Luck, misfortune, acceptance
I try to pinpoint the pinpoint the first time I felt an overwhelming sense of bad luck, misfortune, evil eye, whatever you want to call it. Was it when I started losing more friendships than I can count in the same way that made me feel inadequate over and over again, every year since I was 11 ? Was it when we kept discovering that some illnesses ran in the family ? Was it when I understood that what I had experienced as a child was abuse and that I might not have been the only one ? Was it when we lost several family members in a short timespan and we were robbed of goodbyes ? Was it when the fridge broke down that one time ? And then the car. And then my computer. And then the sink. All in the same week.
Did it start with me - they did, after all, take me to some sort of witch because I refused to sleep and they thought someone had given me the evil eye the first few weeks of my existence - or is there some truth in my parents' words when they say that we have been cursed ? I recently learned that, in 2001, my parents were ready to move us back to their motherland. Everything was set up. Clothes and furniture were packed and ready to go. They eventually had to give up on the idea after nationalists violently attacked Bosniaks again in their hometown. To me, it felt like yet another unfortunate tale that could only happen to us.
I wonder how much of these feelings are cultural, how much of it is born out of superstitious beliefs. How much of it is rooted in having collectively experienced unspeakable and unfathomable life-changing violence that has spanned multiple generations, without ever taking a break. It makes sense that, if we cannot truly make sense of something, it is easier to conceptualize it as some uncontrollable power that comes to crush us and continues to strike repeatedly.
It also seems rather self-centered to believe that we are special enough to be cursed. That these horrible occurrences must be someone or something else's fault because it never should have happened to us. That our lives are so bad that we must have the evil eye. As if thousands on this planet were not experiencing much more difficult and traumatic life events at the exact same time. When I start thinking about that, I feel guilty.
Then, I think about how lucky I actually am, despite everything. And how lucky we are. "If the war hasn't killed us, neither will this." That's a sentence I've heard my grandmother, my mother and my aunt say before. And it's true since none of our relatives, as far as I know, have died in the war. We've been lucky enough to visit my family every summer since I was born, unlike million of others in the diaspora. I was lucky enough to meet my grandpa. Hell, I even met my great-grandpa. That doesn't sound like being cursed to me.
My therapist often congratulates me on how well I cope with things and how well I self-reflect. When I read about how to recognize that a child may be undergoing sexual abuse, I did not find myself in the signs. Was that luck? I felt proud of that, even though I knew it was wrong to feel pride. I was a happy child. A bit too talkative at the doctor's. Bratty and spoiled. Energetic. Cheerful. Sometimes a bit rude to my peers when I felt like I had to protect myself. It was only years after the abuse stopped that I developed anxiety and depression, and I'm still convinced that it had more to do with my fear of failure and disappointing my loved ones than it had to do with anything else.
Although when something bad happens to me, it's always a devastating and troubling wave of bad things happening at the same time, deep down I don't think I'm truly cursed. But I do need to accept that it's just this thing called life. And life sometimes really fucking hurts. But that shall pass too.
