Ambiguity May Save You: A Long-Winded Answer for Why to Lean into It
A meditation for myself on choices, self-sabotage, and courage
So I quit my job suddenly last month. And it was a mess. Due to unresolved issues within myself and my team, I decided to shoot the gun and not come back. I felt absolutely horrible. I may have held a myriad of jobs, but I was never unemployed without a game plan. At first, I felt relieved for walking away from what ultimately wasn’t for me, but the dread I felt about it quickly consumed me. What followed quickly was doomscrolling on my social media accounts and waking up to recycled bot notifications, keeping my dopamine levels high and eventually overloaded. I felt like a fucking loser.
In my downtime over the past month, within the limbo of uncertainty, anxiety, and relief, I reflected on why this sudden change overwhelmed me. I didn’t understand why I felt so unreasonably unsettled with leaving, even though I hated my job, beyond the obvious reasons. Even with telling my answer now, I still don’t know if it’s an absolute one, but I was able to find some meaning in it that it felt compelling enough to share it.
When I left my job, I thought about my past, both in my professional and my personal. I am not a perfect person. Racking through each moment and experience, it makes me feel like a criminal. I didn’t always do the right thing, and the lack of accountability snowballed into a what feels like a heavy weight of regret. It’s an easy recipe for constant beration. How could I ever think about trying again? I think about the odds: the five people that have the closest proximity to me everyday are all broken or tired people, and I’m isolated in a ‘perfect’ suburbia that led women in the past to drink or pill away their dread. Looking back at my history and current situation, a gaping hole into the abyss, and looking and pushing forward into the unknown is like looking up the funnel and seeing a small pinhole of light that’s lightyears away. The gravity that pulls me down feels painful.
In my journey as a creative, we’re told to lean into ambiguity as a part of our practice, as a tool to use in order to create an end piece, but the understanding of that concept has been reposted and pasted into my cover letters constantly, up to the point where I don’t know what that means anymore. Whether through stories we see on the internet or by those that have already done it and made it to the other side, I’m told to do the work in order to see it through. At times, it just doesn’t feel real to me and something that I had the vision for. And after being exhausted by being told this through a thousand scrolls, maybe yes, I will pick myself up from the bootstraps and go into ‘doing what I need to do’.
But at this point, because I am older, the stakes are inevitably going to get higher. Whatever decision I make feels like the material conditions of my life trajectory can be utterly altered, and we’re not talking about a product that needs to be created with leaning into ambiguity. I don’t feel too incentivized about cave diving into ambiguity if my past and my present feel clearly self-evident, when my curiosity would hit another low and hitting another degree of certainty. Sometimes the saying ‘take a chance, by the end of it it’ll all be worth it’ doesn’t seem to really land for me when I look at what they have and when I look at my odds, because that journey feels less and less relatable.
Why does self-sabotage exist in my life and why does it continue to persist? There are a plenty of resources explaining as to why, and in ‘Me Versus Myself’ by Eliane Glaser, she goes down the list within a psychiatric and psychoanalytic lens. I agree with her on this point: “that the mechanical explanations of self-sabotage – neural pathways and dopamine responses – get us only so far.” She highlights how with the rise of wellness content in social media and the addicting algorithms of social media, it exacerbates both the desire to reach our version of our self-actualized selves and provides opportunities to perpetuate that self-sabotage. So starting small with finding an answer, a few actionable ways to combat this is to have a conscious awareness of it and to understand that by extracting a few ways we receive pleasure and addictions, we can build our tolerance and allow for stronger tension to be built when entering ambiguity. By doing so, I can ease the uneasiness. A little.
As much as this lightens my mental load, it doesn’t entirely give me a bit a of reprieve. How can I endure this process of rewiring my body? What can I say to myself as motivation without it being a mantra that reinforces berating my past self? What else can get me past the first mile of the run without blurting out “God just do it and it’ll all be over [you idiot that can’t learn from your mistakes]?”
In the article, ‘Beyond Authenticity’ by Samantha Rose-Hill, the point made in this may satisfy those like me that desire that bit of relief before going into the unknown. Reading this I asked myself, out of all of the decisions I made in my life, what was I motivated by? Having this sense of freedom and autonomy over who I am. Growing up I was the youngest daughter in a struggling and dysfunctional household. Throughout my adulthood I was the one that worked all the time out of a fear of poverty and having a lack of direction. Knowing even a sliver in my identity and giving time to tend to that authenticity gives me joy at the core. I have all these labels and ideas of the person I am from the people that love me, that feel somewhat defining. Yes I am those ideas of that person. And yet I’m at a point where I don’t know who I am. I know about my interests, dreams, desires, goals and who I want to be. But getting to the root of it I wouldn’t know how to grip in one sentence describing who she is. I want to be able to hold my authenticity confidently, have that concept feel like it’s mine, and feel right, like a piece of clay that molded with the shape of my hand.
