It’s been really weird and kinda wonderful lately. I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into my ongoing memoir, Scab-Vendor — Confessions of a Tattoo Artist. Since I started writing this book about my life and my past, particularly since writing about my ultra-strange, violent and abusive childhood, a staggeringly synchronistic procession of people from the past – some of whom I haven’t seen or talked to in over 40 years – have suddenly come out of the woodwork, wanting to talk about our common History. Now I’ve got a lot of company on this confusing and sometimes terrifying walk down Memory Lane. It’s been an amazing gift.
Many of these people found me on Facebook. One of them was a long-lost cousin who it turns out had written a deeply significant autobiographical book himself, coincidentally dealing with many of the same weird family issues I was writing about. He came to me, strangely enough, at the exact time I started writing about some long-forgotten repressed memories and incidents, after not having consciously thought about this stuff or seen or heard from him for over 40 years! Talk about coincidence! After he reached out to me and sent me his book, which I read practically overnight, we began corresponding and then recently met in NY. We are fast becoming close friends. On the heels of that, there has been contact from several younger and older cousins whom I’d never met or even heard of before. Then there were others, old friends I thought were long dead like most of my old friends, and so on…
Since then, there have been many more people from the past emerging in my life — including an adopted older sister who I grew up with but hadn’t seen or heard from since I left my home and insane family behind for good at the age of 15. The other night we finally made contact and talked on the phone for over 5 hours straight! Soon we will meet up. Wow!
Then, within days of that contact, another closely related person from over 40 years ago got in touch, right out of the blue. As fate would have it, it turns out that — even having not seen each other since we were small children — we are on a very similar life path, with many common points of interest, and even many mutual acquaintances we’ve made over the years, completely unbeknownst to each other.
Then, again right out of the blue, this person mentioned in their email that, despite being a writer like me who rarely leaves the house, she had ‘just happened’ to attend a book-signing in LA the night before with another long-lost family acquaintance of mine, and that they’d talked about me and wondered what had ever become of me.
The really freaky part about that was the fact that I just happened to BE at that very same book signing, the author being a very close friend of mine who had flown in from NY to launch his new book here!
What are the chances of something like THAT happening in “real” life? It is an undeniable fact that my life has always been much much stranger than any fiction I could possibly write. And it just continues to get weirder by the day…
There have been many more such fortuitous “coincidences” since I began this difficult inner journey – far too many to list or exemplify here.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that all sorts of strange and wonderful unseen doors seem to automatically fly open the moment we begin to attempt a fearless and searching painstaking inventory of our past. At least that is sure turning out to be my experience.
Like they say, when you take one small courageous step yourself, the universe will always take a thousand unseen powerful steps to assist you and let you know you’re really never alone.
So much for the concept of “random” coincidence. Today I firmly believe that what most people glibly refer to as “coincidence” is really just God’s way of staying anonymous.
Awesome! I am endlessly fascinated by the non-linear magic from the field of infinite possibility.
“be bold and mighty forces with come to your aid.”- whatshername from “almost famous,” and Goethe.
that was suppose to be “will.”
“The word coincidence does not describe luck or mistakes. It describes that which fits together perfectly.”
-Wayne Dyer