Gifset via in-the-pale-gloom

She's so lucky, she's a star

But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking

If there's nothing missing in my life

Then why do these tears come at night?

- "Lucky" (2000, Britney Spears)

Yes, I know the corresponding gifset is not, in fact, the accompanying visual to Britney Spears' hit single, "Lucky" from her acclaimed 2000 album, Oops...I Did It Again. It's actually Florence Welsh in an exuberant display of happiness for, "You've Got the Love". Sorry, I felt that the emotion in those gifs conveyed my following sentiments better, sue me [sidebar: please don't, I'm a super poor college student]. Now, ahem, onto my thoughts.

When this song first came out on the Disney Channel (back when they played music videos on the Disney Channel), naive, five-year-old me thought nothing of it's meaning. My childish ignorance towards matters that were not the latest Disney Channel Original Movie, coloring or praying for one of the golden tickets I saw in my 1971 (that's right, I was going vintage before I even knew what vintage was) VHS copy of Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was at an all time high. How quickly it would shatter in just one year (which in hindsight is quite depressing).

Flash forward 16 years later, and I have begun to, not only sympathize with Lucky (the fictionalized titular character of the song), but I have become her.

Life is hard, man, and the older you get, the more you understand the phrase "either you sink or swim."

Of course, we are constantly reminded to hold steady to the importance of appreciating the very fact that they have life; but our own desires and needs often take precedence over that aspect. As response, we are labelled as selfish, uncaring, compared to Narcissus in our human impulse to seek out or focus on what makes us happy.

To use myself as an example, when analyzing me externally, it is easy to perceive that I've got my proverbial shit together. I'm a Black woman from a middle-class, single parent home in the fairly affluent Montgomery County suburb of Maryland; I attend a four-year, accredited collegiate institution, I am above average in smarts (at least, on paper), I do not drastically veer from what is considered conventionally attractive, I have some of the best, craziest friends in the world, plus, I have the personality of a ray of sunshine.


So how am I anything like Lucky, when she cries in her lonely heart? She's got everything she's ever wanted or will ever need - how are we, at all, the same?

Am I sinking or am I swimming?

I've noticed that people, myself included, tend to appreciate the gifts they've been given only after participating in the gross consumption of misery porn that appears to coat every mass media outlet like back sweat on a hot summer's day. Like addicts, we quickly get high off the fumes of sadness, temporarily satiating our own internal conflict with the notion that, somewhere else in this great, big, green-ish Earth, there is someone suffering in a manner that is totally foreign to us. Therefore our pain is unjustified. In hierarchizing the levels at which we legitimize feeling pain and suffering, we invalidate and squelch our own because: what is a "First World Problem" in comparison to the problems of those people? Worse enough, we just as quickly move onto the next batch of misery, continuing to blatantly ignore or willfully suffocate our feelings because objectification and dehumanization exists in tandem upon both ends of the world spectrum.

Here's the joke, though: There is no such thing as 365 (366 1/4 on a leap year) days, 52 weeks and 24 hour-long happiness on either side. Believing so is unrealistic and not conducive to the growth of our mental health as individuals or a global society.

"Lucky" exists as a testament to that.

You can appear to have everything, and still have nothing.

Now, this is not a treatise on living with mental illness, or coping with celebrity, but an honest, open, personal perspective on just how to cope with the sheer magnitude of life as lyrically interpreted by me. I exist upon a spectrum of both happy and sad, bouncing back and forth between both planes because I am human. I am a complex being that cannot be stuffed into a rigid, emotionally airtight box. That is unnatural, and that is not whom I wish to be.

So I allow the tears to flow freely, I allow sadness to exist within the darker recesses of my brain, because the sooner I accept it, the sooner I allow myself to acknowledge that I am both Lucky and Simone. Perhaps my embracing 'Lucky' is a testament to my evolution, perhaps I just decided to stop suffocating her under false happiness. However, what I do know is I understand her, I acknowledge her and, in such, resume my crawl stroke into becoming a better me.