Uncertainty and the Privilege of Choice

I'm building a life here. At least, I’d like to think I am. A real one, with friends, routines, and favorite haunts. I'm working on my MA, studying things I love, wandering streets that have grown familiar beneath my feet. The enormous, bewildering city that once seemed so foreign is beginning to feel like somewhere I could belong.

Which makes the possibility of losing it particularly cruel.

I don't know how long I'll be allowed to stay—and lately, I've realized that it's not necessarily the uncertainty itself that frightens me. It's the fact that I might not get a say.

I've never been particularly afraid of the unknown. (Quite the opposite, really.) I've spent years longing for something beyond the life I knew, wondering what might happen if I stopped doing what was expected of me and started doing what I actually wanted.

For a long time, the unknown represented freedom.

Possibility. Adventure. The delicious prospect of becoming someone I hadn't yet had the chance to meet.

Coming to London was a leap into that uncertainty, and I loved it. I didn't know exactly what awaited me here. I couldn't guarantee I'd make friends, or love my course, or find my feet in a city so far from everything familiar.

But I chose it.

That, I think, is the distinction I've been struggling to articulate.

There's a world of difference between stepping willingly into the unknown and being pushed.

And right now, I feel uncomfortably close to the edge.

Changes under the Trump administration have eliminated the route to PhD funding I had been relying on. My plan, ambitious though it was, had seemed possible. Finish my MA, pursue a doctorate, continue my research, and hopefully remain in the country where I've begun to build something resembling a future.

Right now, I'm supposed to be submitting my PhD proposal to potential supervisors, introducing myself and my research, and persuading them to consider taking me on.

Instead, I struggle to find the point.

I could write the most brilliant proposal of my academic career. I could find the perfect supervisor, secure a place, and be told that my research is precisely the sort of thing a department would love to support—but none of it matters if I can’t afford the tuition.

There's something uniquely demoralizing about that.

Not failing because you weren't good enough, or because you didn't work hard enough, but because the opportunity itself has become financially inaccessible.

International funding in the humanities is already a rather vicious little blood sport, and I knew that going in. I was prepared for competition. Prepared to work hard, face rejection, revise my plans, and try again.

What I wasn't prepared for was the possibility that effort might cease to be relevant. That I could do everything right and still find myself without a viable way forward.

And beneath all that academic uncertainty sits the question of my visa.

How long do I get to stay?

It's a deceptively simple question, considering how much of my life now depends upon the answer.

How deeply do I let myself settle? How many plans do I make? How much of my heart do I invest in friendships, places, and routines that may come with an expiration date I don't get to choose?

I resent even having to ask.

Because I didn't come here accidentally. I made decisions. Took risks. Rearranged my life around the possibility of something different. Something more suited to the person I've become.

And now I find myself in the absurd position of having finally found somewhere I want to be, without knowing whether I'll be permitted to remain.

It's difficult not to feel a little indignant about that.

I've worked rather hard to become the woman I am. I quite like her, actually, which is a relatively recent development and one I'd hoped to enjoy for a while longer.

She is curious and ambitious and considerably braver than she tends to give herself credit for. She wants things. Not the things she was told to want, necessarily, but the things that make her feel most herself.

She has spent a rather substantial portion of her life trying to learn the difference.

And now, having finally begun to make deliberate choices about her future, she finds herself waiting for permission to continue.

There it is, I think.

The thing that frightens me most.

Permission.

Permission to stay. To study. To build. To pursue a future that, until recently, seemed to be unfolding under my own direction.

There are people I'll never meet making decisions that may determine the course of my life. Policies drafted thousands of miles away. Funding allocations decided in meeting rooms I'll never enter.

Regulations indifferent to the peculiar, fragile business of being human.

To those making the decisions, my circumstances are probably little more than an administrative consequence.

To me, they're everything.

And then there's my book.

My manuscript is out on submission, which is an extraordinary thing to be able to say. I'm thrilled, genuinely. I've spent years writing, dreaming, and occasionally wondering whether I ought to abandon writing altogether and take up something more practical.

