I don’t really believe in woo-woo stuff. The fact that I call it ‘woo-woo’ stuff should be evidence enough of that. By this I mean anything spiritual, to do with the universe’s power, or any saying you might find on a fridge magnet in the home of a Midwestern family. Astrology, for example; I’ll see a meme about Sagittarius and laugh, go ‘that is so me’ and then keep scrolling. I won’t make life decisions based on it, or choose a guy based on it, or a neighbourhood to live in or job to accept. A friend read my tarot cards once and she got it so laughably wrong that the tiny part of me that thought it might tell me something about myself was snuffed out. But the one tenet I do subscribe to is that everything happens for a reason.
I love this concept because it removes agency in the most wonderful, affirming way. According to this principle, there is no such thing as a wrong decision. There are hard decisions, sure, but whichever one you choose was the one you were meant to choose. It’s the one that shaped your life into what it is now, what it was always meant to look like. Even if you don’t like how it looks, it’s great to just outsource the responsibility for it to the universe. The universe wanted me to have a bad day today, so that’s why I’m having one, and I’m going to keep having bad days until the universe decides it’s time for me to cheer up again. If I took the wrong job, or moved to the wrong city, picked the wrong apartment, it’s all to serve a higher purpose. I might not know what that purpose is right now, but all will be revealed soon enough, and I’ll look back and know I was supposed to make that decision. Everything I do is right. Choice is a fiction.
And I do genuinely believe it. Whenever I’m questioning why something is going so terribly wrong, I trace my actions back until I make peace with the situation. If I hadn’t done this, then this wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t have been here… etc. Charlotte from Sex and the City also loves to do this. It’s probably the only overlap in our personalities.
If I hadn’t married Tre, I wouldn’t be getting divorced, so I wouldn’t have met my divorce lawyer Harry, and I wouldn’t be engaged to him now!
It is, as Miranda comments at the time, very convenient. But just because it’s convenient doesn’t mean it isn’t true. If she hadn’t married Tre then she wouldn’t have met Harry through their divorce. But if she was meant to be with Harry, she would have met him some other way. The universe adapts.
Believing in the concept of everything happening for a reason means you can live without any regrets. Sure, you can regret that your action might have hurt someone else, but you know that the action itself was significant for you, and that the hurt was significant for them. You both learned something from it, and that lesson will lead you on to the next thing, and the next. Nothing is random. It’s kind of like religion in that way: the comforting idea that nothing you do is really significant, you’re just following a predestined path laid out for you by some higher being. Even steps that look like they’re going the wrong way are actually going in the right direction, although their purpose might not be immediately apparent.
I’m obsessed with Sliding Doors scenarios. What if I hadn’t done this – what would my life look like now? Even if that’s contradictory in itself, because I know that I never would have done the thing in question, because that’s not what the ~universe~ had in mind. For example: I was meant to live in completely different student halls, and then the week before I arrived at university my assignment was changed. The people I lived with in that first year of university completely shaped the years to come. The ones I was friends with then, for the most part, have become some of my closest adult friends. They introduced me to more people who would become my adult friends. They introduced me to a guy I dated for two years in university. I wouldn’t have known any of those people if I hadn’t lived in that building, and their lives would have gone on just a few hundred metres away from mine, close but never touching.
I had a drink with my ex this week, and we talked about the ‘What if’-ness of our relationship. What if the conversation that led to our end had never happened? What if our feelings on having children in the future had aligned? Where would we be now? Would we still be together? Or would another external factor have come between us?
I said to him then that if we’re meant to be together, we’ll find our way back to each other. In a year, in five, in ten. And if we’re not, and this is the end, then that’s the way it was meant to be. It’s easier to believe that than to believe there was something we could have done to change the outcome. It’s easier to believe it’s in someone else’s hands.
One good thing:
I did a stoop sale this week to make the money to buy a plane ticket back to the UK. The world’s sweetest dad/daughter combo came by and the dad made the daughter rank her favourite items, and then bought all of them for her. She also told me my clothes were ‘so cool’, and even though she was fourteen I was beyond flattered.
One bad thing:
I accidentally vented my lunacy on a completely unsuspecting and undeserving stranger this week because he happened to be there. RIP to me not needing therapy, I guess.