Facing Uncertainty During Coronavirus
I was always a kid who needed to know what the plan was. And my mother was always hesitant to tell me what the plan was.
Because if something came up and our plans fell through…I was, in turns, furious, anxious, despondent and obstinate.
Even today — when I’m much more laid back and better at taking a let’s-see-what-the-day-brings approach to life my Mom likes to remind me how hard-headed I was about sticking to the plan. She also loves to point out just how much my children are reflections of me. Karma comes in the form of our offspring.
The REASON I always had to have a plan or know the plan was because I hated uncertainty.
In the space of uncertainty, my brain makes up all kinds of wild, weird and terrifying stories of what might happen.
In the face of uncertainty, I invent problems that don’t exist.
I remember the night my little cousin was flown via medical ambulance from the Bahamas to Toronto. It was a race to keep her alive and we were all gathered in my grandmother’s kitchen waiting to hear the results from Sick Kids.
Words like aplastic anaemia and leukaemia were passed around with a pot of tea (essential for navigating any crisis).
I remember saying, “I can’t stand this uncertainty, this not knowing is worse than a diagnosis. At least once they know what it is they can make a plan.”
My then-husband tried to tell me not to worry until there was something to worry about. In that way, we balanced each other out. In the space of uncertainty, I became inhabited by a lighting ball of electric anxiety zipping through my body. And he was calm.
The test results came back and it was leukaemia (there were a couple more times when we would nearly lose her but in the end, she beat cancer).
I could breathe again. A plan could be made. It wouldn’t be easy. But hard didn’t terrify me nearly as much as uncertainty. My ex, however, only started to freak out after the diagnosis.
Right now, we’re all dealing with crazy amounts of uncertainty in our lives. Uncertainty around our health, the safety of loved ones, our finances, whether our healthcare system will be able to handle this crisis and whether our governments are doing enough and doing it fast enough to keep everything from tumbling into chaos.
This week someone said 3 words that changed EVERYTHING for me.
“Uncertainty is neutral.”
Holy shit, I’d never considered that before. Uncertainty, for me, had always inextricably been linked to anxiety.
But if uncertainty is neutral then the only thing that makes it good or bad is the stories we bring to it.
Uncertainty opens the space for possibilities.
Possibilities to catastrophize.
To imagine worst-case scenarios.
To invent problems that haven’t happened yet.
To weave dystopian stories about our future and what it all means.
To search for evidence of our personal failures.
OR
Possibilities to hope.
To imagine the most beautiful future we can dream up.
To release the outcomes and expectations that have been strangling us.
To search for evidence of our tenacity and courage.
To move away from fear and doubt and move towards the things we know are good and true.
To trust that everything will be okay even when it seems like madness to do so.
We have a choice.
I have a choice.
I wasn’t even aware that I had a choice until this week.
Uncertainty is only scary if we tell ourselves horror stories about what might happen.
I can’t say I’m suddenly in love with uncertainty. I haven’t quite figured out how to embrace it yet. But I’m starting to look at it in a new way. Learning to see beneath the layers of darkness to the light and hope that sits at the heart of uncertainty.
I can see the possibility that one day, uncertainty and I might be friends after all.
