We Had Nothing, So We Made Up Our Own Luck

The house was too small for noise, but that didn’t stop us. Two bedrooms, seven people, one hallway that doubled as a wrestling ring, a courtroom, a football pitch, and, when the lights went out, a place to lie back and make shapes from nothing. We didn’t grow up with things. Not new ones anyway. Our shoes were cousins before they were ours. The radio only played if you hit it just right. School uniforms were altered so many times the threads forgot their original seams. But if you’d asked us then, we wouldn’t have said we were poor. Not in those words. We had other words. Words for making a game out of dust. Words for winning without prizes. Words for luck.

Luck didn’t live in Lotto tickets. It lived in bottle caps. In street corner flips. In knowing the taxi conductor’s rhythm well enough to get a free ride now and then. It showed up in the R5 you found under the mattress when you thought the world had emptied itself. In the aunty who added an extra chicken neck to your packet because she liked the way you greeted her. In guessing a coin toss right three times in a row and declaring it proof that you were chosen, somehow, for something.

There were nights the paraffin finished before the homework did, and we’d lie on the stoep, tracing invisible letters in the air, promising ourselves that we’d remember them when the light returned. The neighbours had better lights, but we had better imaginations. We turned shadows into cinema. Cardboard into stadiums. We knew how to spin boredom into something worthy of applause.

Our games were half superstition, half rebellion. You couldn’t step on cracks or you’d fail maths. If your shoelace came undone three times in one day, something good was coming. If you counted ten white cars in a row, you could make a wish and it might actually come true. We didn’t believe in fate. We believed in patterns. In tiny signals. In the idea that if you stayed alert, really alert, you could find a way through.

We weren’t naïve. We saw the missed payments. The empty cupboards. The too-long silences between parents who didn’t want to argue in front of us anymore. We knew what being broke looked like. But we decided not to let it be the only story. So we wrote another one. A louder one. One where the universe wasn’t ignoring us, just testing us to see how clever we could be. And we were clever. Not in the textbook way. In the making-a-plan way. The invent-your-own-celebration-because-no-one-else-will way.

There was one December where everything ran out. Food, money, petrol, patience. But that’s the December we remember the most. Because that was the one where someone made a dice out of cardboard, someone else found an old checkers board in the rubbish pile, and we spent ten nights inventing a game that had no winner, just laughter and fake accents and made-up penalties. That game travelled to cousins in other provinces. It became a story. A memory. Our version of luck in action.

Luck wasn’t about what you found. It was about what you saw. The way we saw a skip not as trash, but as potential. The way we saw broken electronics as a challenge. The way we saw long queues as an opportunity to mimic strangers for laughs. We weren’t mocking them. We were studying the world. Finding its weak spots. Learning how to bend it in our favour, even if only for a moment.

There’s power in that kind of make-believe. Not childish power. Survival power. It teaches you that control isn’t always about what you own. Sometimes it’s about what you declare. We declared ourselves lucky, over and over, until it became muscle memory. Until we started noticing small graces where others saw nothing. Until we could walk through a drought and still point out where the weeds were blooming.

Now, years later, we laugh at how serious we were. At how much meaning we put into sidewalk chalk and bottle-top races. But beneath that laughter, there’s reverence. Because we know what we were doing. We were refusing despair. Quietly. Consistently. Turning it into a game it couldn’t win.

Some of us are still doing it. Scraping joy from corners. Making rituals out of routine. Betting R10 and calling it strategy. Reading horoscopes not because we believe them, but because they feel like a kind of whisper, a reminder that the world is still paying attention. Still throwing bones on our behalf.

And when we gather now, with our different lives and slightly more stable incomes, we don’t talk about the struggle the way outsiders want us to. We don’t romanticise it. We don’t deny it either. We just say things like, “Remember when we used to make our own luck?” and everyone nods. Because we did. And maybe, we still do. Every time we laugh when we should cry. Every time we find meaning in something that doesn’t make sense. Every time we keep going when nothing says we should.

We had nothing. So we made up our own luck. And maybe that’s the truest kind there is. The kind no one can take from you. Because it was never given. It was made. From scraps. From stories. From the fierce belief that we were more than our circumstances. And in those moments, we were. Still are.