Attracting Good Luck
is this a thing?
Please consider listening, but only at 1.5 speed or faster! I record myself for this newsletter.
Before I answer the question posed in this post’s header and subhead, I need you to know something. The following thoughts have been waiting to fill an empty draft on nevertheless, still writing for years. Literally. I haven’t gotten around to writing it because I am a little ashamed of some parts of what I want to share, but my desire to get this out into the world is finally stronger than the shame and pain that have held me back.
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In the writing world—or at the least the circles I inhabit—there is a lot of magical thinking. It looks like this:
spell out your publishing dream into the sand and watch the ocean carry it out to sea
have a detailed vision board with all the things “the universe” will send your way in the new year
post to social media with all the things you hope will come to pass as a way to “manifest” them1
All of that sounds nice. It’s a way of ritualizing the process of setting intentions and speaking clearly about what you are seeking in life. On the surface, there is no harm in any of that, but if the belief runs too deep, the consequences can be devastating.
Manifesting is the idea that by sheer will power and clear intentions we can cause the world to bring our wishes into reality.
Seventeen years ago, desperation made me a believer.
I was in the hospital holding my day-old infant when Lehman Brothers crashed2. My husband and I had already seen the writing on the wall of that financial crisis. The housing market3 in South Florida was going haywire. We were stuck with a townhouse we couldn’t sell because we were so far underwater, and we had already put our entire savings and everything else into a new house that we could not afford as a result of not being able to sell our townhouse. By the time we brought our son home from the hospital, the subdivision where we lived in the new house was selling our exact home on larger plots of land with all of the highest-end upgrades for half of what we owed on ours.
And this new house had both me and my husband making significant commutes, costing us $800 a month in gas, seventeen years ago.
But first, a content warning: pregnany loss and infertility.
So, of course the concepts of The Secret and “The Law of Attraction” were appealing. Everything was going wrong, and the idea that I could by the force of my will and strong powers of visualization bring about change for my young family was magnetic. It felt almost irresponsible not to try this new approach: what if this is real? what if I could think and dream and wish our way out of this impossible situation?
I made vision boards—plural. At the time, I wanted a beautiful family life with a house that wasn’t at risk of being foreclosed, but according to the true believers, the sky was the limit, so I could wish for anything I wanted. I got a little more specific as the months passed and nothing else changed. I cut out magazine pictures and practiced gratitude journaling for the things that I wanted in my life (that’s what the true believers did, so I felt like I had to—I am a rule follower, lol). Soon, the vision crystallized: I was going to have a better house, paid for, and earn money from writing (which was hilarious because I had yet to write anything since college), and I would have twins to reach the three child family I always envisioned.
Yes. I got specific enough to decide that I would will myself to becoming pregnant with twins—it seemed fun and special, I guess? I am still unclear as to where this came from.
And then I got pregnant without any of the fertility medications I had needed in order to get pregnant with my son. It was happening!!!! I was manifesting my vision board into reality!!!!
We went to my nurse midwife’s office a few days later to confirm the pregnancy, and there was a heartbeat. My nurse midwife Mary4 congratulated us.
“Mary, there’s another heartbeat here,” the sonogram tech said.
My heart—it lept, truly and really, lept into my throat.
Had I actually manifested my twins? The universe loved me. I was one of the chosen, who really vibed with the universe. Abundance would be mine—obviously. These twin heartbeats were more proof of the universe’s love and joy than anything else I could ever have imagined.
My partner laughed, nervously. “She made this happen,” he told the women in the exam room.
“This isn’t going to be like your first pregnancy,” Mary warned, as she and the tech went on to prod and capture different angles on the sonogram.
Mary went on narrating what they were seeing: The fetuses were in the same sac. It was the kind of pregnancy that can result in conjoined twins. It was early yet. It would be high risk. We would have to see a specialist right away. Stay calm. Relax5. Rest a lot.
In retrospect, I should have paid closer attention to the subtleties in the sonogram tech’s and Mary’s tones of voice, their body language.
Instead, I was in awe that it had actually happened, and when my brain offered reminders of the many concerning things that Mary and the tech had said during the ultrasound, I pushed it away because negative thinking would “attract” negative outcomes. That’s what the true believers said, and I could not let myself engage in that and risk killing my twins.
The problem, of course, was that—despite getting sucked into “the law of attraction” cultish belief system—I am a smart woman with extreme anxiety. My brain would not stop offering up reminders of the risks. The warnings were everpresent, and I willed myself to ignore and carry on with joy and mental expectations of my three-child family.
The wildest thing happened while we were waiting for the day of this appointment with the specialist. My husband and I had become good friends with our nextdoor neighbors. In the neighborhood that we could no longer afford, they were a bright light. They called us to come over because they had news they were dying to share.
