There's this thing that keep happening to me where I'm talking to someone about my life – my life as a pro dom, my life as a kinky person, my life as a poly person, whatever. And they say to me, "You're so lucky."

This happens to me fairly regularly, either in-person or electronically. I know they don't mean to be rude – but it seems rude to me, and I really don't like it. I'm trying to figure out a response I can make to these folks that isn't nasty but expresses how I feel, which is something like this:

"This is not luck. I am very lucky in some ways – I'm lucky in the fact that I have two smart, healthy, pretty parents who got together and made a smart, healthy, pretty baby – me. That's sheer luck on my part, I didn't have a thing to do with it.
But luck has nothing to do with the fact that I have created the life I wanted for myself. I got it because I made a choice, I gave up the other, safer, options, and I did the work to get it. Nothing I have fell into my lap like a lottery prize. It was hard, lonely work - I hit a lot of dead ends, and I took a lot of wrong turns. Sometimes I met people who helped me, more often I had to deal with people who wanted to discourage me. But I kept trying because I refused to believe that I could not manifest what I wanted.
And I am not, by any means, finished. There is so much I want to do that I haven't achieved yet. There are ambitions that are still taking shape in me, goals I'm in progress towards, and some big, scary-looking shit I'm just flat-out not ready to tackle yet.
I know it would be easier to believe that you couldn't create your life the way I've created mine, but that's bullshit. You make a choice every single day about what kind of life you're going to have. Whatever you choose is okay – but don't tell yourself that you shouldn't bother to try to get what you want because you aren't "lucky". The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in your stars, but in yourself. Create what you want. Or else don't. But stop invalidating my power to do so by telling me "you're so lucky".