Superstitions Are Silly

Illustration by Mackenzie Morgan / VOX Staff

By Brittany Briscoe / VOX Staff
 
If you break a mirror, you’ll have bad luck for seven years. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. If your ear starts to itch, someone somewhere is talking about you. If you go into a bathroom and turn all the lights out and say “Bloody Mary” five times a witch will come and gouge your eyes out.
 
These are just a few of the superstitions that some of my friends and family members profess to believe — or are just eager to share with me over and over again. I’m sorry, but they’re crazy to believe in such dumb things. And I’m not afraid to tell them so.
 
Superstitions, or what some people call old wives’ tales, are just stories people came up with years ago to explain things they couldn’t understand. Some of them make sense: Apples are good for you, so eating one a day probably does help you stay out of the doctor’s office. But others are just plain ridiculous. There is one that says that when two people get married, the first one who falls asleep on their wedding night will die first. Someone must have been really upset at their spouse because they fell asleep instead of consummating the marriage, and they came up with this little scare tactic.
 
What kills me is that a lot of people believe in this nonsense. Do you really believe that Bloody Mary, a long-dead witch — not Queen Mary I, according to urban myth-busting Web site Snopes.com — will come out and get you if you say her name into a mirror? That’s the stuff of horror movies, not real life.
 
Personally, I have broken way too many mirrors over the years and I am absolutely sure I haven’t received any bad luck from it. In fact, I don’t even really believe in luck. Everything I have experienced in life comes as a direct effect of my actions, not because of some silly beliefs or luck or kharma.
 
It is hysterically funny to me sometimes the way people change their lives because of these superstitions. My friend nearly breaks her neck to never “cross” a pole. The superstition is as such: If you’re walking in a group and everyone else walks on one side of a pole and you walk alone on the opposite side, you will receive bad luck. My friend was so serious about it one day that she accidentally stepped into incoming traffic and almost got hit. Now that would’ve been ironic, wouldn’t it?
 
Every time another friend of mine feels her ears start to itch she swears up and down that someone is talking about her. I tell her that it  just isn’t true. I tell her that they’re only itching because she doesn’t clean them enough.

Personally, I just can’t waste my time worrying about whether or not I should bring an open umbrella inside the house. I instead think about the consequences of the things I do and don’t do, and accept and take responsibility for them. I can’t blame some invisible, supernatural force for plotting pointless revenge against me for such inconsequential actions as stepping on a crack in the sidewalk.