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We all make plans for our lives. Sometimes we dream big and don’t really expect them to come true, but are all the happier when they do. But we all have expectations of life.

I will find a good job.

I will get married and have kids.

None of the people I love will die unexpectedly.

But what if these dreams don’t come true? I may only be speaking for myself but deep-down I have this belief, this trust, that everything will always work out in the end. That I will not be one of the people who have bad things happen to them. I may not have a job right now, but I will find one. I don’t have a boyfriend but I will find one. But rationally, I don’t know if any of these things will come true.

We make all these plans for our lives, but we don’t know if tomorrow that life may be over. So far I have been incredibly lucky and been unscathed by fate. I have not had anyone close to me die unexpectedly, get cancer or another serious disease, had any horrible accident, or something like that. But that can only last so long, can it? Eventually something bad will happen to me or someone close to me.

When I was young, a friend of my mom was pregnant. Her husband was killed shortly before (or after – I don’t remember) she was due to give birth. Want to know how he died? He was struck by lightning. That is the kind of freak accident that you never expect to happen. To anyone, let alone someone you know or yourself. But it does happen.

The other day I read about a baby in Australia that died on the day of her parents’ funeral. The parents were killed on their way home from the hospital in a traffic accident. The baby was born prematurely and had been in the hospital since birth. Isn’t that the moment you’d least expect anything bad to happen? A baby has just been born, the parents must have been overjoyed, only to be killed in a traffic accident a few short days later.

And incredibly tragic things like this happen every single day to people like you and me. What makes us think that something like this won’t happen to us? I bet the parents of the baby or my mom’s friend never expected what happened to them. I bet they thought the same way I did before the accidents. But they had bad things happen to them.

I know that this way of thinking – believing that nothing bad will happen to me – is maybe the only way of staying sane, of not being so damn scared of all the bad things in the world that can happen to any of us any day. If I was, I am not sure I could continue living, I’d be too scared to. I’d be too scared to love anyone because I could lose them. I’d be too scared to have children, because something could happen to them. I know that it would be impossible to live like that.

But yet it seems so unrealistic, almost blind, to think that fate will always be on my side. I have been incredibly lucky so far. Lucky to have been born in the country I was, at the time that I was, to the family I was, and that nothing bad has happened to myself or someone close to me. Luck. It’s all it has been. I don’t believe that bad things only happen to bad people. Bad things – and good things – happen to all sorts of people. It’s mostly coincidence and there is little to nothing to prevent things from happening to me.

I know that the day will come that my heart will be broken in a way that cannot be fixed entirely. But until then, I will – I have to – live pretending I will always be lucky. Block out the possibility of something bad happening in my life. Because how can you enjoy life if you are constantly waiting for tragedy to strike?

I may never get married or have kids. I may be dead in five years. Or one. Or maybe I’ll die peacefully at age 90 surrounded by grandchildren. I just don’t know. All I can do is hope. And have faith that everything will work out and that what is meant to be will happen.

How do you feel about this? Do you ever wonder about when your luck will run out?

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I have a (bad?) habit of signing up for too many accounts online and then abandoning them at some point only to forget my password or screenname or both. When Gmail first came out, I registered several addresses, you know, just in case I might want to use them. And because when it was new you could still get all the cool names. Until five years ago, I would also constantly change my email address, AOL screen name (who even uses AIM anymore these days?), and MSN screennames. I think my friends probably rolled their eyes each time I made a new screenname. Most of which I cannot even remember nowadays. Since then I have cut down on the email accounts I use and have only this year switched to Gmail, though with my various current and old blog email accounts I still have too many.

Just now I was checking an email account I mostly use for when I don’t want to give out my good email address, I found a Google account password reset email. I was a little confused as I had not tried to reset a password lately, but I’ve gotten these before and just assumed that someone mistakenly thought that an account of mine was theirs. I opened the email but the email address it was for did not at all seem familiar to me. I thought that someone must’ve mistakenly put my email address as the recovery email address but curious as I am, I decided to reset the password anyway.

I know, had it actually not been my account, I would have locked someone else out of their account. But hello, they should have made sure not to put another person’s email address as the recovery email address! I would have also gotten in touch with Google about it. Because I’m nice that way. But also curious.

But, as it turns out, the account was mine. It had my name in it and another Gmail address I registered back then and never used. I know!

I was honestly baffled. I have no recollection at all of ever signing up for this email account. And I clearly never used it. It was, however, filled with Blockbuster emails dating back to 2005, so the account must be at least five years old. The emails were also all unread so I must have not logged in a single time in that period. I thought at first that the Blockbuster emails were spam or that maybe I was signed up with them when I lived in the US (although I’m pretty sure I wasn’t) or somehow got signed up for their newsletter.

But, as it turns out, the Blockbuster emails were not addressed to me but to ‘Bill.’ Bill must have mistakenly given my email address that I didn’t know I had to Blockbuster when he signed up with them. I have personal rental reminders dating from between August 2007 and February this year, though Bill mostly used Blockbuster between August and November 2007 and only a few times since then.

Bill likes movies such as The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, All About Steve, Couples Retreat, Fool’s Gold and a bunch of others and lives in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, though he has also rented movies at Blockbuster in Edwardsville, PA. He also believes that his email address is utopiandreams [at] gmail.com. Which is not a very manly email address now, is it, Bill?

Maybe it was Bill who tried to recover the password to, what turns out to be, my email account. I guess I will never find out. I also don’t think I’ll ever find out why I registered that email address. But it is kind of cute, yes? I guess I’ll add it to the list of email accounts I own and never use. Because maybe, one day, I may want to use it. (Yeah, not likely.)

It may just be me but I find it so weird and in a way hilarious that not only did I completely forget that I created this email address but that someone else mistakenly thought it was theirs and used it to sign up with Blockbuster. I guess, Bill and I both have to work on our organizational skills and learn to remember which email addresses are ours and which are not.

Has something like this ever happened to you? Do you also have a myriad of email addresses dating back to your teen years that you have long forgotten about or have you used the same screenname since the day you started using the internet?