the lucky one
on being the happy kid, the guilt that comes with it, and being a stupid teenage girl
I wasn’t a sad child. In fact, I was so happy that it’s almost embarrassing to think about, because I know for a fact that not everyone was provided that same luxury. It felt almost storybook-like as I grew up, and looking back, it seems almost too good to have been true. Of course, we had our own little issues here and there, but as a whole, it was kind of the ideal childhood.
We always lived in nice homes that housed all six people in my family. We had cable. I had pretty clothes, and even prettier clothes to wear to church on Sundays. There was always food on the table, gifts at Christmas, and celebrations for birthdays. And to top it off, it wasn’t only materialistically ideal—we are also all extremely close-knit, and not only had a good dynamic as a unit, but each person had their own positive relationship with everyone else.
It also didn’t help that I grew up as a bookworm with a soft spot for warm, fuzzy, happy endings. My favorite books were Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Those were the stories that shaped me, my personality, and my outlook on life, mainly because I related to their main characters greatly. I also felt an embarrassing amount of connection to Riley from Girl Meets World, the spinoff of Boy Meets World. She was the daughter and eldest child of ‘90s power couple Cory and Topanga, irritatingly optimistic and quirky, and often exaggerated things and intentionally created drama because of the lack of any real issues in her life and upbringing.
I saw a lot of myself in her, both characteristically and circumstantially. My mom and dad were also ‘90s sweethearts, have been in love for as long as I can remember, and they still jokingly refer to each other as “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”, which makes me sick in the best possible way. They are the epitome of the friends-to-lovers trope and why I believe true love exists. I’m convinced that they are the biggest reason why I’m such a hopeless romantic—why I read so much into things, and why I grew up with such optimistic expectations when it came to love, and optimism in general, for that matter. I’ve been told on several accounts, even up until now, at twenty-three: Faith, you’re too optimistic for your own good
I think we can tell what kind of kid and teenager I was from those descriptors alone. You do the math. Outside of my insecurity around being racially distinct in a conservative, white town, and occasionally being singled out for it—I didn’t really have any other problems. My parents carved out a beautiful little life for themselves and their children, one that they did not have the opportunity to live when they themselves were kids, and did what was necessary to keep everyone safe and happy. I’m not saying any of this to boast at all—it’s just that this image of the circumstances that I was enveloped within as a child are important for any context as to why I was such a happy kid.
No one also ever died throughout my childhood, unless you count the goldfish we used to have. The closest thing to a funeral I’d attended as a kid was the “service” my siblings and I held for a honey bee in our backyard. We’d found him on one of the stone blocks at the bottom of the slope, clearly struggling to fly. And because he kept twitching around, we named him Twitch, after the dancer from So You Think You Can Dance (who may also rest in peace). Eventually, he died, and we transported him to the dirt by leaf, where we buried him, made a tiny headstone, and said a few words. I also sang one verse of Amazing Grace and we all cried a little bit.
So, yes—I experienced sadness growing up, but I wasn’t sad per se. But I reached an internal turning point when I was around fourteen and started to form a concrete friend group, and I realized fully that not everyone had it as easy as I did. And I was never ignorant of this fact—of course, I’d previously known that other people had harder upbringings. I knew that was how the world worked. How the cookie crumbled. The way things rolled. The difference was that now, I was forming close relationships with people who greatly fell under this category. Oftentimes, I found myself mindlessly chattering and mentioning something that was normal for my family, like having dinner all together every single night, and one of my friends would say something like, Wait, you guys actually do that? I often found myself tilting my head like a confused puppy and responding, Yeah, don’t you? Turns out, a lot of them didn’t.
As a result, I felt a compelling responsibility to do what I could to help. Over time, I turned into the friend each of them cried to, complained to, things like that. I had always been someone people came to when they needed to vent, rant, or cry, but it was around this time that I truly earned the title of the Therapist Friend. It was like that all throughout high school. I didn’t mind one bit, and I didn’t blame any of them for needing to get their feelings out: I figured that if the mere knowledge of the fact that they suffered bothered me on a daily basis, imagine having to be the person actually going through it. I was willing to do anything I could from my end, and most of the time, that meant just being there—as a shoulder to cry on, a human diary, or a distraction. I was always really good at distraction. Still am.