I beg you to take a moment and guess what that news was.
Alright. Did you guess?
Yep. She was pregnant, also with twins. Our due dates were within two weeks of each other.
I had not planned on sharing our pregnancy news with anyone because I believed in keeping it private until after the first trimester, but this seemed too special not to share. What were the chances that we would both be pregnant with twins at the same time? Our kids would grow up with each other!
The appointment with the specialist finally arrived. What I remember is another sonogram technician who would not speak to me while she pushed on my lower abdomen. I played solitaire on my phone because I was nervous.
“Where is the other heartbeat?” I asked. Four, maybe five, maybe eighty, times.
The sonogram technician would only say, “the doctor will see you soon.”
He did. From behind the desk in his office, where he explained in strictly clinical terms about how one of the fetuses had died6, but the other one was still viable. The pregnancy would remain high-risk. We should come back in two weeks.
I struggled trying not to have negative thoughts while also wondering if I had already let too many slip through before the ultrasound, which you can imagine created nonstop mental turbulence. Plus, why was the universe taking away the dream it had given me? And why was it rubbing it in my face by giving my dream to my nextdoor neighbor?
Friends, there is no way to quell negative thoughts when you’ve lost a pregnancy. And are going to lose your house. And are running out of money to pay for gas to go to work.
Finally, we returned to the specialist for the next ultrasound. I don’t even remember this appointment—only the outcome: no heartbeat.
I felt completely abandoned. For once, it had seemed like there was some kind of benevolent force of magic out there, and that it wanted me to know it was there, but it did not want to grace me with its goodness.
The shame had many layers—especially when filtered through the idea that I may have caused the miscarriages by allowing too many negative thoughts. There was also the feeling that I had not quite manifested hard enough, and “the universe” wanted me to know that because why else would my neighbor have twins, too. I know all the spiteful and nasty little things the true believers say under their breath or maybe only in their thoughts because I said every last one of them to myself, and they are all some flavor of: you did not try hard enough. I mean, clearly the universe grants wishes to some people—like my neighbor—so why not me? Am I less worthy? How did I fail at manifestation?
Friends, if you have any attachment to manifestation, the rest of what I’m going to write here is probably going to draw a reaction from you. It would have gotten under my skin back in my true believer days. I would have scoffed at anyone trying to talk sense to me (even myself, which absolutely happened) because facing reality can feel like seeking out negativity. And, if the “law of attraction” is true, then negative thoughts attract negativity energy, and you have to block that! Or else!!
The belief in manifesting had burrowed deep into my psyche by the time we lost the twins. (Remember, I followed the rules: I had dedicated time every night before sleep to this; I had hung vision boards in my office and bedroom; it was everywhere.) Years passed before I finally purged the last of the belief system, and it was a slow process to the point that I cannot identify a single moment of time to delineate “when I still believed in manifesting” versus “after I stopped this nonsense.”
I changed many things in my life after the loss of the twins. We short sold7 our house, so that I could finally escape the daily torture of watching my neighbor’s healthy pregnancy progress. (It was also a wise financial move because our situation was that dire.) We eventually crawled out of that hole, and I had two more children—but not without more miscarriages and IVF. In truth, many parts of my vision have come true, and I think this is because I had a clear vision and took actions to pursue those things whenever and however I could.
Somewhere in there, with a lot of therapy and a lot of reading, I finally and fully accepted that the universe is not, in fact, a thing we can control with our strong desires.
I knew this already, obviously, on an intellectual level, but—and let’s pause for a moment, take a deep breath together—it is, despite the trauma I experienced, much more comforting to believe that manifestion is real.
Think about it.
No one—not you, not me, not any single person I know—likes the fact that so much of our lives are given up to chance. It is genuinely easier to go all in on believing that we can manifest exactly what we want because the alternative is looking reality in its sometimes ugly face and saying: I accept that you are largely out of my control.
But, you may ask, what about that person I know who manifested [fill in the blank with the first person that comes to mind—we all know of someone]? My answer is this: There will always be examples of people who have “manifested” something amazing into their lives. It’s statistics and confirmation bias. True believers will point to those examples as hard proof that “it works.”
They’ll tell you: put “land a literary agent” on your new year’s vision board and it will happen as long as you manifest hard enough and never let negative thoughts poison your energetic vibrations.
They’ll say: oh, it’s not working for that person because they are too negative; their vision isn’t clear enough; they’re letting too much doubt creep in, etc.
But for every example folks offer as proof, there are dozens (if not hundreds) more who did all the things and did not land that agent, or get that book deal, or hit the bestseller list, or carry their twins to term. Were those people less worthy? Less loved by the universe? Did they let one too many negative thoughts into their psyche?
