Getting Better at Good News
Do you immediately knock on wood whenever anything good happens? I know I do. Nothing makes me more paranoid than when I get positive news. I immediately assume there’s a catch, refuse to think about it at all because it’s too scary to hope, or assume if it really is that good, I’m about to be hit by a train.
Basically, I totally ruin it for myself. I’ve had this tendency as long as I can remember, and I know a lot of writers have the same problem. But then I realized two things that changed the entire way I look at the world.
1. Life isn’t a movie.
People look to stories to make sense of our lives, and we’ve been trained by every book and movie we’ve ever seen to expect that good will be IMMEDIATELY followed by bad. It can’t be nice too long because a story needs conflict to drive it. So if there’s a scene where things are happy, we come to expect that in the next scene, the person will be riding a bicycle, arms outstretched with a smile on their face, and be hit by a bus.
But life isn’t a movie, and conflict isn’t a requirement. In life, you can be happy for longer than a moment, and nobody will leave you a note that says, “Cut for pacing.”
But life isn’t a movie, and conflict isn’t a requirement.
2. Life isn’t fair
Look, in real life, there’s nothing that says you won’t total your car on the same day you get diagnosed with cancer. Life can and will kick you when you’re down, way more times than is fair or right or makes any sense at all. That means it can also give you good things. More than one at a time, and not parceled out according to any cosmic quota. There’s nobody counting up your score.
You get what you get.
Sometimes it’s more good than you think you deserve, and sometimes it’s more bad than you think you deserve. That’s scary. People have built religions and philosophies and myths as long as humans have existed to hide from that idea of “nobody’s keeping score” or that if someone is, the algorithm is too complicated for us to fathom. However, it comes with a big silver lining: there’s no glass ceiling on the amount of good that can happen to you. It’s okay not to cringe when you get a full manuscript request on the same day your CP sends glowing feedback about your new book, or when you meet a guy who likes dogs as much as you and he has great abs… because there’s no chance you’ll reach your quota of happiness.
So the next time something awesome happens to you, you don’t have to knock on wood, and there’s no reason to be nervous. Happiness isn’t a zero-sum game, and there’s no evil Hollywood director in the background shouting, “Keep the tension up!”
This is real life, and the good news is, it’s not fair.
