I'm the kind of person who makes plans for things that haven't even happened yet. A study schedule split by morning and afternoon, the year's goals taped to the wall right above my bed, a project I'd pictured all the way down to the scene of opening the result email and smiling. Everything sat neatly in the palm of my hand, solid, almost touchable. I love that feeling — the feeling of having a grip on my own life.
Then one afternoon, right at the last minute, it collapsed. A short email. A polite rejection. Something out of my reach that I could do nothing to save. And the whole castle I'd carefully built in my head came down without a sound.
I sat still for a long time. First the emptiness, like a skipped breath. Then the anger. Then the question I'm guessing you've muttered on some afternoon of your own: why me? Why does this happen right when I thought I was about to reach it?
The illusion that I'm the director
Honestly, most of the pain back then didn't come from the loss. It came from the fact that I'd believed I was in control.
We grow up with a quiet belief: that if we try hard enough, plan carefully enough, life will play out according to the script we wrote. We're the director, and reality is the obedient actor waiting for our cue. So every time reality steps off the mark, we don't just grieve the loss — we panic, because we suddenly realize we were never really holding the reins the way we thought.
In the middle of that, I thought of the old man from a very old story. His horse ran off, and the neighbors came to mourn the loss with him. He just smiled: who's to say it isn't good fortune. Before long the horse returned, leading a fine wild stallion behind it. Everyone celebrated, and he said calmly: who's to say it isn't misfortune. Then his son rode the new horse, fell, and broke his leg. That very year war broke out, the young men of the village were nearly all conscripted, and the son, because of his bad leg, was allowed to stay home — and kept his life.
I tell it quickly, because the beauty of it isn't in the details. It's in the way the old man never rushed to put a label on anything.
I'm quick to call something a "tragedy" while the film hasn't reached its final episode yet.
The butterfly effect of every near-miss
It took a few years before I had enough distance to look back calmly at those old collapses.
The project I grieved so hard over — if it had worked out, I'd never have had that empty stretch to fumble my way toward another direction, the one I now thank quietly every single day. The person I once mourned losing — if they'd stayed, I probably wouldn't have had the room to meet the people who actually fit me later on. The missed train, the failed exam, the cold little "we regret to inform you" — each one felt like the end of the world as it happened, and yet looking back, each was a quiet bend in the road carrying me exactly where I needed to go.
I'm not saying every pain has a beautiful reason tucked behind it. I don't trust that tidy kind of comfort. I just noticed something much simpler: at the very moment it happens, I never have enough information to judge whether it's fortune or misfortune. I only ever see a tiny fragment of the picture, then rush to a verdict on the whole thing.
The uncertainty I used to bitterly hate turned out, more than once, to be a gentle hand steering me off a wrong road — right when I was racing toward it at full speed, refusing to brake.
So now, when a plan of mine falls apart, I still feel sad. I don't pretend to be some monk. I still let myself grieve, be angry, sit in the disappointment for a day or two.
But after that, I practice saying one quiet thing to myself: who's to say. Who's to say what I lost today isn't making room for something I haven't seen yet. Who's to say what looks like collapse isn't the universe steering for me, toward a script better than the one I wrote with my own hands.
I take a deep breath. I loosen the hand that's been gripping the wheel so tightly. Then I sit still for a moment, and watch where the next stretch of road decides to take me.