I sincerely doubt it the same way that I doubt the reverse: are the ones who successfully manifested more worthy and more loved by the universe? Did they successfully block all of the negative energy to achieve some kind of mythical state of pure bliss positivity? Let’s go back to my neighbor for a moment. Do I believe she was somehow more worthy than I was, more loved, more magnetic for positivity? Not really.
Belief in this literal interpretation of manifestation is dangerous. If you are responsible for every possible positive outcome, you are also responsible for every negative outcome. But no one should feel less loved or less worthy simply because luck didn’t pan out in their favor.
The true believers, however, need to believe that they are in control of their good fortune so that they do not have to face the fact that their good luck is just that. This always reminds me of the people who sit in cushy seats of privilege and comfort who refuse to acknowledge the role their privilege plays in doling out good fortune and success.
Quick note: I want to acknowledge that I sit in a fairly privileged positition. I am a white, cisgender heterosexual female with two degrees. I know that seat of privilege affords me many opportunities; or, at the very least, means that I avoid many systemtic challenges that others without my privilege must overcome.
We all want to be the masters of our lives. We want to be able to say—like my husband said of me the day we learned we were having twins—I made this happen. For many people, acknowleging the role of luck and privilege feels like taking something away, minimizing our individual greatness, tarnishing our fragile pride.
I think a reason that some people who have rolled the dice of life and come out with good luck or cushy privilege might avoid facing that uncomfortable truth is that it reminds them that they did not earn that luck and privilege through controllable and repeatable actions. It means facing the fact that should the next roll strip away the luck or knock them out of their seat of privilege, they will have no choice but to take their chances like the rest of us. And, honestly, ew— who wants that? It’s far preferable to pretend that luck wasn’t a factor; privilege wasn’t a factor. Rather, “I manifested all of this once; I can do so again.”
It makes me think of being on vacation. There’s the sweet spot of being able to completely forget that the trip will end and then one person who accidentally breaks the spell by mentioning something pertaining to the other side, when we get home, don’t forget about… and collectively, you’re forced to acknowledge the end of super fun times is imminent. But isn’t it always?
To all of this I say, buckle up buttercups. None of us are so special that we are immune to capitulations of luck. When you have it, be grateful for your luck and privilege. And, accept that some parts of your achievements were outside of your control; that you did not, in fact, single-handedly make it happen. Bask in the good fortune that shined on you while simultaneously getting cozy with the fact that your good fortune could change at any moment—and there is nothing you can do about that. No one likes this. We all have to live it.
Better to broker honestly with life than tap dance on the thin ice of delusion.
So what does this have to do with writing and creativity?
I don’t want to be misunderstood, though. I won’t minimize the myriad ways we can exercise agency in the creation of our own lives, but I will never again (I hope) fall victim to the idea that I can think my way to changing outcomes that are outside my own control.
That old saying, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, holds true. We cannot have good luck if we aren’t ready for the right opportunities when they arise.
We can point ourselves on a specific course, but we cannot control the weather of our travels.
It is inherently important and valuable to take time to periodically reflect on our goals. There is no other way to ensure that we are taking the right actions to achieve them.
Much like my pregnancy, though, on this path towards publication—regardless of which form of publishing—there are many factors that are outside of our control. In the same way that I could not control the way my embryo split and then slowly perished, we cannot control how other people respond to our creative work. That means that we cannot control whether we land a literary agent, but we can control the quality of our submission materials, our perseverence, and the number of queries we send. We cannot control whether readers like our work, but we can control the quality of the book we offer, the way we promote our work, and the calculated risks we take to get our book into readers’ hands. We cannot control whether a publisher accepts our manuscript, but—much like with querying—we can control the quality of our submission materials, selecting the best fits for our submissions, and our perseverence.
The following is a note to myself. If it resonates with you, then please consider it yours as well:
Remember that you cannot manifest the actions and behaviors of other human beings—agents, aquiring editors, or readers. You simply cannot do that. You can direct your own course, set sail, and hope for friendly seas. You have to accept that a lot of your life is a roll of the dice no matter how hard you may want to hustle, visualize, and manifest otherwise.
The following is a note to all the folks who claim otherwise:
For the lucky ones…the ones who claim to have harnessed all the power of the universe and to have compelled the actions of other free-thinking human beings…Luck may have been on your side, but that does not mean that you are somehow more worthy. It means you are somehow more lucky. Good luck happens to those who deserve it, and those who don’t. Bad luck happens to those who deserve it, and those who don’t. Luck is energy of the trickster, and there is no predictable logic to luck.
If you found yourself having a strong negative reaction to any part of this (exception: having an emotional response to the pregnancy loss), I would urge you to spend some reflecting on that response. The concept of “the law of attraction” and manifestion is magnetically appealing because it claims to provide answers and solutions to the uncertain reality of living.
