions.

In the same vein, I’m not interested in punishing Robert Sagastume, a graduate student at Washington University, for his mother’s decision to reunite her family. Sagastume will graduate with two master’s degrees from the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University next month. His mother brought him to America from Honduras in 2001, when he was 12, to reunite with her other children in Kansas City, whom they had not seen in six to seven years.

Sagastume and his mom entered legally on tourist visas. His mother got her green card and filed on his behalf. Then attacks on 9/11 changed immigration policies, and Sagastume’s application fell through the cracks.

He had no idea.

He was a top student in high school, a member of the National Honor Society, and won a full-ride scholarship to college. That’s when he learned the truth about his status.

“I cried so much,” he said. “I felt all my dreams of going to college had been torn apart.”

His family told him to take landscaping jobs and hide in the shadows.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program gave him a chance to regain his life. After a thorough application process, he got DACA protection in 2012, becoming a so-called “Dreamer.” After 15 years of living undocumented, it allowed him to get a driver’s license, a credit card, bank account, apartment and internship. He married a U.S. citizen in 2015 and has a green card now.

His dream is to help others and continue contributing to his country.

Eduardo, who also lives in the St. Louis area, knows this journey. (We are identifying him only by his middle name, since DACA’s status is in limbo.) His parents brought him from Mexico legally when he was 6 years old. They overstayed a visa, and Eduardo became undocumented. He worked hard and lived cautiously. His family paid his way through college, where he graduated cum laude with an engineering degree.

But without legal status, he could not apply for jobs. For three years, he worked as a cook in his parents’ restaurant.

DACA changed his life: He was finally able to get a job in his field. He has reapplied for DACA every two years, as required by law.

The night he heard that Trump rescinded the program, his heart broke.

“I remember crying myself to sleep that night,” he said. “I live in perpetual fear of what’s happening.”

The Supreme Court will ultimately decide whether Trump’s decision to shut down the federal program protecting nearly 800,000 Dreamers was appropriate. But there’s a more fundamental moral question at stake for the rest of us: Is it fair to destroy the lives of so many people, who had no choice when their parents brought or kept them here as children?

If you would object to the government throwing you in prison for a crime your mother or father committed, it’s intellectually dishonest to want to deport Dreamers.

We shouldn’t hold the president accountable for the questionable immigration past of his grandfather or the Department of Justice investigations into his father’s unwillingness to rent to black tenants.

Let’s set aside that the president’s close adviser, Stephen Miller, was busy sending Brietbart hundreds of emails promoting white supremacist propaganda before he began crafting the administration’s immigration policies. It’s probably just a coincidence that he’s the same guy who wanted to tear babies from their (nonwhite) parents at the southern border.

The story of what makes us American is intensely personal. The Trump family history reveals how complicated and contested these narratives can be.

Of course, it’s bad public policy for the president to hold 800,000 people hostage over his own mommy and daddy issues.

It’s certainly not his fault that his current wife, Melania, was granted an “Einstein” visa -- typically awarded to Nobel winners and prominent scientists -- after her nude cover shoot as a model.

Good for her for using whatever technicalities identified her as a genius and got her on the path to citizenship. And if “chain migration” helped her bring her immigrant parents to America, too, well, good for them.

Eduardo and Robert’s mothers know what it’s like to want to keep your family together.