It’s only been a few months ago since I realised that how I understand the concept of luck is probably quite different from other people: for me it’s not about the impact the event has, but about how unlikely it is. So if it’s something small, but very unlikely, and it’s positive, I consider myself lucky.

In my life there were some events that had very positive impact on my life and that don’t happen to most people, yet, I didn’t consider myself lucky because of them as they were predictable.

On the other hand, I also had events that were quite negative and very unlikely, yet, they happened to me – that means, I’m unlucky. I mostly think here about my brother severe drinking and my dad’s mental health breakdown. When I was a child there was absolutely no conversation in the public space about mental health problems. I also didn’t know another person who was so severely affected. I know families where alcohol was a big problem, there were also two households in the village where parents were really neglectful, even though they appeared to not have any other problem. But it was only us who were so severely affected by mental illness.

At the time I didn’t know how much more difficult it can be to have an alcoholic in the family. People didn’t talk about it and it was only with time that I realised it could mean not having money for food or heating, being woken up in the middle of the night or serious physical abuse. When I was a child the only thing I saw was that what happened to my family didn’t happen to anybody else.

And that’s how I used to live my life: thinking that I’m the unlucky one.

The last couple of months I try to challenge this perception. I must say that having a blog really helps – even if a misunderstanding happens to me, I write a post about it explaining everything from my autistic perspective and I know that I at least created content, so it wasn’t all bad.

But what happened yesterday was hilarious. Around lunchtime I’ve noticed that Google renamed itself on my mobile and it stayed like this for several hours:

It looks a bit like Hej, which means ‘hiya’ in Polish. So does that mean that Google say hiya to me? In my native language? Only that H has been swapped to 7 and 7 is a symbol of good luck in Poland (I so far didn’t work out if it’s the same in the UK).

I asked other people and also… Googled it, and didn’t find anything. No one heard a thing! And yet, it was on my mobile – so I was the lucky one. And there was 7 there, that means I got lucky twice!

Who would think that can be so easy? I felt lucky because of random string of numbers that appeared on my mobile screen. Thank you Google! You definitely made my day. Or possibly even entire week!