On Luck

The other day I was at 19th street, in the apartment that is temporarily no longer my home, explaining the stupid end of my trip to Pierpaolo and Alessia and Whitney, and Pierpaolo asked in what colloquial way we would express how unlucky that was. And Whitney said that she thinks that it is a kind of outmoded term in America actually, that people don't really talk about luck or unluck. They say things like "that sucks," instead. And I reflected that maybe this had to do with this rugged individualist sort of attitude that a lot of Americans have about working hard and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and everything good or bad being a direct consequence of good or bad work. Luck doesn't exist in that equation, except for suckers and apologists. But even before having that conversation, it occurred to me that I think about luck a lot. Luck and Fate sit next to each other, and if I am looking at patterns and coincidences, strange unexplainable things, if I dig back into my deep troves of personal mythology, they show up a lot.

The main reason that I feel my luck so tangibly, increasingly and always, is because of the really powerful relationships that I have in my life right now. Sometimes I think about how many people I love and how deeply I love them and how I am only 22, and that number is going to just keep growing, and I am going to lose a lot of them, and gain some more, too. Who even knows what will happen when I have more than a bundle of really intense, heartfelt friendships on my plate, and I find another person who I love with solid abandon. I've already lost and gained a lot of these ties in unexpected ways and places. Thinking about losing people, though, terrifies me. Terrifies me. Meeting and connecting with people who become part of my heartscape feels like fate, and luck, but losing people nearly always feels like a consequence. A lot of these people that I am terrified of losing are far away from me, and that is very hard sometimes, but it also keeps me constantly and actively grateful that they are in my life.

I feel so lucky that I can send emails with parts that are like this:

why do i feel so bad here sometimes? sometimes i really love everything about it, and sometimes i am walking to the co-op in the snow to meet liz and make risotto, and i find myself crying into my scarf and talking to myself along the way. i remember the conversation we had when i visited you where i articulated for the first time that this thing, this badness, was just always going to be there no matter where i was. that is more and more true all the time, and even though i know it, i don't want to believe it. it seems like such a sad way to live, always having to fight against myself.

and get responses like this:

I don’t know if I know quite enough about your badness (what it looks like, what it smells like, what it asks you to do), but I think that you’ve answered your own question, that it something that is with you wherever you are sometimes, and also probably it is stronger when there are fewer people present to fight it with on a daily basis.

I maybe told you this already? That I have this completely dopey personification of my need to explain it; that I think it is like this vicious mythical creature and when it is after me, I only have enough strength and courage to evade it – to escape, but not to slay it. And when I have escaped, I forget that it is so bad and that I should really be on a quest to kill it and I go about my life figuring that it will be all right on its own. And then it comes back and I have to run again. And now is the time when I am only starting to understand that I want to figure out what would be necessary to seek IT out and then to slash it apart. I wonder if maybe your feelings are a little like that.

I also think that maybe with part of this terrible individualism that has fractured our would-be lelaina-viki-sammy-troy apartments is the idea that WE are supposed to be okay all of the time. One of the things that helped me when I was so sad and confused at the beginning of my time here was coming across the thought that maybe this awful on the edge of the world all of my feelings in my shirtsleeves feeling – that maybe this is EXACTLY what my early twenties are supposed to feel like, maybe this time will become a treasure to me when I am growing older and looking around in myself for my love and passion and loneliness. Maybe you are just more alive, and more attuned to yourself than a lot of people are. Or maybe you have demons other people don’t, and learning how to keep them back will help you have wonderful things too. I don’t know.