On the evening of Dec. 15, 2021, I awaited the debut of a three-word URL that would secure or sabotage my future: Check status update. It seemed somewhat derisive — this little arbitrator that existed in my phone — with the power to rule on what I did and did not deserve. Nevertheless, when the URL appeared, I clicked on it.
“I got in!” I howled at the screen. I jumped up in my seat; my head hit the ceiling of my old Honda Pilot as a .png of Handsome Dan danced with me on the acceptance video.
However, this ecstasy was soon eclipsed by another three words poised to exert their power over my fate. Less than 24 hours later, on the afternoon of Dec. 16, 2021, I opened a new tab in my search browser. In it, I typed the three words I had been specifically warned by the doctor not to Google: idiopathic subglottic stenosis.
“I was diagnosed,” I sobbed into the phone, my mother speechless at the other end of the line. From one day to the next, I’d received a full scholarship to Yale University and a diagnosis of rare, chronic illness. To me, the mere occurrence of the latter in itself asserted that I was deserving of this grim future.
At that moment on Dec. 16, I wanted to tear off my navy-blue collegiate sweatshirt. The iconic Yale “Y,” emblazoned in white on the front, seemed to mock me as the joy from the previous evening soured into something sinister. In the days, weeks and months that followed, a different phonetic “Y” occupied a new, intimate obsession of mine: namely, the why of what happened and the why of what I deserved. What mysterious forces had transpired to impose upon me such conflicting fates? What had gone so right on one hand, and so wrong on the other? And most importantly, which was it that I truly deserved — a future, or the lack thereof?
This relentless, but often latent, conviction that our lived realities equate exactly to what we deserve is not unique to my experience. On the contrary, it is a remarkably universal response to the enduring changes that occur throughout our lives. From spirituality to science, humans have long sought some omnipotent justification for why we have been assigned certain fates, especially when we become victim to unfortunate events. What karmic imbalance has been corrected by the death of my dog? Do I possess an “unlucky” gene? How does the loss of my job fit into God’s plan?
Often, in the midst of my own obsessive spirals, I found myself yearning for the world before Dec. 16, one with immense joy and limited pain. However, in the spacetime since my acceptance and diagnosis, I’ve developed a deeper understanding of the human obsession with deservedness: rather than produce generative answers, these harmful suppositions instead serve as a distraction from one’s own reality. By associating what we live with what we deserve, we disassociate that which we live from ourselves.
Equipped with this awareness, I’ve been able to break away from my more haunting hypotheses. Nevertheless, in this past year, I can’t say for sure whether I’ve deserved what I’ve lived: why is it that, in one fell swoop, the door to my future was simultaneously swung wide open and then slammed shut? Even still, I will never again entertain the thought of returning to the time before my diagnosis. Largely free from these haunting why’s, I now relish the security of the present, despite the uncertainty of my future. If I’d been able to rewind the clock — in other words, if I’d been able to live my life up until Dec. 15, 2021 — I would have no future at all. At least today, I’m guaranteed the present moment.
It’s been nearly one year since the best and worst moments of my life took place within the span of a single day. Notwithstanding the ongoing ambiguity about what I do and do not deserve, I am firm in my belief that I deserve the healthy, fruitful future which I so stubbornly seek. I force myself into knowing that these identities are not wholly irreconcilable or incompatible with one another, because believing otherwise would be contradictory to my current way of life. My future is here, in the here and now.