So what’s the connection between my sense of authenticity and leaning into ambiguity? In ‘Beyond Authenticity, Rose-Hill condenses the German historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s critique on Martin Heideigger’s conception of the ‘True Self’. According to Heideigger, the ‘True Self’ exists when there’s no one else around us, and that’s where we can identify authenticity.
What Arendt ultimately argues is that the True Self doesn’t actually exist. That there isn’t actually a True Self, as the axis that gives dimension to the self is different. Drawing from French Existentialists and her future professor Karl Jaspers, it’s not based only on the number of people in the room as indicated by Heideigger, but it’s also based on time, splitting the self into the person you are now and the person you want to be in relation to the rest of the world. What Arendt realized is that distance between the person you are now and the person will be is closed by the act of Willing. To be Willing to do this in order to get to the ‘You’ that will be, to be working thru the hard shit in order to get to the ‘You’ that will be, and ideally the ‘You’ that you want to be.
Learning this, not only did it click the connection between my desire to know myself and the act of leaning into ambiguity, but made me realize that this is the basis of my drive. My desire to know myself is the gas that fuels the ‘Willing’, and that this is a choice I can’t consistently opt out of. Because to opt out of it is to get farther from the person I want to be, the ‘future Me’ I constantly escaped to but in reality, who I was actually running away from. If I refuse to do the Willing, if I continue to pull back, then the gap becomes even more wider than it already is, and that gap would lead to a month of dopamine overload.
Using the dimension of time, that gap can be described also as the distance between my younger self and older self, illuminating the origins of my frustrations that I have about “growing up”. This concept also applies to my past experiences too, having this sense that all of my failures and lessons are ones in which I subconsciously berated myself to ‘grow up’., even when no one was telling me this.
Leaning into ambiguity is this act of Willing, and it’s not only a part of the process but it’s a necessity. It’s part of the process that must be done in order to make you wiser about the world but about your self-concept, your confidence, the sources of pain, and the true sources of peace in my life. The act of leaning into ambiguity can also increase my tolerance for imperfection as well, distancing myself from the symptom self-sabotage. When learning more about myself, it can be rare to see that things will go as planned. But opening up myself to the possibilities of what could work out, and seeing that leaning into ambiguity can be seen as a good thing, adds to the purpose that comes with learning who I am.
It can be easy to look at my past as self-evident, and it can be damning yet safe to look at my past and deem it as future, but leaning into the ambiguity and uncertainty can be a choice that leans me into saving my own life. It can not only cultivate my curiosity and creativity as we are constantly taught, but it can also teach me more about my authentic self by just being ‘Willing’ to figure it out.
The desire to become myself is having the Willing to change.
Imperfection during the process is no longer fragmenting, but the pieces of my history that grounds my footing towards myself. Just like how with experience comes a knowing as visceral as muscle memory, leaning into ambiguity is a necessity that works in tandem with the discovering of who I am. The act of leaning into ambiguity no longer feels like gravity that brings me down: it orients me toward my resolve. It’s accepting the consequences of my actions with an uncomfortable certainty, which include confronting the possibly very steep odds. But thinking of the cost of doing that in exchange to knowing in multiple dimensions what I’m made of is a choice I’m certain of leaning into.
EDIT: after looking at my final draft I do have on last thing to add before I leave this article alone LOL: I feel that this article is heavy, and I think it’s because I feel that I’m going through this hardship and struggle by myself. But the reality is that I’m not. There one aspect of the article ‘Beyond Authenticity’ that I left out because I thought I was going too much into the concept of the Self, but I’m realizing that it’s important to include. When Karl Jaspers explored the concept of Authenticity, he asked the question, how does one facilitate it? And his conclusion is that in order to have a sense of authenticity to measure, there needs to be a,,, variable of sorts (this would be the fifth time I used a math analogy) to base it off of. And that variable is community, and the public. Authenticity is measured by how we relate to the people in our world.
I think how authenticity is conceptualized in the States is rooted in a sense of individualism. And I also think about I text and the emojis I send. And I also think about why I gravitate toward Indomie and Chapaghetti as some of my favorite ramen. I also think of when I went to a K-pop concert last week and my friend reminded me that we’re only going to this concert because I put her on the artist when we went on a trip in middle school.
Authenticity to me is having pride of who you are and rising above the limiting labels and conditions of one’s life, but it’s also comprising of all of the people that have influenced us. I believe this may be where Arendt decided that she did not agree with Heideigger, because community also plays a factor in how we define ourselves, and how we can further lean into the personal responsibility we have to ourselves and others. ‘Willing’ is also rooted in showing up for the people around you, and what I think works in tandem with living a fulfilling life.