The Golden Ticket
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It was the summer of 1999…not the summer of 69. The world was on the brink of teetering into a new millennium with the looming threat of the greatest computer glitch we ever programmed into our social reality. It could have destroyed us, we were told (remember Y2K?). The president had been impeached for only the second time in history. Though, we had no idea a future president would soon be both the third and fourth to be impeached. Columbine had shocked the world in one of the first mass school shootings. And yet it ushered in an era where mass shootings became commonplace, normalized almost. This relatively new thing called the internet was on the verge of exploding into the juggernaut it has become. And now stuff goes viral on it everyday. It was a strange time. It felt like major change was coming. And it was still the pre-911 world order. We didn’t know if we should party like it’s 1999 because it was going to be the beginning of a new millennium or because it would be the end of the world.
I was teetering a bit myself. Toward what exactly, I couldn’t say. But nothing good for sure. I was reeling from a literal trip sailing around the world. I had just returned from a study abroad program that took us to many developing nations and we took college courses on the ship between ports. Yeah, sounds crazy, I know. The things I saw were. The legacy of colonial rule. The extraction of wealth. The fomenting of ethnic conflict. The inhumanity of dehumanization. The poverty that exceeded any capacity my imagination had to conjure. It fractured my mirror of reality, as a middle class white suburban kid from the U.S. I could no longer see the world as I thought it had been. It all bewildered me.
I came home from this strange journey to have my girlfriend of four years break up with me. I had three semesters of college left and had no idea what to do when I was finished. I was relatively broke and spent nearly all the money I had left — $700 — on a really old used car. Maybe I was adrift. Many of my decisions at that time seem erratic at best, at least in retrospect.
Then a friend I met on the ship told me she’d drive from Ann Arbor to Pittsburgh to meet up with me halfway. I lived near Philadelphia at the time. She felt bad for me that my girlfriend left me. And she kinda liked me. I kinda liked her too, but wasn’t going to do anything about that in my contemporaneous state of mind. I dropped everything and went. Again, erratic behavior for me.
I took my old new car on the PA Turnpike west. It’s about a five hour drive, so I stopped at a rest stop near Carlisle, PA to use the bathroom and get a snack. It was one of those rest stops where you don’t exit the turnpike to stop at.
As I was throwing the wrapper from my snack into a trash can, I looked down. And, there, on the ground, was a PA Turnpike ticket. I picked it up, almost compulsively.
Someone must have dropped it, I thought. I gazed at the exit. It was Pittsburgh. Where I was headed.
It was hot out, and a thought popped into my head. I could use the ticket. It would save me like twelve bucks. But I couldn’t get off at the Pittsburgh exit since that is where this ticket was picked up on entry. I got in the car and pulled out my atlas (remember those) and saw Cranbury Township was the exit before Pittsburgh. I plotted the route from that exit to the rendezvous point with my friend. My palms were sweaty with glee, and I was so impressed with my own cunning. I put my hands on the wheel and pulled out.
Before I was even back on the turnpike another revelation struck me. If I used the found ticket when I exit, I would still have my entry ticket. I could use that on the way home and save like another twelve bucks. Damn, I was scheming now!
Lightning never strikes twice, they say. But this day, it struck three times. A few moments later, I realized that I would always be a ticket ahead. Forever. I’d found a loophole in the eternal golden braid of our social reality. It was the Golden Ticket!
What was the universe trying to tell me? I thought. Remember, I’m not in the most stable mental state at this point. Was I chosen for something? No! Chosen people are the stuff of myth. Good thing I was at least skeptical of that.
Was it a sign about the girl I was going to meet? Or about the potential auspiciousness of a relationship? No, I couldn’t believe that either? Or at least that’s how I rationalized it later when explaining to myself why I didn’t act on my feelings for my friend.
So what could it have been? What was it a sign for? Wait, the universe doesn’t send signs! That’s the stuff of myth too. Or does it? Maybe I just never noticed? Or could never decode the signs?
See this is how people go crazy! Teetering world, teetering self — one could convince oneself of almost anything — even that the universe could be trying to send you signs.
Have you ever been here? It can be dark. Lonely. Isolating. It can cause social anxiety to jolt you to do and say things you otherwise wouldn’t. Things that further sabotage you. You make decisions that are out of character, do things for reasons you’re not quite sure of. You confuse yourself about yourself, your place in the world. You hang out with people you’re not sure you like. You’re not sure you even like yourself, or if anyone else even does.
There can be days where it feels like the universe is against you. And you interpret all that happens to you as if that is the case.
It’s a hopeless spiral. Downward into an abyss of quicksand. The harder you try to climb out the faster and deeper you sink. Or so it feels.
Sometimes there is help. Sometimes your luck changes. Sometimes it lasts. Sometimes it doesn’t. It can be unpredictable, like life. Ups and downs, frequency changes. Hard to find patterns. Normalcy seems unlikely. Where do you fit? Where will you fit? The world is changing? Your life is changing? You are changing?
Late adolescence was hard for me. Everything seemed to be going wrong, and my sense of everything was unsure. I somehow found my way out of that abyss.
Oh! Wait! The turnpike ticket! I got completely sidetracked.
I realized that I was always a ticket ahead. I could basically ride the whole turnpike for almost free! Forever! I almost had something really cool here! It was a story!
And it lasted for about two years. I told the story on several occasions. I got away with it until a surly toll booth operator asked, “Where’d you get this ticket?” and confiscated it. Luckily he bought my story about recently finding a misplaced turnpike ticket from the last time I drove out to Pittsburgh, which I told him that I had handed him by mistake. Then I gave him the right one. But the Golden Ticket carried me through three or four trips across Pennsylvania and into the new millennium, which somehow didn’t bring about the end of the world. What it gave me was a story of how maybe my luck was changing. Or, maybe I was changing how I saw my luck and therefore my story.
And I used it. To tell myself that the universe wasn’t trying to tell me anything. That the universe wasn’t against me. That the world was always changing and uncertain for everyone. That my own life was always changing and uncertain. That the only luck was mind-manifested. Or at least we can convince ourselves of that. We are architects of our own reality, as Lisa Feldman Barrett has written.
Sometimes changing your story changes your perspective. Even if it is the story you tell yourself. Especially, if it is the story you tell yourself.
Was this helpful? Did it really work for me? I can’t say. I will never know. But I can say I tried and things got better. Causation? Definitely can’t prove that. Correlation? Possibly, but no definitive way to know. I can’t promise it would be your Golden Ticket. It may not get you almost free rides or help you escape the abyss, but it might be worth trying.
Sometimes trying is all we can do.