Lately, I struggle to think about the future without feeling stressed and overwhelmed by all of the uncertainty in mine right now. I keep coming back to a recent Vlogbrother's video about "The Sudden Obliteration of Expectation." In it, Hank Green talked about his experience getting diagnosed with a chronic disease, and how suddenly the future he had expected was just gone- and how recent times are starting to feel like that for a lot of people. “The story that you have been quietly, silently telling yourself about what the future is going to be like, that story just falls apart,” he explained. All of a sudden, I'm not sure what my next few months are going to look like- whether I'll be able to leave my house, whether I can get the summer job I had planned to, whether I'll even be able to return to New Mexico and go back to school for the next semester. Online school is tough, for a lot of people, and one of the things getting me through it is the acknowledgement that it's going to end in a few weeks. The thing is, there's not really a guarantee of that, though. Schools in my state are already talking about moving classes online for the fall.
What I'm really struggling with is just the loss of certainty. I'm a person who likes to plan things, but there's no way to prepare for the future, because no one knows what it will look like. I can't even do the work of resigning myself to another semester of online classes, because nothings been confirmed yet. I remember thinking when I drove back to Michigan that at least now I knew where I'd be living for the next few months- I was no longer constantly waiting for the ball to drop on UNM moving students out of the dorms.
I don't really have a solution, other than I think I need to get better at taking this one day at a time, and perhaps not thinking quite so much about at least my own personal future.
Hank offers this:
"Eventually, we do get to a new normal. There will be a stability out there, but even when reality reaches some kind of stable state, it's gonna take us, each individually and collectively, a long time to sort of figure out exactly what that is, to actually understand it. And we're gonna rock back and forth, and we're gonna have moments where we think this isn't a big deal, and moments when we are blissfully free of it, and moments when we are crushed by it. And it's gonna suck. But we will catch ourselves, and we will rise, because that's what we do."
Kayla! I really, really loved this post. I think we are all feeling similar things right now. I am graduating and I can't even plan to find a job because I don't know if the jobs I am able to perform are even available right now due to the non-essential nature of my skills. We must gentle and patient with ourselves as we continue to cope with the situation around us, and eventually we can attain the "new normal" Hank is talking about. Thanks for the great post.
ReplyDelete--Erika Schwaner
Hi Kayla,
ReplyDeleteThis is such a good explanation for what this uncertainty feels like. I can't say I've ever been able to expect anything of the future, but I've been able to at least try to plan on what I want. Now, even planning is a fruitless endeavor. I think it's important to try to be patient with ourselves. We can't control what's happening, but we can control how we react to it. I sincerely hope that when we get through this (because we inevitably will), we are easier on ourselves and others. Stay safe.