At some point, all the children who are told they can do anything if they just believe hard enough turn into adults, and for the majority of them whose hopes and dreams don’t come true, the fall back down to reality is oftentimes painful and sometimes lethal.
Like most children, Felix had been brought up extremely high by this idea early in his life. He was told that he could do anything he wanted if he just believed and worked hard enough. That he was the sole driver of his successes or lack thereof.
That he was either going to make it and achieve greatness and worthiness in the world, or he was not. And in both cases, it would be him who was solely responsible or to blame.
Now, in his mid-thirties, having worked a series of jobs in a variety of industries, starting in mostly service jobs, then going on to different labor and contract jobs, and most recently, a series of office jobs, Felix had felt himself falling further and further from the heights of his hopes and dreams, approaching, in his view, the ground floor of failures and losers.
Felix always did his jobs well and with integrity but hated just about all of them. Like many people, he wanted more than a job. As a child and teen, he formed the deep desire to be famous, which he still had not yet shaken.
Growing up in a single-parent household with a mother who had to work all the time just to get by, Felix was both in a somewhat disadvantaged position to become highly successful and famous, while simultaneously a position that made it all the more desirable and important to him. He wanted greatness.
He wanted personal ownership and creative distinguishment. He wanted independence and a legacy. He wanted love in the form of wealth and blind, public admiration. But he had yet to find anything close.
And his self-worth, inextricably linked with his achievements or lack thereof, now hung in the balance of his life’s aimlessness. He felt as though he was an oncoming failure who deserved the title. It’s not as if Felix had not tried.
He had tried many things in many different ways. However, everything seemed to just lead to dead ends. He was too small and slow for the sports he pursued in high school, his attempts at rapping and singing went nowhere, and his paintings never sold.
The only real surviving dream he had left was filmmaking, which he had formed as an interest in the middle of high school and held onto ever since.
However, his film projects weren’t getting him anywhere either, and he couldn’t afford much equipment, which made it hard to appeal to freelance clients. Financially and realistically, college was also not in the cards for Felix, and so he couldn’t leverage any of the opportunities that might have existed that route either.
As he aged out of high school, further and further into early adulthood, and none of his dreams were paying any of the bills, he inevitably had to get a more stable income, inciting the start of him working more traditional, long-term jobs.
During and following this time, though, Felix continued to pursue his personal goals in film production around his work schedule.
At around twenty-three, for the first time, he saw the beginning of a real potential path forming towards this dream, getting hired as an unpaid intern as a weekend filmer for a local TV studio.
At this point, Felix planned to double down on his filmmaking goals and getting into the world of Hollywood. One year later, however, Felix’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Fortunately, within three years, she would make a full recovery, but this monkey wrench of unforeseen financial burden forced Felix to re-focus his entire attention on better paying, regular jobs to help support his mother and younger sister during this time.
Soon, the majority of his own time would be taken up, his free time becoming mostly dedicated to sleeping and preparing for work, the occasional off days spent just trying to enjoy the small amount he had with friends and family, and so forth.
Even though his mother would go on to recover, Felix would, for all intents and purposes, become caught in this routine of life, the stress of his work increasingly draining him to the point of almost complete deflation.
He couldn’t help but give further and further into the implications of everything and lose almost all remaining motivation and self-belief, finally hitting the ground floor. Felix would continue on through his life from here, working, doing his best, and living with his wife Marie and their dog, Sammy.
By his late thirties, he had climbed into slightly better job positions, making and saving better money, and creating an ok life for himself. But he was bored, tired, and entirely unfulfilled by the mindless tedium of it all.
He loathed himself, and he loathed himself for loathing himself, knowing that he had it alright and had no excuse. Around this time, he had begun to more seriously consider the idea of ending the whole thing, frequently ideating on the notions of failure and pointlessness and the particular extreme conclusion that can sometimes be drawn from such a line of thought.
