For years I thought I was cursed.

No matter how hard I worked, money slipped away like water through my hands. A motorbike accident one month, a sick parent the next, then my boss cutting my hours right when rent was due. At home, every conversation turned into an argument. I went to bed with a tight lump in my chest and woke up already tired.

People told me, “You’re just unlucky.” After a while, I believed them.

My parents kept saying, “Go to the temple, pray, recite the Buddha’s name. It will help.”
So I did it the way most tired adults do anything: half-heartedly.

I lit incense. I put a few small bills in the donation box. At night, in my little rented room, I sat in front of a tiny altar and whispered, “Namo Amitabha Buddha” a few times before passing out.

I didn’t ask to be rich. I didn’t even dare ask for good luck.
I just begged: “Please, let my heart calm down for one night.”

The first thing that changed was not my bank account.

It was my temper.

I don’t know when it started, but one day I realized the things that usually made me explode… didn’t. A rude customer. A neighbor making noise at midnight. A relative dropping a hurtful comment about how “someone your age should have achieved more by now.”

The anger still knocked on the door. But it didn’t move in and rearrange the furniture anymore. It came, I saw it, and then it left. My chest felt a little lighter. I started sleeping through the night like I hadn’t in years.

And with that tiny bit of peace, everything else began to shift.

The people around me changed.
Or maybe I did.

The “friends” who only called when they needed money or favors started drifting away. At first I felt abandoned. Then I realized I finally had space to breathe.

A new manager came to our company. I was ready for another person to criticize me, but instead he guided me, patiently. “You’re good at this,” he said one day. I almost cried in the bathroom because I couldn’t remember the last time anyone said that about my work.

Out of nowhere, an old friend messaged me. We hadn’t talked for years. “Hey, my company’s hiring. Want to try?” The position fit my skills perfectly. The pay wasn’t huge, but it was steady. For the first time, I wasn’t terrified of the end of the month.

The disasters stopped lining up like a queue.

I still had problems—this is real life, not a fairy tale—but the constant wave of “one more bad thing” slowed down. My health improved. Those random headaches and stomach pains that scared me? They came less often. My body felt lighter, like someone had quietly removed a heavy backpack I’d been carrying for so long I forgot it was there.

One night, after finishing my prayers, I looked around my tiny room. Stained walls, old bed, the sound of rain outside and traffic lights blinking in the distance. Candlelight from the altar warmed half my face, the other half was blue from the window.

And I realized:
I didn’t feel like a victim anymore.

I wasn’t “the unlucky one” in my group of friends. I wasn’t the poor, miserable woman life kept kicking in the teeth. I was just… me. Breathing. Awake.

I wanted to learn more. I started listening to Dharma talks while cooking. I read small sutras on the bus. Not because someone told me to, but because my heart naturally leaned that way. I wanted to understand why my life felt different even though, on paper, nothing had dramatically changed.

The answer that kept appearing in every teaching was simple and scary at the same time:

Nothing is random.
Every little ease, every helping hand, every chance to start again… is a fruit of seeds you once planted.

Maybe it was from this life. Maybe from lives before. I don’t know. I just know that when I stopped fighting everything and focused on calming my own mind, the world I saw outside started to soften.

People ask me now, “How did you get so lucky?”
And I laugh, because if they’d seen me a few years ago, crying alone on that same floor, they wouldn’t use the word “lucky.”

I’m not saying, “Just pray and all your problems vanish.” Life doesn’t work like that. Bills still need to be paid. Relationships still require effort. Karma doesn’t disappear overnight.

But I am saying this:

The night I stopped begging the universe to change, and started quietly changing myself, my “luck” changed too.

So if you’re reading this on your phone in some small room, feeling crushed and thinking, “Why is my life so hard compared to everyone else’s?” — maybe you’re not cursed. Maybe you’re just in the middle of repaying some old karmic debt… and the moment of breathing easier is closer than you think.

Tell me honestly:
Do you believe in luck, karma, or just coincidence?
Have you ever felt your life soften in a way you couldn’t explain?