I also never did any of it out of charity, or pity, or anything of that caliber. I just had so much love and empathy for my friends, and genuinely believed they were some of the purest, best souls to walk the earth. I had no clue why the punches just kept coming. None of them deserved it, and I wasn’t any better than the next guy. What constituted me as someone deserving of an easier life and my friends not?
I talked to my mom a lot about this, telling her I felt guilty for having things so easy. Even the sole fact that I could open up to my mother was, in and of itself, another example of my lucky life. I was—and still am—able to come to her about pretty much anything, when some of my friends struggled to even have a normal conversation with their parents.
A lot of times, I found myself wishing for something, anything, to happen to me. Maybe that’s why I related so much to Lady Bird (2017) when I first saw it in 2018. I was seventeen-years-old at the time—the same age Christine, a.k.a. Lady Bird, is for the majority of the movie. I felt so seen and understood in so many respects—especially since the entire thing is set in Sacramento, which is scarily close to where I grew up, and also where I attend grad school. There is a freeway entrance I drive on nearly everyday of the week during my commute that’s featured in one of the montages in the movie.
CHRISTINE: I wish I could live through something.
MARION: Aren’t you?
CHRISTINE: Nope. The only thing exciting about 2002 is that it’s a palindrome.
MARION: Okay, fine. Yours is the worst life of all, you win.
I found my own mother and I having interactions almost exactly like this, way before I even watched it. She would hear my problems out, of course, but she would often become frustrated at my ungrateful attitude toward a peaceful life. She and my dad had worked endlessly to create a life for my siblings and I that was easier than their own childhoods. If nothing bad ever happened to us, well…that was the entire point. But what my mom perceived as safe and peaceful, my teenage self understood as boring. And I think Christine went by the same logic.
Her parents sent her to Catholic school to avoid the danger that could arise in public school, and the sentiment behind that decision totally went over her head a lot of the time. They also purposely kept serious issues from her, like her father losing his job, to shield her from the harsh realities of the world, and so she wouldn’t have to worry about anything. When I was about thirteen, because of horror stories they’d heard on the news, my parents took my siblings and I out of public school to homeschool us instead, and often kept serious issues out of earshot from us, so that we wouldn’t have reason to be concerned.
Christine led a generally lucky life. Sure, her family had their own external issues and internal dysfunctions alike—as did mine—but as a whole, she had an easier time on the daily than her peers. The trouble and drama that ensued in Christine’s life were, more often than not, the result of her own actions. She was a good person at her core, but she was also selfish and spoiled, and I think that’s the whole point—and also exactly why I felt like I was looking into a mirror, whenever I watched it during my teenagehood. Her positive traits felt similar to my own, but so did the negative ones. We were both dumb adolescents who constantly thought the grass was greener on the other side, and didn’t know we were actually really lucky.
Throughout the movie, there’s a running bit surrounding where Christine lives, in the sense that she thinks she lives in the lesser part of town. She tells one of her love interests, Danny, that she’s “from the wrong side of the tracks”, as a joke—because she lives by actual train tracks, but also in a neighborhood she deems secondary than her classmates’, but also insinuating that she’s dangerous and/or mysterious, both as a joke and to come across as more interesting to him.
DANNY: It’s funny, on my way here, I went over the train tracks—
MARION: You took H Street?
DANNY: Right, and so just Lady Bird always says that she lives on the wrong side of the tracks, but I always thought that it was, like, a metaphor.
MARION: Ah.
DANNY: But there are actual train tracks.
Funnily enough, I pulled a similar stunt to this (before having seen the film, believe it or not), telling people I was from “the wrong side of the tracks”, simply because I also lived right next to literal train tracks. I was completely unaware of the derogatory connotations attached to this idiom, and genuinely just thought it was a phrase that implied the person saying it was calling themselves mysterious, brooding, etc. (I was and am the total opposite of that, so it was obviously a joke whenever I said it.)
Like me, Christine doesn’t initially find anything with this statement, but when it comes up later, her mother is hurt and offended. Hearing her daughter casually dismiss their neighborhood as “the wrong side of the tracks” probably felt like a rejection of her efforts and a lack of appreciation for what they have. I can’t help but think that’s how my parents might have felt at the time, whenever I took our life for granted.
MARION: Whatever we give you, it’s never enough.
CHRISTINE: It is enough.
There’s a scene toward the end of the movie that I love, because it reminds me so much of my friends and I in high school. After ditching her loser prom date (sorry Timothée I love you…but your character was a real d-bag!), Christine arrives at her best friend Julie’s apartment to make amends after a short period of quarreling, and to convince her to attend prom. But upon opening the door, she finds her in her pajamas, and in tears.
