At Ease with Uncertainties

By: Reem Elmaghraby
English Managing Editor

Last Sunday marked my last first day at AUC and finally my last day of moving back into the dorms. I’m extremely happy that I won’t have to be packing and unpacking several times a year anymore.

I’m also excited to start a new chapter after I’m done with what will be my last semester.

However, the excitement I feel is accompanied with the fear of the unknown. The fear of what’s to come after I graduate.

“Unemployment is waiting for you,” my friends would joke and I’d laugh because humor is the best coping mechanism, right? If you can’t beat it, might as well joke about it.

During the last month as I started to prepare for my last semester, I found myself reflecting on who I am now as opposed to who I was when I first arrived at AUC.

I’ve realized that this fear of the unknown is something that I’ve carried with me my entire life and I believed it to be entirely normal. This fear significantly increased due to the virus and the uncertainty of the future that everyone currently shares.

I combated it by constantly having multiple plans for everything just in case something goes wrong.

This fear has been an enemy and a friend throughout college. It has helped me become a rigorous planner staying up to date with what I needed to do.

However, fear was also one of my biggest roadblocks. I struggled to put my work out there because I was scared I wasn’t good enough.

The fear of failure often prevented me from trying as hard as I could just so I could have something to blame if things didn’t go according to plan. It also pushed me to quit simply because I was afraid of being labeled a failure.

This fear has become subdued the more I’ve challenged it either with difficult courses that I’ve taken or simply by picking up new hobbies.

But if I’m being honest with myself, even with all this fear-induced planning, I still feel lost.

I’ve had plans that guided me throughout my entire life up until this point and now I’ve reached the last page of my planner and it feels like I’m out of options.

How will I get a job after I graduate? Where do I want to work? Where will I stay? What now?

So many questions that I have no answers to. But for the first time, I think I might be okay with that.

The longer we’ve been under the threat of COVID-19, the more I realized how no one can be fully prepared for anything that’s yet to come.

In the span of seconds on a random Thursday in March, our lives changed. Everyone endured a lot of losses and the future became extremely vague.

In the beginning it was frightening, but we’ve almost spent a year with this virus and unfortunately we still don’t know where we’ll be in the next few months.

Uncertainty is a normal part of life and there’s no point in constantly being worried about things going wrong.

All this will do is cause you more stress.

Focus on the problem you can solve now, and answers will eventually follow.

I’m not saying never plan for anything, being prepared is always a good idea, but if things go wrong, maybe it isn’t the end of the world.