Everything works out. Probably

guest post!

I get slightly more woo-woo when my life is going badly.

Not that woo-woo. I planned my kids around their astrological signs, which is not nothing, but I don't consult the moon before making major financial decisions. I've never hugged a tree. Still, when things are particularly bad, I become much more open to the idea that maybe everything is unfolding exactly as it is supposed to.

Which is convenient.

Because “this is happening for a reason” is much easier to tolerate than “sometimes life is just awful and there is no bigger picture here.”

The problem is that I do have evidence.

Every breakup I have ever had has led, eventually, to a better relationship. Not necessarily a great one. Sometimes the bar has moved from actively catastrophic to just ill-advised. But better, because I was better. I knew more. I had learned something about what I would tolerate, what I needed, what I was doing wrong, and what I absolutely did not want to repeat.

Apparently personal growth is just repeatedly touching a hot stove and becoming increasingly specific about which burners I avoid.

My marriage was awful. I would not do it again. But I also would not undo it, because then I would not have my kids.

That one is easy enough to package into the tidy little story people like to tell about difficult things leading somewhere good. Terrible marriage, four extraordinary kids, lesson learned, roll credits.

My sister dying is not.

She died while I was pregnant with my second child, and at the time I could not imagine there was any universe in which something good could come from it. I still wouldn't say something good came from her dying. That feels gross, and also like something you'd see written in cursive over a sunset on Facebook.

But she was neurodivergent, and understanding more about her life, her experience, and ultimately the circumstances around her death changed the way I understood so many things. Then I ended up raising multiple neurodivergent kids, one of whom is very much like her, both in appearance and personality.

There are things I understand about my kids because of my sister that I don't think I would otherwise understand. There are decisions I make as a parent that are directly informed by what I wish had been different for her. I have more compassion for things I might otherwise have mistaken for behaviour that needed correcting. I am more suspicious of the idea that functioning well from the outside means someone is doing well on the inside.

That doesn't make her death good.

It does make the line between “bad thing” and “what came after the bad thing” much more complicated.

This is where I get stuck.

I don't believe every terrible thing secretly contains a gift. Some things are just terrible. Some people experience losses that never become inspirational anecdotes. And I particularly dislike the version of “everything happens for a reason” that requires us to pretend suffering was necessary because something good eventually happened afterward.

There is probably a fallacy for this. I can't really remember all the types of fallacies from my Philosophy 101 course to confidently name it. But it exists? Right?

Anyway humans are very good at working backwards. We know where we ended up, so we take all the things that happened before and arrange them into a little chain of cause and effect. This happened, which led to this, which taught me this, which gave me this life.

Except maybe it didn't.

Maybe the terrible thing happened. And then, because life kept going, other things happened too. Maybe I learned from it because I had to. Maybe life just kept moving and eventually something got better. Maybe I'm drawing a line between two dots because I already know they're both on the page.

But!

Things have worked out for me, over and over again, even when “worked out” did not mean things got easier.

My career has gotten better. I make more money. I trust myself more. I know what I want my life to look like. I am much clearer about what I will and won't tolerate.

So in some ways my life has gotten substantially better and substantially harder at exactly the same time.

Right now my career feels difficult. My interpersonal relationships feel difficult. Parenting feels very difficult.

Which means, naturally, I am once again becoming spiritually optimistic.

Maybe this is all happening because something better is coming.

Maybe five years from now I'll be able to point backwards and explain exactly why all of this had to happen, conveniently leaving out the seventeen other possible ways I could have arrived there with much less distress.

Or maybe believing there is something on the other side is simply one of the ways humans survive periods when things feel particularly shit.

I don't know if everything works out the way it is meant to.

I suspect I won't know until it has worked out and I can construct a compelling argument that it was meant to all along.