Predictions by Johanna

I’m not sure what a prediction really is. I’ve never been able to predict what would happen in my life; all I’ve ever done is wish for good things and when I get close to them find some way to sabotage them, all the time pretending to myself that I was trying so hard for whatever it was. In sports I always practiced more and worked harder than anyone, but anytime I had a chance of doing well in a meaningful competition, like the conference meet, I self-destructed. I called it bad luck for so long. Now I can see that I’ve never felt safe being happy or successful. The higher you are the farther you have to fall I guess. When I no longer had sports as an outlet for failure, I managed to sabotage the one thing that had always been the easiest for me, the thing I had always put so low on my list of priorities, because I succeeded whether I tried or not: getting good grades and scoring in the 99th percentile of everything academic. I am now achingly close to getting my Master's and I find the smallest amount of schoolwork nearly impossbile to finish. This is after I passed the Hebrew proficiency exam in my second semester of graduate school, on my first try, only one messy drunken week after my boyfriend of two years broke up with me. I guess the breakup fulfilled my failure quota for the time being.
Maybe secretly I’ve always predicted the worst and acted accordingly. Predicting failure is safe because I can always find a way to make it come true. But what would happen if I took the chance to predict success for myself? Not the kind I used to predict when I convinced myself that if I was good enough, if I only practiced enough, I could win any soccer game, regardless of what the other 21 players did. That was setting myself up for failure, as if I had gotten a taste of gut wrenching loss and perversely wanted more. No, predicting success must be something like, no matter what happens, I will be ok. No matter who comes and goes there will always be someone else in the world full of people.
This kind of prediction is the scariest. The way I deal with the fear, when I don’t give in to it, is to picture myself in the Psalms, walking through the valley of the shadow of death but fearing no evil, like a hero in an action movie. I’ve gone pretty far down the path toward death, but it was never the right way. There was always God reminding me to be brave and not disappear. That was obvious to me when I was close to death, but the farther away I get, the harder it is to let go of the other path, to not keep it in sight just in case there is some awful thing hiding in the trees along the way. On the road to death there are no leaves to hide behind. Everything is ugly and unhappy and stagnant, but at least there are no surprises. But, as with any forked road, I can’t get very far in one direction without losing sight of the other. I find this terrifying. All I can do is remember to be brave.