Did I know how lucky I was?
He asked me with a mixture of envy and mirth.
Yes.
I've attended three schools where I studied writing with mostly talented young minds. Two decades later I'm one of the last people still writing. Back then the talented prospects were in the dozens. Thrivers are now in the single digits. At several points I thought of quitting. The ego tires itself out in face of bills and expectations. It felt like I was pulled back to writing several times in my life, despite the typos, despite the erratic periods of creativity, despite the doubt.
Luck, guile, and timing were my gifts. The ability to keep saying the most honest thing possible was my uncomfortable default. It costs me friends and fair-weather relations that could have benefited me in the short-term. In the long-term, being the uncomfortable truth ranter helped to burn off the ticks and leeches. There was nobody left but other truth tellers.
Then a TV job happens. And you're told the statistical luck of this feat. Less than 1% or some absurdly small probability...that's you. You're the less than 1%. And then one succeeds at the business of television. More tv, more money, health care, retirement funds. You can start looking around and considering the possibility of kids. But maybe the kid impetus has been burned away from all those years of truth telling. All those years of watching your friends slump into marriage and slump into parenthood, becoming weaker and blander version of themselves. All the lame postings that you liked grudgingly. Was it a grudge or was it envy? Was there some parts of me that made the feat of kids seem lame because it was not on my horizons? Who can say, at this point?
How accurate is that truth meter? Is it weakening just a bit as one enters middle age...or are the 20-something's just really fucking irritating these days? They seem irritatingly smug, but we were probably just as smug, perhaps?
No, we didn't have social media. We didn't have that echo chamber. We pontificated in college, had those late-night debates where we fixed the problems of the world. Then we went to sleep, woke up the next day, and went to class. The bubble of perfection was burst by our daily routine. But now those late night college debates can carry on infinitely online, the bounce around and build. It is different somehow.
But back to luck...yes, it is a small fraction of a tiny percentage point. That's my reality. It would be foolish if I didn't acknowledge that a few jobs could have ended my luck streak. A few prospects that I desired could have put me in a bad situation.
Luck is wanting something enough to keep you going, but not wanting it so much that it blinds you. It's that 'blinding want' that's dangerous. Con artists and scammers specialize in figuring out other people's blinding wants...the desire that's so strong that the holder can't see the red flags and warning signs. Being an artists means living on that razor's edge of passion. You have to be driven enough to have some discipline. Usually that drive comes from something outside of writing that you want to convey into words. But that source of desire can't be so overwhelming that it blinds you because then you stop writing and become prey to the scammers.
I've known several artists ruined by blinding passion. They fell victim to catastrophic relationships, bad investments, devotion to false prophets, drugs-alcohol or the desire to exist in a mind-altered state. It's amazingly simple how the same 4-5 blinding passions repeat themselves and ruin humans. It's been the same things for thousands of years. And yet every generation has to discover for themselves the error of loving too much a thing which does not love back.
Luck is dancing on that edge of passion and not falling. Luck is meeting the right teachers and side stepping the shady ones. Luck is timing timing timing. I have been in places for reason far beyond my conscious understanding. Some times it's just a willingness to follow a gut instinct or to move the feet in a certain direction. The timing of being here, and not over there.
Luck is mental seed planting. Luck is perception. You would think wealth was luck but plenty of people have been destroyed by money. The same with good lucks or talents. Every lucky thing can turn into a curse. Conversely every curse can be a chance encounter with a divine purpose. There was a time when I thought being fat, black, gay, asthmatic loser was a curse. Certainly no one was standing in line for these 'gifts' in a straight, white, beautiful world. These things that I saw in myself depressed me. I considered suicide for many years. I planned it out in my mind before losing my nerve and I guess that was luck too: the lack of nerve. Maybe there was a deep mental seed that knew even suicide would not be the end...that I would probably be back here in samsara. That deep awareness would certainly be the luck.
Anyway, those things which were curses drove me inward. I skipped the parties and proms. I detested what I assumed people saw in me. I wrote about it. I wrote through it. I wrote to confess my shame to a blank page. Some of my teachers judged my writing and found it...revelatory. Messy, unrefined, filled with typos, but brutally honest. I was brutally honest because I had nothing else to hide behind. When you think about death every day, it cleans away a lot of the nice pleasantries. You skip the small talk about the weather and jump right into the mud and misery and madness of the world. And while sploshing around in this shit no one things 'how lucky I am to be in this sewer!' You just think the world is shit and maybe you can throw some of this muck onto the clean people...here take a handful of this excrement right between your eyes.
So the curses were gifts. And the gifts that my childhood friends had -affable beauty, decency, obeying parents- were shackles to some of them. They grew up to be inexpressive gray clods with mediocre jobs. It wasn't my choosing. I was just down here in the sewer...enjoying my good fortune.
The filtration system
