#13 Bad Luck
When It Feels Personal
When I was little, I started writing out of desperation. I needed to create my own solid ground. I feel like so much of my life has pivoted on desperation.
It’s hard for me to believe that the brutality of life is random. It’s like flipping a coin 30 times, and having it come up tails every time. Technically, that could happen, but the chances are so low that it leads a person to wonder: Is it my flipping technique? Is there something wrong with this coin?
Is every struggle an orchestrated event—opportunity in disguise? Or are we merely forced to make the best of a nonsense existence?
If the only meaning we make is the meaning we choose, how does that not feel like delusion?
The picture is far too big for me to see the whole thing, but I can’t stop guessing at what it might be.
This is one of my favorite quotes, from a favorite writer, and we all should write as well. Louise Erdrich. (I used it in a book I self-published years ago.)
"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
I think struggles are opportunities in disguise, as long as they don't break you. I don't have the enormous struggles that some have.
We make our own meaning. Is it delusional -- sometimes, yes, I do think so.