CHRISTINE: Why are you crying?
JULIE: I’m just crying. Some people aren’t built happy, you know.
The film just feels like a love letter to the monotony that comes along with being a teenage girl, bored with life in the suburbs, the stupidity and selfishness that accompanies it, and the inevitable bad decisions she makes in an attempt to combat it.
My friends were going through difficult things I’d only ever read or seen movies about. This troubled me greatly, so much that I subconsciously began to start causing problems on purpose. I felt a huge amount of guilt toward the lack of a great tragedy in my life, and often wished I could simply switch bodies with my friends so that they could have something good, and I could experience something bad for once. I also felt an impending sense of boredom because I didn’t have any big, life-altering problems having to do with my family or upbringing—at least, to my knowledge, at the time. Regardless, it made me begin to exaggerate and make a bigger deal out of the small issues that we did have.
Have you heard of Lucky Girl Syndrome? You probably have. It’s a manifestation trend that has recently taken the internet by storm, particularly TikTok. The entire idea is that if you believe you’re lucky, good things will begin to simply fall into your lap, if you regularly send good energy into the universe. It’s essentially a rebranding of the idea of positive affirmations and speaking things into existence. When people’s efforts pay off, I don’t necessarily think it’s the result of the universe handing out your greatest wishes. I believe that when people verbalize their desires and constantly think about them, they begin to rearrange their life in a way that makes space for those things, and in turn, basically putting in the work in order to achieve them.
Whatever the opposite of Lucky Girl Syndrome is, I started taking part in it. It was almost like I was manifesting sadness, trouble, and drama. Like I was putting in the work to achieve a state of sadness so that I, too, could have something happen to me; to be sympathized and felt bad for. Crazy, I know. I took a lot of the great things in my life for granted and often began to stir pots on purpose, imposing sadness upon myself, until I actually started suffering because of it. It wasn’t until I was about seventeen, after a few years of doing this, that I realized: I was so desperate for something to happen to me that I became the reason why my own life was difficult.
In a way, I guess I trained myself to become masochistic. I started fires just for the sake of starting, and cried after everything went up in flames. I ran in circles just because it was something to do, and then immediately complained that I was dizzy. I would constantly knock over my own glass and then cry over the milk that had spilled. Nearly everything that went wrong in my life during that time was a direct consequence to an action I took; actions I knew I was taking as I took them. I didn’t quite consider the weight of them, but I did know that there would be consequences. These are behaviors that have followed me into my twenties; habits I am now trying to quit, cycles I am trying to break. In some twisted way, maybe all of that itself is the great tragedy of my life I had been searching for.
But I think I’ve done a good job at monitoring myself and at getting better. At twenty-three, I no longer feel any shame in admitting that I had a lucky childhood, because it just means that my parents did a great job. I think that one of the biggest goals a parent should have is to make their child happy, and to outdo their own parents in providing their children with things and experiences that they didn’t have growing up. And I think my parents did exactly that. I have no idea how I’m going to top that, in the scenario where I have children, that is. If I ever do, I sure am going to try.
Teenage Faith had the entire world in the palm of her hand and she didn’t even know it. I had a blank slate in front of me, and the ability to write upon it whatever I wanted. I chose wrong a lot of the time, but there were times when, by some miracle of God, I somehow chose right. I’m thankful for those moments, both the right and wrong. In a strange way, I’m glad I was a stupid teenage girl. If I hadn’t been, I wouldn't know better, and most importantly, I wouldn’t know to be thankful to my parents for all the hard work that went under-appreciated for so long. Better late than never.
And when I watch Lady Bird now, I don’t feel like I am looking into a mirror, but more like I am peering into a window of my past. And the feeling of knowing you have grown and changed for the better is nothing short of euphoric, and comforting above anything else.
I’m mature enough now to be able to cherish a good thing when I have it. To know when I’m lucky.
dearest faith, it’s so endearing to read everything you write- like looking into a mirror which is bizarre since we live on opposite sides of this world
i feel so seen after reading this 💌 when you mentioned how re-watching lady bird lets you see your own person growth, i completely agree with that. it’s always been my favorite movie and the last few times i’ve rewatched i’ve started to feel that way as well. such a beautiful piece and i can’t wait to read more of your writing. (also so much love for girl meets world 🩷)