One day around this time, while cleaning out the gutters on the side of his and his wife’s house, Felix clumsily missed his step on one of the rungs of the ladder and slipped forward off the side, falling onto the ground where the yard met the edge of the driveway.
Fortunately, the height was fairly low, and he fell safely enough to catch himself before landing too awkwardly. Except for a few mild scrapes on the left side of his torso and thigh, he was fine. A close call perhaps, but nothing more.
It did, however, strike Felix. As he got back up and finished the job, he thought to himself about how life was funny like that. How fragile and malleable it is and can be. In one moment, everything is one way, and then in the next, with one small, wrong step, everything can change and tragedy can strike.
Suddenly, Felix felt a resurgence of motivation run through his veins, scheming in his head a plan of action to getting back into camera work and video production more seriously.
He imagined and plotted a scenario where he would soon be able to quit his job and go full time on his own, pursuing a higher promise land of individual greatness and success.
A few days later, while at his office job, Felix began to feel a horrible, sudden fever, becoming terribly fatigued and unable to properly hold himself up. It got so bad so quickly, his co-workers called 911. At the hospital, it was discovered that Felix had MRSA, a flesh-eating staph infection.
While diagnosing the situation, it would become evident that the source was those small scrapes he received from the fall of the ladder; that minor, commonplace injury had, in fact, exploded into catastrophe, the infection spreading through his bloodstream and into other areas of his body.
The doctor informed him, his wife, and his younger sister that it wasn’t clear if he would survive, and it might be wise to say anything they might like to say to each other as soon as possible. Furthermore, the doctor went on to say that if he did survive, it wasn’t clear if he would ever be able to walk, talk, or function properly as himself again.
Felix immediately underwent two separate, back-to-back surgeries in hopes of saving him and removing and repairing as much infected damage as possible. Despite the high level of uncertainty and doubt, Felix would survive.
Somehow, he came out the other side mostly unscathed in comparison to the expectations. A stroke of unbelievable luck according to the doctors and nurses. He was essentially as good as before with exception of one thing: the infection had gotten into his brain tissue, and subsequently, his optic nerves.
Now, and almost certainly for the rest of his life, he was blind. Once Felix returned home and had enough time and space to sufficiently realize what was happening, he quickly began to sink into the reality of what he deemed was the final straw of the tragic drama that was his life.
He realized that he would no longer have any possible chance in doing much of anything, especially the one thing he still held some semblance of hope towards. He, of course, could not pursue camera work and film-making blind.
In fact, he couldn’t really do his regular job anymore, seeing as primarily paperwork and computer files. Felix thought about how horribly, and astonishingly unlucky he was. A failure ruined by the gutters. Tragic poetry, he thought.
Felix essentially called it quits on life at this point, sinking into his living room couch with no plan to ever get up. Over the course of the following several months, the only thing he could bring himself to do was to continue to shrivel into the couch cushions and watch endless marathons of movies.
Of course, Felix could not watch the movies, but he could listen. And that’s what he did. All the time. At some point early on, he would receive entitlement to Social Security Disability checks each month, essentially absolving him from having to work or worry about making money, allowing him all the more easily to just continue watching endless amounts of movies, focusing on anything or nothing.
Eventually, he would run through so many movies, good and bad, that he began to just re-watch his favorites over and over. He watched some of them so many times, that he was nearly able to recite the entirety of the dialogues verbatim while watching.
Despite how strange this little activity of learning the lines of movies was, it helped Felix keep busy, giving him something to do and focus on, filling his days with purpose, and keeping him from the alternative.
It eventually got so concentrated and important to him, that for several of his favorite movies, he actually tried to learn how to play along with the music as well, playing the melodies on an old keyboard he was given by his cousin as a hand-me-down gift in elementary school.
Even though he never really played it much as a child or any time after, strangely, he seemed to pick it up fairly quickly, able to almost mimic the melody of the songs in the films with only a small amount of trial and error.
