A few things that help when you’re sitting with uncertainty alone.

Part 5 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)
Teaching the Pause (Part 4)

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By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

The previous piece in this series was written for the person standing alongside someone caught in an unclear season, a friend or a mentor whose calm presence can make uncertainty easier to bear. This piece is for the person actually living inside that season, in the hours when the people who could help happen to be elsewhere. Even with good people in your life, much of that season still gets lived alone, thought through in silence long before it ever becomes a conversation.

The research in the last piece, on intolerance of uncertainty and co-regulation, assumes a second person is present, someone whose own calm can be borrowed for a while. Alone, the same nervous system still reacts to ambiguity as though it were a threat, except now only one person occupies the room, playing both parts: the one who feels the alarm, and the one who has to answer it.

Learning to play that second part starts with a distinction worth making early. What you feel, and what you have quietly decided that feeling means, are not the same thing, even though they arrive together and feel fused.

One thing that helps is writing the distinction down instead of carrying the whole conversation in your head. Psychologist James Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing found that putting a stressful experience into words, even briefly and only for yourself, loosens its grip in a way that simply turning it over in your mind rarely manages.

Try writing two short lines. In the first, put the feeling exactly as it arrives, something like I feel behind, or I feel lost. In the second, put the verdict your mind has quietly attached to it, something like I am behind everyone else, or I have ruined my chances.

Seeing the two side by side, in your own handwriting, tends to reveal something surprisingly hard to catch while a worry is still circling in your head: a feeling and a conclusion are different things. I feel lost describes what’s happening in this moment. I have ruined my chances makes a claim about your entire life. The first is likely true. The second demands proof it rarely has.

Writing both sentences down opens a better question: what do I actually know? Maybe you know that the career you once planned has stopped appealing to you, that several job applications went unanswered, or that everyone around you seems to have a clearer sense of direction. Those facts can be hard to sit with. They still say something far more specific than I have ruined my life. Once you separate the facts from the verdict, you have something you can actually think about.

Psychologist Ethan Kross offers a second way to create this kind of distance. His research on self-distancing suggests that people often give themselves better advice when they address themselves by name, or as you, rather than as I. Try asking yourself what you would say to a friend who came to you with the same history and the same fears.

The point of the exercise is simple. We often speak to other people with more perspective than we bring to our own problems. If a friend told you at thirty-five that she had ruined her life because she wanted to change careers, you would probably spot possibilities she missed entirely. You might remind her of what she has learned and how many years she still has ahead of her. Asking what you would say to that friend gives you some of the perspective that’s hard to reach while you’re standing inside your own uncertainty.

A clearer perspective, of course, has limits. The same worry can return within the hour. This is where a third practice helps. Cognitive behavioral therapy often uses a technique built around setting aside a specific time to think through the questions that keep circling. Fifteen minutes in the evening is often enough. During that window, write down whatever has been following you through the day and let yourself think about it fully.

Then, when one of those worries resurfaces at ten in the morning or three in the afternoon, jot it down and remind yourself that you’ve already set aside a time to think it through. You are giving the question your attention on a schedule you chose rather than letting it claim the entire day. Over time, this tends to loosen the habit of turning the same problem over and over again every time it appears.

Together, these practices work on different layers of the same experience. Writing separates the feeling from the conclusion you’ve attached to it, and that alone tends to loosen the sense that the conclusion is settled fact. Speaking to yourself the way you would speak to a friend adds back some perspective you lose at this range. What’s left is the tendency for the same worry to circle back on its own schedule, and that’s exactly what the fifteen-minute window is there to catch.

These practices matter because you carry so much uncertainty in private. Even someone with loving friends and generous mentors will still spend hours alone with the decisions that shape a life. The question follows you home. It shows up in the car or in the middle of the night when sleep is slow to come. You’re the only witness to most of those moments.

This is where the question of vocation comes back around. An unclear season can feel like a season where the calendar has simply stalled, especially while you’re waiting on a job or reconsidering a path entirely. Yet the experience you’re having during that time is still giving you information. You’re learning what kind of work holds your attention, and which abilities keep showing up in more than one part of your life.

The gifts we keep returning to in this series are still engaged in their conversation, even when you’re the only one in the room to hear it. Uncertainty can get loud enough to drown out everything else, but these practices help turn the volume down enough to listen again.

Sometimes that is the entire work of an unclear season: staying present long enough to notice what your own life is already trying to teach you.

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Further reading: James Pennebaker’s Opening Up by Writing It Down covers the expressive writing research in full. Ethan Kross’s Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It lays out the self-distancing work in more depth. The worry postponement technique traces back to Thomas Borkovec’s early work on generalized anxiety treatment in the 1980s.