Ethan Lam

Apparently, in every Hallmark Christmas movie, the conflict happens exactly one hour and 35 minutes in and resolves itself in the final 25 minutes. In the final 25 minutes, the corporate businesswoman will save a dying small business and find her happy ending with her lumberjack love interest. The bed-and-breakfast owner will fall in love with her sophisticated metropolitan guest. The single dad will rediscover the magic of Christmas.

Every holiday season, I exhaust this catalogue of cheesy Christmas movies with my mom. At this point, it’s nearly impossible for us to find one we haven’t seen. It’s absurd, I know—but there’s comfort in the absurdity. Year after year, I crave the predictability of familiar Christmas classics and formulaic Hallmark specials. I appreciate knowing exactly what to expect and predicting the ending within the first five minutes.

I spent the first 18 years of my life searching for predictability, trailing behind on the predetermined path that my older sister paved. Same school, same teachers, same expectations. I would never admit it to her, but it was easier for me to follow in her footsteps than to make my own.

After my first year at Bowdoin, 1,000 miles from home, I came to the frightening realization that no one was pulling the strings of my life. Every decision exponentiates upon the last as choosing classes becomes choosing a major becomes choosing a career becomes choosing a life. Faced with one (seemingly) major life decision after another, I start to fold under the weight of possibility. Annoyingly, I am my own worst enemy: I have too much control to the point that it scares me.

Often, I wish that I had a director behind the scenes telling me what to do. (Let the record show that I am not known for my stellar decision making skills.) When it feels like everyone around me is on a predestined journey, I search—to no avail—for my own script to follow. Somewhere along the way, I missed out on the secret meeting where everyone decided their life plan. Here I am left trailing a step behind, the younger sister who can’t seem to keep up with the big kids.

Daunted by the uncertainty of the future, I grasp the present moment to stay afloat, placating the churning undercurrent of my anxiety. I almost obsessively plan each minute of my day to compensate for the fact that I cannot bring myself to plan for the next month, let alone the next year. My friends laugh at my Google calendar, where I block out absurdly large chunks of time for purportedly inconsequential tasks, hours labeled for “walk” or “breakfast.”

To cope, I find myself outsourcing my agency to some undefined cosmic energy: Whatever the universe has in store for me, I will accept, I tell myself—athough I’m still waiting for a sign that it knows what it’s doing. If something doesn’t go my way, it just wasn’t meant to be, right?

In truth, the universe is not responsible for the choices I make. I am not the main character in a Hallmark Christmas movie whose happy ending is painfully evident from the moment the conflict appears. In fact, I have made more unpredictable decisions than I give myself credit for. Bowdoin was the unpredictable choice for me. When it would have been so much easier and comfortable to attend the liberal arts college 30 minutes from my house, only by bravely embracing unpredictability have I opened the door to personal growth.

Now, I am teetering on the very precipice of unpredictability as I grapple with the decision of where to study abroad. While I still dread decision making, at a certain point, it’s time to take ownership over my life—take a leap of faith into unpredictability and let the rest work itself out.

Perhaps it’s better that I can’t predict my own life the way I might the ending of a Christmas movie. In life’s unpredictabilities, I have found unexpected fulfillment. There will be no neatly tied ribbon or perfect Christmas miracle unless I put it there myself. The weight of that knowledge still makes me anxious, but I am slowly learning to embrace the control I have over my own life and the events I can and can’t predict.

I still take comfort in knowing that the fake snow will always fall on cue. But this year, when I watch the Hallmark Christmas movies, I know that a world exists beyond the script—one where I get to choose the next scene, even if I don’t know how it ends. And maybe, for the first time, that unpredictability feels less like a threat and more like a possibility.

Evelyn Dyer is a member of the Class of 2028.