The birthday card my dad sent me said in big letters on the front, "This is your year!" And it had a picture of a 20-something Black woman spreading her arms and smiling, like she'd just won life.
Normally, I think these things are a little cheesy, but this card was so perfectly time for this junction of my life that I wanted to cry. Normally, I think these things are a little cheesy, but this just felt...spot on.
I opened it a day after I had three interviews over four days, and a week before I got offered the position I really really wanted in DC. In the time since, a version of my independent work has been selected for publication in an undergraduate journal the University of Texas puts out and I've won three blog giveaways. I even joked about how I missed having goldfish in my eating club's kitchen for late night snacking, and the very next damn morning I walked downstairs to find a bowl of goldfish.
In the words of my mother, "Damn it's a good time to be Maya."
(I'm actually terrified that something is about to go horribly wrong because so many things are going right, but I'm trying not to speak that into existence.)
Anyway, I'm a little bit shocked, and kind of confused that my life is suddenly awesome, and incredibly grateful, and maybe even a little bit skeptical...but the one thing I don't feel is "lucky".
I've been thinking for a while about how I think I'm becoming disenchanted with the concept of luck. Not in the sense that I don't think it plays or has ever played any role in my life or in getting me to where I am, because I will always count it among the mysterious forces that brought me to Princeton and the ridiculous wealth of opportunities that attending and *knocks on wood* graduating from this place has given and will give me, but...even in that momentous case, I would only allocate a small percentage of whatever forces brought me here to "luck." (Among other things, I would attribute more of them to a mother who'd felt cheated by her own life and was determined to not let me feel the same way, a few good teachers, the circumstances of my childhood that taught me to look for an escape in books/school, an irrational fear of failure combined with a thorough resourcefulness that led to my having put together an impressive application package, and a little bit to the checking of a particular box, because while I don't think the color of my skin was a making- or -breaking-point for me, it is something they look at...) The truth is, I kind of applied to Princeton on a bit of a whim. I barely got my application in on time, and I was only really applying because my family demanded that I apply to Harvard and it seemed silly to apply to one and not the other. After I sent all my applications in, I actually had panic attacks over a period of months because I thought the admissions committees were going to laugh my application out of every meeting.
But they didn't. Maybe a couple people laughed at Harvard to get me on the waitlist, but fuck Harvard. I got to tell them I was sick of waiting around for them TWICE! (They wanted me to come up there for an interview for a Research Associate position in like a month, and I was like, uhhhhh, I'ma go to D.C.) Was I lucky? Undoubtedly a little bit. But no amount of luck in the world could have saved me if I hadn't put myself out there.
I used to think I was, like, a particularly unlucky person. I felt like entering giveaways and raffles or prize drawings or whatever was a waste of time because there was no way I was going to win. When I won my first giveaway in March of 2010, I was floored. I had legitimately never won anything in my life. I hadn't quite changed my mind about giveaways yet, though, and only entered very sporadically. I didn't win another one until September of 2011. Over the summer, I started reading more blogs and being aware of more giveaways, and I realized that I have infinitely greater chances of winning something if I enter myself into the drawing rather than if I just let the opportunity go by. And so I resolved to start entering damn near every giveaway I saw. (It was even part of why I finally joined Twitter, because there were so many that I couldn't partake in because they involved tweeting.) Since then, I've won six giveaways: a skincare set, an $88 dress, two t-shirts, an entire line of hair products, an individual hair product, and a bottle of Rihanna's perfume.
Am I lucky? You could say that, I guess, but really my chances were no better than anyone else's...unless those people didn't enter the giveaway. I didn't do anything special. All I did was say, "Why not?" Why not enter the giveaway? Why not apply for the job? Why not run for the position? Why not reach out to the interesting person on the dating site? Why not submit a paper to the undergraduate journal's call for papers? Why not?
Self-promotion. I'm tryna make it a new way of life. It seems to be working for me already.
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