My life as a novel

What I haven't told many people is that I'm facing two significant medical appointments this week. Since I'm a pretty optimistic person, I don't usually talk about such things ahead of time, but instead wait until I find out everything is fine so that I can tell everybody, "Everything was fine. There was no need to worry you." But yesterday, while sitting in the Baker Center ballroom in the closing session of the Baker Peace Conference (which totally made me wish I'd become a historian), I realized that this time the back of my mind thinks something will go wrong. Why? Because I feel especially happy and fulfilled.

Ever since I was a little girl, I've liked to pretend that my life was a book, and this has often influenced my actions. For instance, I've been known to think things like, "Well, I could just give in and write to him now, but it would be so much more romantic if I wait five years, and then we can be reunited much more joyfully." (The basic plot of the movie Serendipity, by the way.) And I often try to read events around me to predict what will happen the same way I would if I was reading a book, as if God was nothing more than a hack writer pounding on a manual Underwood up above the clouds. So in this case, I clearly see the foreshadowing. I have recently received many accolades at work (including wrapping up a project I've been working on since Day One), and I have had many promising developments in my personal life. If this was happening in a movie, you know that the next thing to happen is for me to find out that I have cancer or get hit by a bus or be stabbed walking home from work.

What else can I say? I really hope I'm wrong, but the writerly part of me thinks the narrative will be so much more exciting if I'm right!