Taxidermy, perhaps? At least then I'd have something tangible to show for all the dead things I've accumulated.

But I kept writing.

And now my words are out in the world, being considered by people who might turn a lifelong ambition into something real.

I've never been closer.

And, of course, I've never felt more keenly how little control I have over what happens next.

Because the manuscript is finished. I've done the work. The pages contain everything I could give them, at least for now.

What happens next belongs to someone else.

I understand that's how publishing works. I don't expect an industry to rearrange itself around my personal aspirations (however convenient that would be).

But the waiting is difficult.

Especially when it feels as though every meaningful aspect of my future has been placed into someone else's hands.

I think that's why the uncertainty has begun to feel so consuming.

I am left to inhabit this strange, suspended version of my own life, where everything is happening and nothing is decided.

Moving changed me.

Or perhaps it simply gave me enough distance to recognize how much I'd already changed.

I don't want to return to an older version of myself out of necessity. To slip back into familiar patterns because the alternatives have become inaccessible. To discover that all this possibility was only ever temporary…

I'm aware that no one has complete control over their circumstances. Life has a rather impressive history of disregarding carefully arranged plans. We make choices, and things happen. People change. Opportunities disappear. The universe exercises its considerable talent for being an inconsiderate bastard.

I know this.

But accepting that life is unpredictable is one thing. Accepting that my own choices may carry so little weight in determining its direction is another.

I want to feel like the author of my life—not its protagonist, helplessly watching as someone else turns the pages.

Perhaps that's an especially irritating predicament for a writer. I'm used to deciding what happens next, even if my characters occasionally have their own ideas. I can rewrite an ending, or change a setting. Give someone a second chance, or remove the obstacles that stand between them and the life they want.

Reality, inconsiderately, refuses to be edited. (Trust me, I’ve tried. Exhaustively.)

I've caught myself struggling to enjoy the very things I came here for.

A lovely afternoon with friends becomes tinged with the thought of eventual goodbyes. Familiar streets begin to feel like places I should be memorizing rather than simply walking. I find myself calculating potential futures instead of paying attention to the one I'm currently inhabiting.

And I hate that.

I hate that my fear of losing this life is beginning to interfere with my ability to live it.

I wish I could offer some revelation here. A beautiful, elegantly phrased realization about surrendering to fate, trusting the process, or embracing the journey.

But I don't particularly want to surrender.

I've spent too long learning how to make choices for myself to find comfort in the idea that I should simply relinquish them.

I don't want to be told that everything happens for a reason, because sometimes things happen for terribly mundane reasons. Budgets. Bureaucracy. Policy changes. Someone in an office deciding there isn't enough money.

And I don't want to manufacture a lesson about gratitude from the very real frustration of having so much of my future beyond my reach.

I'm grateful to be here.

I'm furious that I might have to leave.

Both things can be true.

Maybe what I'm grieving isn't a future that's already been lost, but the belief that I would be allowed to choose it.

The assumption that if I worked hard enough, planned carefully enough, wanted something badly enough, I'd at least earn the opportunity to try.

It's difficult to relinquish that belief without feeling as though I'm relinquishing some part of myself alongside it.

I haven't figured out how to reconcile any of this.

I still want the PhD. I still want the book deal. I still want to live in London, to build friendships that aren't quietly haunted by departure dates. I want the privilege of taking my life for granted, just a little.

But for now, at least, I'm here.

And I suppose the difficult task ahead isn't learning to love uncertainty. I'm not convinced I ever will.

It's learning how to live with the knowledge that I may not get to decide what happens next, without allowing that knowledge to take away everything I still get to experience.

I don't know how to do that yet.

What I do know is that I chose to come here. I chose to build this life. I chose to write that book, to chase an education, to become someone who wants more than she once believed she was allowed to want.

Those decisions were mine.

Whatever happens next cannot undo them.

But I would still rather like to have a say in the ending.