I don1’t know if this is specifically an American thing or a human thing, but, man, Americans really want to believe in the just world fallacy.
When I was a kid, my mother liked to say that life was not fair. Which infuriated me, but she was correct. Life was not fair. It was life. I think we should try to make it as fair as possible, but things were never going to even out. That was, indeed, life. In fact, me dying twice and coming back twice means that I’ve used up my luck for the rest of my life.
It was luck that I lived, by the way. Not completely. I tilted the deck in my favor by practicing Taiji for a decade-and-a-half. It prepared my body to relax under very stressful situations. That helped me when I was in a minar car crash about seven years ago, and I walked away with only a massive bruise on my stomach (either from the air bag or the seat belt), The front end of my car was caved in and the whole car had to be totaled, but I was fine.
I always say that love, luck, and Taiji were the three things that pulled me through my medical crisis. I mean, my medical team, too, but that was just a given. I would say of the three, Taiji was maybe 25%; love was 25%; and luck was 50%.
I have joked that I want to write a self-help book about my experience, but that would be basically, “Die and see if you come back to life.” It’s a high-risk, high-reward situation, and the chances that you will come back to life is slim-to-none.
A few months after I returned home from the hospital, I tried to find other people who had gone through what I had. I also wanted to find a therapy group for people like me.
They don’t exist. At all. I could not find anyone who had walking (non-COVID) pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, and an ischemic stroke. Hell, I can’t even find someone who has had a cardiac arrest and a stroke, let alone the rest of it.
It’s interesting. There were people who wanted to know my secret–how I managed to come back from death–twice. This is such an American way of thinking, honestly. That we have more control over life than we do. I get it. It’s scary to think that things happen to you for no reason, but that’s life, indeed.
I also get the need to think that others will get their just due. Again, this may be an American thing, but people in this society really thirst for the villain to get their comeuppance. This is the Just World Fallacy, The belief that bad things will happen to bad people.
Side note: it drives me crazy that karma has come to mean revenge to Americans. It’s such a Christian way of thinking of things, and it’s not what karma is at all. Karma doesn’t care about good and bad or getting revenge. It’s not about punishing someone for their bad deeds (or rewarding someone for their good deeds). It’s allowing things to reach their natural consequences.
I wince everytime someone calls that karma. I also shake my heads when Americans say about a bad actor, “They’ll get theirs in the end.” You know what? They probably won’t. Bad people prosper and good people suffer. That’s fucking life.
I hated it when my mother said that life wasn’t fair, but she was so right. Life isn’t fair. We want it to be, and we should try to be as fair as possible in our personal life, but we have to accept that we are not in control of anything, really.
I’m really not trying to be bleak, by the way. I’m not trying to say that life is hopeless because it most certainly isn’t. I’m also not saying that we should just accept that life isn’t fair. As I’ve said, we should try to make like more fair when we can, but it just isn’t. fair, that is.
Americans refuse to accept this. Not all, obviously, but it’s part of the American mythos. Cowboys doing it for themselves and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Yes, I’m mixing metaphors, but both are correct. So, the belief is that anyone can do/be anything is a lie. It’s pushed hard on Americans by the elite ruling class to make it our fault if we don’t thrive.
When I was nine or ten, I knew I wasn’t going to be president of the United States. Bear with me. I promise this is related. I got the bullshit about ‘you can be anything you want when you grow up’ that is spewed at American kids across the land. Supposedly, it’s to inspire kids to be great and do great things.
I knew this was bullshit from a very young age. Look. I was born female and Asian in the seventies. Even putting aside being president, there were several things that I was not going to be able to do/be when I was an adult.
I knew from a young age that I would not be in any position of power given who I was. I knew for sure that I would not be president. I was not going to be an athlete, even if I had the skills, because I was not a guy. I knew that I probably would not end up on TV because I was Asian. The latter was not impossible, but it was going to be very, very difficult.
I didn’t think that was being cynical or selling myself short. That was the reality of the world I was living in. Add into the mix that I was bisexual, agender, fat, and areligious, and, well, that cut off a whole lot of things I could do in polite society.
This is just life. This is not me beieng down on myself. This is how our society works. I am on the fringe, which is where I am the most comfortable, by the way. I can pass for short amounts of time (as a normie), but it’s not where I’m comfortable. At all.
It’s interesting when I talk to normal poeple. It’s like being in an alternate universe–one that I know well, but one that I’m not a part of. That’s my life. I’m fine with it. For now.