I don’t like to complain often; okay, who am I kidding. I write a blog for the sole purpose of complaining and by doing so hopefully helping others with their ups and downs. I complain for the sport of it, I complain for the release it brings, I complain because quite frankly the problems I often have don’t have resolutions so what else is left. I complain not because anyone is actually really listening but because deep down it gives me a sort of cathartic release that allows me to continue on for another four minutes when the next bad thing happens.

I love to try and figure out when exactly my bad luck that lead to this complaining actually started. I have searched my memories long enough to realize that it was shortly after my son was born (although I still complained prior to this event), was egged on by my daughter’s birth and has steadily gone down hill from there.

There are certain people in this world that are gifted with the amazing ability to always have luck. I am not one of them. There are people who get jobs from their first interviews, who can buy houses and cars after they save their money, who can raise their children and give to them the tools that would make them better: whether that’s signing them up for baseball or giving them dance lessons. These are happy people.

Am I so naive as to believe that these people don’t have problems? I sincerely wish that I was. Do I believe that these people don’t have unexpected bills or medical expenses that there was no way to prepare for? Of course not. Is every human tested in some way, each day of their lives? Bet your bottom dollar.

But no matter how much you twist it, no matter how you look at it, bad luck simply follows some people. Being mentally ill I went through a phase that required my total belief that it was in fact the disease I had that made everything so difficult. Being a difficult person, a person with mood swings that create neon signs over my head, I have always wondered if the difficulties I have are not a response to the disease.  I don’t believe that the actual disease can produce luck, but rather my ability to see clearly and with some intelligence of the world in which we live has created for me a world that resembles that darkness of bad luck.

The bad luck I am talking about is not the kind that happens on Friday the 13th. The luck that pervades my life is not a result of breaking a mirror or walking a path of the neighborhood black cat. It isn’t something so basic and easy as superstition; rather it is simply a continual set of circumstances that prevents me from being like the Jones-es. If you think to yourself you never wanted to be like the Jones-es then you honestly have never had bad luck.

If you google bad luck you can actually find 700,000 results on how to get rid of it. Everything from salt to crystals are guaranteed to help you avoid the very bad luck that seems to stick to oneself like, well glue. I personally have a diary, a beautiful and rather eerie diary, of spells, chants and promises that not only guarantees that I won’t have bad luck but my house, car, and furniture will be free of it as well. I haven’t tried any of the spells as I am just wary enough to worry about a commoner practicing what has been used and perfected for the last ten thousand years. It requires a lot more research, in my mind, before you speak the words that could change the way things work completely. Ridiculous? Probably, but we are talking my bad luck and I don’t think I can afford to make it worse.

Easy examples of my bad luck…my air conditioning breaking on literally the hottest day of the year. Visiting our friends and seeing their beautiful homes and then looking at our small apartment because we can’t afford anything else. What about trying to build savings, pay down credit cards, but always run dead into situations were the only way to pay for the newest bad luck is with the very things we swore we would never touch. And I am not talking about isolated events, but daily even hourly events that build on one another. We have Excel charts and large and dense plans to make ourselves better and therefore find better luck, but we end up with so many other problems, needs or requirements that it seems a waste. Every time I pull up my bank account, my heart literally aches. We try but it just doesn’t get better.

I of course, like most people, question God especially considering most of his powerful lessons were singular (how many times did he force Eve to follow his dictate?). If this is God trying to teach me something it isn’t singular. It is plural to the millionth. And I can’t do anything about it. My therapist laughs and shakes her head because she hasn’t seen anything like it, but to me it’s my life.

I have a sign that hangs in my bathroom (strategically) that says, “You were given this life because you are strong enough to live it.” I sincerely would like to put out in the universe that I am not strong. I am weak and a ridiculous human being that can not see myself in a positive light with rose-colored glasses on. I am not meant to have continual and constant stomach aches from wondering what today will bring. While teaching my children that sunshine and rainbows are in their future, I recognize that I am lying through my teeth. The teeth that are not cleaned regularly because of the additional expenses that come from it.

I guess somewhere, in someway, I am going to have to give up on hope. I am going to have to give up on the idea of bad versus good luck and recognize that my life was not meant to actually have been lived. While I have confounded so many with the strength of my will to live, each day, each year, each moment a little less of my desire to understand falls to the wayside. I think that I will eventually end up in a bed, in some room, padded walls and bars on windows understanding that I have no business walking the same path of those I love.

For them I will break, if only because I believe that the bad luck that affects them comes from no other place than my own soul, my own punishment.