How Do You Deal With Uncertainty and Ambiguity?
a poem
once central theme of what i write about is tolerating uncertainty and ambiguity, which i believe human brains human souls human beings really absolutely do not like one ounce. i know. my anxiety brain, of which makes up probably most of my personality, exists because of this cool thing where humans can actually try to predict the future based on what we know of in the past, except my own brain can sometimes just be really bad at it. it tries to prepare me for the worst. for some people, that’s just how their brain works, their brain selects the worst possible case scenario. for others, like me, their brain selects the worse possible case scenario to prepare for because their life has been full of pulling the worst card from the deck and being told that that’s just life, life is just that. some of us are a mixture of both. regardless, sometimes i tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity by planning from plan a to z, from plan aa to zz, per spreadsheet column notation. sometimes i sit down and write about my values because uncertainty and ambiguity come from the idea that our world is complex and just because we place importance in certain things doesn’t mean that they will cluster all together. i mean, it’d be nice. but, that’s really never happened to me. usually, to embody one value i often have to tweak how i envision another value, or else deprioritize it altogether and “practice acceptance and mindfulness”, knowing that something truly fell short. i wanted more. we all can want more. but this is what there was. that is how i deal with uncertainty.
#WritingPrompt: write a piece about ambiguity, with the bonus challenge of using a completely new kind of form.
Inviting Lara Manetta | Thalia Dunn | Aaron Kemp | Denise G | Trista Signe Ainsworth | Hannah M. Moore | Jacob Flanders | Denise G| Judson Vereen | if you’re up to it and anyone else interested to smash that writer’s block, join in on this tiny challenge and write a response, wherever it takes you! It can be a tiny poem, a shortform piece or an essay — whatever comes into that brain noodle! If you want to be added/ removed from the tag list, please leave a private note! ♥
Hi, I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and as someone who likes to press ENTER in her poetry (i.e., lots of spaces, indents, etc.), creating a block-text that represents more of a stream of consciousness was a new experience for me. Instead of letting Medium let automatically create a new line, I also set an arbitrary width through my writing, and eye-balled needing a new line. Why was this fun? I pretended to be writing on a typewriter, devoid of the natural assistive features that I’ve taken for granted on the computer. It was fun. I still want a typewriter. (Narrator voice: Lucy you don’t need a typewriter).