Uncertainty is scary. I think we would all rather believe that we can set our course and map out the weather and be absolutely, concretely certain of the outcome down to the minute detail. For some people, this will happen because those are the odds, friends, not because those people are able to control the mechanics of being alive in a world filled with free-willed people.
Back to the beginning. Attracting Good Luck: is this a thing? I guess you have to answer for yourself, but I hope that I have made a compelling argument that the most you can hope for is being prepared to take advantage when good luck arrives.
Something funny about me…
I haven’t ditched my curiosity about the potential for magical moments in life. It’s hard to articulate where that line exists, but I will give it my best effort with two examples; both are purchases from a bookstore trip I took on Mother’s Day.
If you happen to also follow me on Instagram, you might have noticed for the last two weeks, I've been drawing from a deck of bird cards8 that are supposed to serve as a kind of oracle.
Do I believe that bird cards are going to predict the future? No. That’s utterly ridiculous. Do I believe that thinking about a specific aspect of life for a week can support my mental health and outlook? Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. For the first week, I drew the “hawk” which encouraged me to take a zoomed out perspective. The second week was the “hummingbird,” which encouraged me to look for joy, childlike wonder, and (problematically) to expect good luck. Do I expect good luck? No. Can I reflect on events for which good luck may have been apparent? Yes.
Spending a week with a subconscious predisposition to seek out zoomed out perspectives and opportunities for childlike wonder is only a good thing.
I also bought another deck of tarot cards9. Same as with the bird cards: no, I don’t believe tarot cards predict the future. But I find drawing tarot cards as a reflective tool very enlightening. I’m not making life decisions based on what bird cards or tarot cards say, but I can use them as ways to reflect on my life, internal and external.
Entertaining Distractions
I finally finished Outer Banks and have moved on to watching The Perfect Couple while I exercise. This will not last for very long, and I will be back on my BS soon looking for another show. I’m thinking of watching You or maybe even some movies once The Perfect Couple has run its course.
I am still enjoying Locke & Key, which would be an ideal show for exercizing, except that I started that one with my husband, so I have to watch it with him (marriage, a blessing and a curse). We are also watching Killing Eve together—quite by accident. I love this show. It’s a masterclass in making a likeable bad guy, and it’s wild how I am consistently rooting for Villanelle despite the fact that she is objectively evil. I aspire to character development to that level some day!
I finished the third book in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy last night, and I have no idea what I want to read next. I’ve been struggling with fiction lately—writing it and reading it. I think the struggles of this year (school year, not calendar year (I hope)) have really caught up with me. I am so far behind on my reading goals for the year that I may not even bother trying to catch up; this would be the first time since I started making reading goals.
Want to recommend a book to me?
Words of Wisdom
To wrap things up, a brief writing update. Friends, I am not enjoying my time in the query trenches, not that I ever have. I have one full manuscript still out, have been sitting in some maybe piles for some time, and am waiting on more than a dozen active queries with at least a dozen more agents I might send to. Yet, the landscape of young adult publishing seems barren. At this time, my horror will be the last young adult novel I work on until something changes. In the meantime, I finally found the spark for my work in progress, which I am reworking for an adult readership. I must keep creating, though. I have experienced the truth in the following quote:
“Unused creativity is not benign. It metastisizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgment, sorrow, shame.” ~ Brené Brown
Until next time,
nevertheless, still writing is about living a creative life when you’re wedging that creativity into the open crevices between working, parenting, and living and walking the knife’s edge in defiance: we can simultaneously want to earn money from our creative endeavors & we can create for the pure joy of creating without needing to prove the value of our work to strangers.
I have done this one and will again, but only now because I know not to take myself seriously about it, and I know that I mean: I am taking action steps towards making this a reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_Lehman_Brothers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
I’m changing names here.
Relax?? Bahahaha. At the time, my husband’s youngest brother, who has since died by suicide, was in the throes of a psychotic break, which drew my husband out of the house for several all-nighters trying to help his brother. These were not relaxing times.
I don’t actually think he used the word “died” because even that word carried more warmth than this doctor with no bedside manner could muster.
Selling a house for less than you owe by making an agreement with your mortgage broker.
This is the deck of bird cards: https://emandfriends.com/products/animal-allies-birds-deck
This is the deck that I got: https://lightseerstarot.com/
I was watching a manifestation guru do a Q+A once, and someone asked her, basically, "What about people who are assaulted? Did they manifest that?" And she couldn't find a way to say "yes" without sounding like an absolute asshole--though bless her, she did try. There's so much toxicity in that space that I made a quick exit. Toxic positivity gets talked about, spiritual bypassing gets talked about, but I think the deeply rooted culture of shaming gets missed.
We can't control everything--or even very much--and that's so scary. (And maybe so liberating.)