Dear Diary: How I found the surprising joy of learning to live with uncertainty

CBCCalgarywants to knowhow you are living these days. What are you doing differently? What makes you laugh? Cry? Scream? Have you started a new hobby? Let us know.

In thisinstalment of our series, Dear Diary: In a Time of COVID-19, we hear from Amanda Gmez. She's a linguistics student at the University of Calgary. This submission has been edited for clarity and length.

Every now and then, I try to remember what I thought my life would be like at "x"point in time.

Right now, I'm a 21-year-old university student who is a year away from graduating, in the most uncertain times we've seen in recent years. Although I can confidently say that I didn't expect to see a pandemic at the end of my studies, I'm facing these changes head on.

When I started university, I was feeling the intense pressures of being a first generation immigrant wanting to make a better life for my family and our future generations. This would build up expectations within me that I would later on have to deal with, when things wouldn't work out the way I thought they would.

It would happen again and again over the course of my studies, and in various aspects of my life, and every time a valuable lesson was reinforced for me.

I've always needed to control every aspect of my life in order to feel safe, and when something would inevitably have to change, letting go of where I thought I would be was hard.

I've had to learn to be OK with the uncertainties of life, without completely losing hope.

I learned this once before, when my whole life was uprooted and I came to Canada in 2012.

Now that I am faced again with having to let go of the control I thought I had about my future, I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that I'm having a much easier time doing it now.

Something I've discovered in the last eight years since I moved here is that there will always be a place where you will perfectly fit in. So I have learned to be OK with not knowing the details about my future, and accepting wherever this may lead me.

I have made sure to know the diversity of my options, whilst accepting that I don't know precisely what I'll do next. I've found it in myself to be OK with this because I'm taking it one day at a time, and reflecting on the things I've learned whilst letting go as I approach the end of my studies.

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