He found that he could feel the music with certain intuitive clarity, knowing exactly where the sounds were, even though he didn’t know what he was playing or any of the music theory behind it. Over the following months, Felix would get better and better, adding more instruments and equipment into the mix, and learning the entire soundtracks to several films.
He would soon move on to creating his own, original pieces, playing over scenes that didn’t already have music, creating songs based on the particular emotion and pacing in different films. One year later, with the help of his story intriguing the director enough to initially get him in the door, Felix got his first real break in life, selling a collection of background score music to a small production for a series pilot.
A year later, the show took off. Another year after that, Felix began working with other similar productions, creating more original pieces for small shows, ads, short films, and the like. Over the following decade, Felix would find himself evolving through the ranks of Hollywood, astonishingly becoming a world-renowned, famous film score composer.
For the first time in his life, Felix felt successful and worthwhile. At fifty-eight years old, while promoting the premiere of a feature film for which he composed the original score, Felix was asked to speak as part of the film’s press conference panel.
Like he often would at these types of things, he introduced himself and shared his story. He shared how the unluckiest moment of his life somehow became one of the luckiest. That in some strange sense, the accident that almost killed him, saved him.
Make no mistake, he always added, the loss of his sight posed a vast array of miserable consequences. But without it, he would have never discovered his greatness, as he put it. And he would have never been there on that stage.
Later in the night, the conference opened to a Q&A with the entire audience. Several questions in, one audience member directed one at Felix, asking, “I know this might sound strange to ask, but based on what you said earlier, do you think as though losing your vision gave you the ability to make music like this, and it was sort of almost lucky? And if so, what role do you think luck plays in success in general?”
Felix took a moment and thought to himself before answering, grunting out loud to signify that he had to briefly think about it. Sort of pressured by the need to say something, he began thinking out loud, “You know, I know my story can sometimes come off as typical hopes and dreams always come true kind of thing. That everything always works out. But it isn’t. And it doesn’t. Not really.
People up here are typically supposed to say those sorts of things. And people up here seem to often believe those sorts of things. Because of course, the world is always fair to those who win. But my case is somewhat unusual.
The sort of hybrid lucky tragedy of losing my vision can, for the most part, be clearly pointed to as the cause of my discovery of music composing and my eventual being up here. But it was an accident. If it wasn’t for that misstep on the ladder, none of this would have happened for me.
And I think far more often than we’d like to admit, we are all pushed and pulled by accidents equally as significant as mine, but far less obvious or apparent, if at all.
We are rarely aware of or accounting for the good or bad luck in our stories, because it’s never really something we do or see. I’ve obviously thought a lot about this, and I’ve realized that bad luck isn’t just what happens to us, but also what doesn’t, and we never know about it.
And likewise, so is good luck. So, in that sense I would say yes, in some strange way, I am lucky, and luck does play a big role in one’s success.
But at the same time, the ability to do this, to be a successful music composer, was inside me the whole time.
The potential energy of my success and skill was just sitting there, waiting to be made kinetic by the random variables of the world and my personal circumstances.
And so, it’s really both luck and skill, I would say. Because of course, no one ever succeeds in anything hard by not trying, not having talent, and not working hard.
One has to have all of those and have them to have any shot at all. But plenty of people who work hard, have talent and try their best, never succeed in any grand thing. Luck only finds those who work hard and/or are talented.
But it doesn’t find all those who are or do. And I think this is important to realize because if I am in large part to credit my being here tonight to the arbitrary circumstances of my accident, then how can I have been totally and personally to blame for not having been here before my accident?
Or if my accident never occurred? In truth, the majority of us are going to live an ordinary life, never knowing precisely where the good and bad luck lurks.
But having been blind for the second half of my life now, it is clear to me that ordinary, healthy life is just as noble and worthwhile.
Work hard, try your best, and enjoy the good fortune if it comes your way, but don’t depend on it. And don’t think if it doesn’t, you are somehow less worthy or solely to blame. I see that now.” Felix gestured with a slight head nod to the crowd to indicate that now, he was finished.
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