My First Week Living in Student Halls (Postgrad Edition)

When I didn’t get either of my preferences for student accommodation, I decided not to worry about it. So long as I had a place to sleep near campus, I didn’t care what that place looked like. My thinking was that if I spent energy trying to micromanage my living situation to make it as comfortable as possible, that would already be giving in to an anxious mindset. Whenever I worried about what my life in halls would be like, I told myself that trying to control the uncontrollable was a fool’s game. I told myself that whatever my living arrangement looked like, I would deal with it. In general, I’m trying to be more comfortable with the unknown. I think if I can learn to embrace uncertainty, I’ll be happier.

It’s an ongoing process. I’m trying to get into the habit of not imagining too hard what the future will look like. I know from past experience that my imagination has no fucking idea what it’s on about. Usually, it can only conceive of extremes- things going either unrealistically perfect or comically terrible. But real life is rarely so polarized. I always come back to the example of my student exchange at the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire in the United States; it’s far and away the best decision I ever made, but it wasn’t an unmitigated success. I still had moments of weakness, doubt, and sadness. Everything that happened there- both…