Life Is Not Fair--I'm slow, but finally catching on!

Before I get started I should probably warn you that this may sound whiny before it gets you where you--and I--need to be. I can't help that I'm afraid, because I have to tell you the whiny part first to explain why I now see how whiny the whiny part is.

So some back story first--I have always subscribed to the idea that if I worked hard and really applied myself, good things would come. And they did, for the most part. As I said in my bio, I have been an overachiever competitive person all my life, and it has gotten me some great gigs. Shortly after my first attempt at college, I spent twelve years in the travel business and got to take advantage of some wonderful travel opportunities. Then later, after finishing my bachelor's degree and then moving on to my masters in English, I got into the publishing business and was an editor for a major publishing company. I have owned a couple of businesses in my life and got to have a helluva time writing (and traveling) for my own travel newsletter and running a small graphics company. For the last six years I've been in the education field and work as an administrator at a private college. All of that sounds okay on the professional end, not star power or anything like that, but better than I expected when I graduated from a low performing high school where my inquiries about college were brushed off with applications to the local state run university with a sigh and a begrudging "good luck." In addition, I've had a wonderful family and a successful marriage that by all accounts, defies the odds on the personal level. So over all, a great life, but nothing really wonderful and exciting like I had always hoped and dreamed. "Don't we all," you're saying. "Grow up, honey! Life ain't all a bed of roses." I know, I know . . . and I felt guilty about even wishing I could have more, because after all, what I had was pretty good--right?

But then things started to get exciting when I won a seat to a major poker tournament that launched a new career-in-the-making-I-hope as a poker writer and marketer for women's poker. (My first entry will tell you all about this--How I Won My Seat to the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Without Really Trying--And You Can Too!) And I am telling you all of this, why? Because, as great as all that sounds, and it was/is, it's not enough. It never is. And I guess we're all that way. We all want bigger, better, more, MORE! Or don't we?
 Maybe it's just me. I am always driven to improve on whatever it was I just accomplished. I'm working on ratcheting it down, I really am, and my poor husband is always telling me, "It's okay to just enjoy what you're doing. Why do you always have to be trying to one-up yourself?" But I do, and that's just my nature, I guess.

But in the last couple of years I've found it's getting harder and harder to do that. In many of the pursuits I've doggedly pursued during the last two years, I've run into brick wall after brick wall. No matter how hard I work, it just doesn't get me there. And that's a relatively new experience for me. Not to say that I've never failed at any thing--that would be absurd. But in the past, my successes have at least equaled my failures and when I achieved some of those things, the joy of the success was always greater than the sting of failure. But lately, it has been a long string of "almost but not quite," "in the right place at the wrong time," bad beat after bad beat. I lost out on a great promotion at work that everyone thought I was a shoo in for, I lost out on a writing job that I had worked very hard to pull together for over a year, I played two major tournaments and couldn't make it to the money on either one (horrible, horrible cards in both tournaments). Not slit-your-wrists kinds of disappointments, but very frustrating and very unusual for me to get that close and not be able to seal the deal.

It may be partly the economy, partly the fact that I'm not as young as I used to be, and what worries me the most--it may be that finally, my luck has just run out. I sometimes worry, and I know this is superstitious and I try to avoid that at all costs--that all the successes I've had over the years are now going to be evened out by bad luck, since as we know in poker, statistics prove that it all evens out in the long run.

Next I will tell you how poker has taught me how to handle some of these challenges in thinking and how I'm learning to accept that life is not fair.