Life’s not fair. This was hard lesson to learn. Not everything works out the way it should, no matter how hard you work for it. That was even harder to learn.

This was my grandma’s favorite phrase, ‘life’s not fair’. She would say it in response to everything.
“Why does SHE get to go?”
“Life’s not fair.”
“Why do I have to wear this?”
“Life’s not fair.”

Whenever she said that, my automatic response was to just roll my eyes. ‘Life’s not fair’? That’s not an answer, I would think. I never took it seriously, just assumed it was another one of her idiosyncrasies. Being an EXTREMELY optimistic child, I just expected that everyone got what they deserved, no more, no less. Life was black and white.

No greys.

But, the older I got, the more the colors blurred, until there was no more black or white, just grey.  No one was equal. Just because, like me, someone else was a little girl, didn’t mean they were as protected as me, as safe, or had as many opportunities.

My nanny, Amma Bano, was like an aunt to me, and I loved her. She took care of me and my sisters for our whole lives, so, naturally, we assumed that we were the only children in her life. We were wrong, she had six children. Her youngest was Bua, who was the same age as me.

When we found out about them, I was five, and very curious about these ‘other’ children.

“Does Bua go to school like me?” I asked her. She smiled at me, shook her head sadly, and said, “But she’d love to.”

“Why doesn’t she?” I asked angrily. If I had to be subject to the horrors of school, why shouldn’t all little girls have to as tormented as I was? It wasn’t fair.

“That’s not fair… If I have to go to school, she should as well!” my self-absorbed five-year old self said indignantly.
I didn’t understand. She wanted to go to school. I didn’t. So why did I have to, and she not be able to? It just wasn’t fair. But then again, life’s not fair.

“If you work hard, you will get the success you deserve, and if you don’t work hard, then you won’t be successful.” My mother said to me, in one of those many lectures I received as a child, when I was playing outside while I should be working. This soon became a core belief of mine, seeing as I probably heard it a billion times.

Everyone gets what they deserve. If you studied at school, you would get good grades. If you didn’t study, you wouldn’t. Plain and simple, like 1 + 1.

Ever since I was eight years old, I was part of my school rowing team. I was on the team for around five years. Throughout those five years, there was this one boy who trained harder than all of us. He would stay an extra hour after practice, and come in everyday, even if there was no scheduled training. The coaches loved him, and he was always around to give you pointers and help you train.

The first time I went out in a pair (two people boat with one oar each), he followed us in the scull (single person boat).

“Don’t lean that way so much!” he would yell.
“Try to stay in synch so the boat doesn’t veer off course!” he would suggest.
So you can imagine my surprise when he got passed over as team captain, and some girl got it, a girl who had only been in the team for about a year. I’m not saying that she didn’t work hard, she probably did, but he worked even harder. He worked for it, he deserved it, but he didn’t get it.
I was so disappointed with people, with life. I felt personally let down. Life SHOULD be fair. People SHOULD get what they deserve. I lost faith in life. If nothing works out the way it should, then what’s the point in even trying?
I said this my mother one day, and she looked at me and laughed.
“You’ve been spending way too much time with your grandmother.” she said.

“No but I’m serious, what’s the point of working hard?” I said insistently.

“Because there is always a chance. A chance that things will work out the way they should. Yes, a lot of the time, life’s unfair. But there’s always a chance that it won't be.”

Learning that life wasn’t fair and that it practically never turns out the way you think it should really changed how I looked at life. Yes, it took away my naivety, my belief that things would just ‘work out’. But I also became more idealistic, more determined to make a change. Life SHOULD be fair, and I would make it so. I didn’t know how, or when, but someday.