Every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things…
Hello, Old Friend.
There’s something I need to remember…
I never learn the lesson the first time around. Or the second time either to be honest. I fall over the same crack in the sidewalk. I grab the pot by the handle that is always too hot to handle and walk away with burns. I forget my glasses in the same spot on the bathroom counter. I pick at my cuticles until they bleed because it is as close as I can get to feeling some sort of emotion without resorting pressing a blade into my fingerprints again…that was a violent 180. Did you feel it?
I forget that there are people. There are over 6 Billion of them in fact. The amount of people that you will come across in your lifetime is over 700,000. And that’s a normal person. It doesn’t take into account someone who travels for a living or who works with patients for a living or who works in the service industry (even just for a brief moment). You have a 1000 in 700,000 chance in meeting someone you’d call an acquaintance; someone you’d get lunch with or text or Snapchat or whatever. You have a 500 in 700,000 chance in transferring that acquaintance to a friend. You have a 50 in 700,000 chance of finding people you hold onto, your friends who have morphed into family.
Probability states that at least one…one singular bundle of atoms and cells and breaths and memories…there is at least one lifeform that has experienced something that you have or are or will be experiencing. The same thing. The same moment. The same feelings.
There’s a person who I met, just by chance, just by happenstance. She just so happened to be one of the 1,000 individuals living in the same dorm as me. She just happened to pick the floor I spent my time on; out of all 12 floors, she picked the Family’s. In the beginning, she was one of the 1000. I went away and through the wonders of the Interwebs, she slowly became one of the 500. She stole me away from the floor and hid me away in her room where we would talk about life, university, travel, boys, our mothers. Then she did something that I never expected:
She stayed. She became 1 of the 50. We talked more about our lives and our problems; our walls started to come down. Finally we talked about mental health. I can’t even remember how we first told each other. But we fight the same battles: the anxiety of ever being good enough; the PTSD from our past relationships; the abuse at the hands of our Mothers; the depression that haunts us even when everything is supposed to be “good”.
The probability that I would meet someone who fights the same wars that I do, that I would find a friend who holds on as tightly as I do, that I would have a battle partner…that I would find that 1 in the 50 in the 700,000 individuals…
Suck on that Probability.
Hold tight, My Girl. We’ll never give up and never give in. I got your back.
…but vise versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
–Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 10, “Vincent and the Doctor”
I Shall Not Go 