Uncertainty has been one of my biggest fears in life. I am a very calculated person and I feel most comfortable when I have a clear plan or an idea of where I am headed. I have struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember, and my largest stressors always seem to be ones where I feel some sort of lack of control or ambiguity, both of which tend to go hand in hand with uncertainty. When I was younger, this meant that I was afraid of the dark, where I felt uncertainty because it was difficult to see. While I have gotten over that fear, new ones have come and go as I have aged. My most recent uncertainty-related fear has been leaving for college.
As I began to prepare myself for my journey to Middletown, Connecticut, anxiety crept into my brain and made a nest there. Suddenly, college was becoming less of an abstract vision and more of a reality. I have always planned on attending college, but it always seemed so far off that it had not really felt real. As I began to realize what I was getting myself into, college started to seem like “an irreversible voyage through a long tunnel,” in which the eventual exit was graduation — which would just lead me into the tunnel of graduate school (Behar 2012).
The uncertainty of my future was taking over all of my thoughts. I felt as though I lacked the ability to control what was in front of me. There are so many variables in everyone’s college experience, and it is not possible to know everything about all of them. I decided to do all that I could to minimize my anxiety. To do this, I immersed myself in research to make sure that I was certain about as many things as was physically possible.
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I dug deep into WesPortal and gathered up every useful (and not-so-useful) piece of information I could get my hands on. This helped to soothe some of my worries, but others were left to grow. Now that I know the campus, what will it be like to actually live here? What will my room look like? Who will be on my hall? Will I actually like these classes I spent so long picking out? There is only so much information on the internet.
So much of daily life circles around uncertainties that we simply cannot control. I get through my life by trying to control as much as I can. Few things are left up to chance if I have any say in the matter. Before going out to restaurants, I look up the menu to see if there are enough options for me as a vegetarian. I like to review my syllabus before attending class to get a glimpse of what to expect.
If I feel at all unsure of where I am going, I will set my GPS to avoid getting lost. Much of what I do to avoid uncertainty is, in another way, to avoid getting lost. I have stuck to my childhood instincts — to avoid encounters with an unfamiliar environment (Solnit 2017). At this point in my life, I know that I need to stop working around uncertainty and learn to live with it. Putting myself in unfamiliar situations will teach me how to problem solve.
Failure has never been appealing to me. I have always tried to avoid failure, moving out of its way and giving it a wide berth. Unlike those at Google’s “X”, I have not been able to see its beauty and have found it to be both discouraging and frustrating (Failure 2016). In retrospect, I am able to see some of failure’s inherent benefits, but it is hard for me to see past it in the heat of the moment. Those at “X” have learned that failure is useful to ensure that time is not wasted on near-impossible projects (Failure 2016).
As I look ahead to my future (potentially as a data analyst in biomedical informatics), I have to realize that, in science, failure to prove something can be just as good as success. A failure to prove a point still adds to the scientific conversation. In some cases, a failure to prove is considered to be disproving, which can also be useful. Science is based upon failures and successes, using certainties to turn uncertainties into knowledge. If I want to succeed as a scientist, I have to learn how to embrace my failures and my uncertainties. I have to look on the bright side and try to find positives in what seems to be negative.
As I begin my freshman year of college, I hope to become more relaxed when I sense lurking uncertainties. I hope that reading more literature about this will help to set me on this path so I can try to grow as a student and as a person in general.
