Great expectations

SAM PRENDERGAST IS BATTLING WITH A NEWFOUND LACK OF CONTROL.

There is no aspect of my personality that anyone could describe as chill. No one in the history of the universe has ever said the words, “Sam won’t mind if the plans change, she’ll just go with the flow.” All power to those calm enough to ‘go where the road takes you’, but I enjoy having a good sense of what’s coming, and how, and when. The general response to this pandemic has taught me I’m not alone. There’s really nothing like a global crisis to reveal that many of us struggle to cope when uncertainty about literally everything increases by a thousand. On top of learning to handle a highly contagious virus and the effects of lockdowns and border closures, we – the unchill over-planners of the world – are learning to cope with the reality that we can’t control the future.

In theory, we really should have seen this coming. Books and movies are full of narratives about the downfalls of being overly rigid. See, for example, every borderline sexist depiction of a neurotic mother trying to control her “I’m a free spirit, Mum!” kids. ‘Control freak’ is not a recommended personality type. You don’t sit and watch a film with a protagonist on a journey to become more uptight. And if you encounter a control freak in the wild who’s unable to conceal their controlling tendencies, there’s a fairly high chance you’re going to walk away calling them a Karen.

Ironically, despite the general ill will towards people who like rigid plans, there’s also a societal implication that we should try to keep our lives pretty much under control. Eat five fruits and vegetables a day; exercise three times a week; make regular appointments to visit your dentist; don’t accidentally melt into your bed with Dorito dust covering your face. In other words, it’s not entirely our fault if we’re slightly obsessed with knowing what the week will hold, given so many of us live in a meal-prepping, gym-class-booking, five-baby-showers-to-attend-this-month world.

When everything shuts down and the small certainties we rely on become impossible – or, in the case of a pandemic, potentially lethal – it’s easy to scramble for new things to control. I know this very well because I was one of the world’s 20 million millennials who, in the face of a lockdown, decided to grow and obsess over a sourdough starter. There’s a real powerlessness that comes with having your ability to control and plan things rapidly stripped away, and appointing myself queen of the sourdough (if my starter was the world’s mouldiest kingdom) made me feel temporarily powerful. My sourdough died around the time a low-level depression set in, and the things I’d hoped would ‘go back to normal’ were postponed, then cancelled, then never spoken of again.

The uncertainty of everything is probably an important life lesson. But it’s difficult to transition from constantly being braced for disappointment to accepting you can plan as much as you want to even though, ultimately, things might change. I’m still in the ‘braced for disappointment’ phase, which causes me to mutter doom comments under my breath whenever I hear someone planning an event more than two weeks in advance. In an effort to evolve and become less irritating, I’m trying to move towards the acceptance state, otherwise known as the place of being fine with the reality that things may not pan out as we imagined. We’re all getting very good at feeling disappointed. And hopefully we’re also getting better at embracing alternatives when they come up, being OK with seeing our friends’ pixelated faces instead of their flesh bodies, and not knowing when a border might open or close. ‘Accepting’ these things still feels foreign and uneasy, but if it doesn’t make my stomach churn with furious disappointment, I’ll count that as a win.