You Don’t Know It — But I’m Jinxed
I don’t think anybody truly realizes this about me, but I am almost entirely convinced that I’m jinxed.
Now, before you tut, or scoff, and tell me that I’m being silly — ‘what’s a nice 22-year-old college girl like you believing in a thing like that?’ — you should know that the extent of which I manage to somehow propel bad luck towards me is incredible, and somewhat frightening. It’s almost as if I have a gravitational pull that happens to exclusively attract all the wrong things. This was not the kind of magnetic allure that I set out to have, ever.
If you have heard of Murphy’s Law, then you might be familiar with the concept of how ‘anything that can go wrong will go wrong.’ I am altogether too familiar with it, because it seems that this has somehow become the modus operandi of how life tends to treat me.
I am not a superstitious person, and I have never been. I often live dangerously on the edge of peril by being blissfully ignorant of pavement cracks; I would not think twice about walking under a ladder if it happened to serve a more convenient passage; and I have definitely broken more mirrors than I can ever recall. All common superstitions that I couldn’t care less about. Because I’m fearless like that.
But perhaps this ‘reckless bravado’ in the face of such superstitions that exist across so many cultures — that one begins to wonder if there is, since so many people believe in them, truly some basis for them — is the reason for my constant misfortune. (Although at this point, the sceptical side of my mind is trying to curb this sense of curiosity by insisting that there must be a logical explanation for everything.)
At most times, the level of unfortunate coincidence (…? I say unsurely, with a suspicious squint) is nothing more than a series of inconveniences to my daily routine. Things that, at worst, are plain annoying. For example, I could easily rattle on about the things that happened just in these past four days alone. But to spare you a long, sorry tale, I will compile this into a neat schedule of sorts:
Monday
1. I found out that I had not been added to the register of one of my university classes.
2. Because of the above error, I had to rush to a class that I could only attend half of, due to a clash in timetables.
3. My computer account could not, for the life of me, work. But when an IT assistant arrived to help, it magically sorted itself out on the spot before he could even reach the computer.
Tuesday
1. I couldn’t use the printers in the university library. It turned out that my account had not been added to the system. Again.
2. I went to the bank to make an appointment. I waited for a confirmation email, but it never came. It turned out that my appointment had not been registered. Again.
Wednesday
1. There was another timetable clash, and I had to miss one of my classes. Again.
2. When I attempted to get some help to resolve the above issue, it magically sorted itself out before I could even get a reply. Again.
I don’t know about you, but I am seeing a lot of patterns. You can try to convince me to convince myself that I’m just making these patterns up, and perhaps even suggest ways to counter the bad luck, but trust me, nothing works. And by no means was any of this my fault, I can assure you that. I have no control over mutinous IT systems.
When things go wrong like this, it does not bother me much. Ultimately, all of these problems can eventually be resolved. No — it’s when the big things happen that I get really worried, and I genuinely begin to fear that my presence alone is a potential hazard for other people.
Because when bad things seem to happen only when you are around, you begin to feel… afraid.
Many terrible things have happened over the years, and I do not wish to sour the mood by describing them in full and tragic detail, but they were most definitely awful occurrences (some involving trips to the emergency room, and in worse cases, death). But more importantly, they only seemed to have happened around me specifically.
I’ve said this already, but it’s simply illogical to believe that such a thing as a jinx exists — which is partially why I rarely bring up the topic in conversations to my friends and family. Because it’s stupid, is it not? Everything has to be a coincidence; bad luck is just as it is — luck.
Yet, I do believe that I am jinxed. Nobody knows it, but I do.
And maybe part of the reason why nobody knows this is because I don’t let people get close enough to me to find out — lest I curse them by proximity and cause them to experience something horrible that I would not want to happen to someone I cared about.
I supposed it is impossible to know if the rate at which I experience misfortune is statistically higher than the average person, or if jinxes are real, or if I am one. I still think that I am.
Maybe I should avoid those pavement cracks after all.
