the precipice of (un)certainty

In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s historic win to become New York City’s next mayor, I have been working on an essay about how to communicate productively with loved ones across party lines—a skill I’ve honed over the years thanks to my conservative parents and my own conservative past. But events in my personal and professional life are also coming to a head right now, and I felt compelled to capture this precarious yet hopeful moment. Fear not; the partisan divide guide will still be out ahead of Thanksgiving and the holidays, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this attempt to capture the ineffable!

Last week, I embarked on simultaneous uncertainties: egg freezing and submitting my book proposal to publishers. Babies, of the body and the mind.

They say it’s easier the second time around. You know what to expect. But knowing what to expect is itself a curse: I can’t help but compare the present to the past, measure the millimeters of difference between now and then. Sometimes figuratively, as I count the hours since my proposal’s submission and compare it to my timeline of yore. Sometimes literally, as I watch my doctor measure the sizes of follicles on the ultrasound. 12mm is still not enough; 24mm may be too much. The margin for error is less than half an inch.

I am a stranger to uncertainty. The irony of immigration is that even though it requires diving into the unknown, a hazy film of certainty envelops the endeavor. I may not have known where I was, but I always knew where I was going: to a better place. The same way my parents couldn’t possibly have known what the Beautiful Country was like before they stepped off that plane, but they nevertheless believed in several certainties: of progress, of betterment, of self-efficacy. They must have, because it is the only way one can muster the courage to leave behind everything and everyone.

In The Long Walk, the 2025 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, fifty teenage boys compete in an annual competition for a large cash prize and one wish. The competition is exceedingly straightforward, meritocratic even: keep on walking at a pace of 3mph. If they fall behind or step off the road or become violent with the other contestants or military overseers, then they get shot. That’s it. It’s a battle royale without the compelled intra-group violence.

The premise sounded incredibly dumb to me. A whole movie about a walking competition? I couldn’t fathom how that could be interesting. I watched battle royale films for two reasons: first, to see whether the contestants are able to see the game beyond the game; and second, to interrogate whether the need to survive always overtakes the desire for humanity. The Long Walk could possibly explore the first question, I gave it that, but the second was sure to be lost. A contest of walking—pfft.

But it turns out the movie highlights an equally pivotal and heartbreaking tipping point: the moment when someone realizes that their belief in certainty cannot overwhelm the uncertainties in living. At the beginning of the Walk, all fifty boys walk with some belief that they can win, that they might be able to escape the rampant destitution of their dystopic alternate universe America. Even though the odds are slim—they know there can only be one victor—they walk anyway.

As the Walk goes on, their belief in these initial certainties—that life can be better, that they can make their own life better—begins to fall apart. They get leg cramps or diarrhea or simply become too tired from lack of sleep to maintain the requisite pace. They start confronting the true odds of winning: one in fifty, give or take. Some even feel regret. If they hadn’t believed in their own agency and competence, they would’ve taken a hard look at the odds and never signed up for the Walk in the first place.

But they didn’t. Because they believed in themselves, at least a little.

The Walk is an allegory for hope and despair during desperate times. For each boy, there is a moment of reckoning: the flicker in their eyes as their last hope of winning dies and they stare head-on into the darkness of uncertainty. They may not win. In fact, they will probably die. After so many hours—days, even—of averting their gaze from the Abyss, they finally stare into it, and the Abyss stares back.