I wasn’t going to talk about this, I’d made a very firm promise to myself to go complete radio-silence on the issue but I only did that because I didn’t want to talk about how absolutely awful I felt. I felt stupid and incompetent and like a total disaster area. I don’t feel like that now, and even if I am all of those things, sitting around and doing nothing is never going to make it better now, is it?
After spending the past six years seemingly waiting on emails for results and acceptances and plenty of rejections besides, you’d think it would bother me less. It doesn’t. I cannot sit still and i have no patience, I want to know what the results are and I want to know what action I need to take as a result. Some people would call it being proactive, but it has so easily slipped into wishing my life away.
I know it comes from a good place because I’m young (cries about her incoming 25th birthday) and out of education and I have so much I want to do. I just want to see what’s out there and get moving again after six months back at home. It’s a mixture of never-ending stress and a lot of excitement about what could be next. I am only just getting started and I hate the feeling of being held in one place because it’s not logistically possible for me to do anything else.
Now I’m not just waiting for an email or two which will tell me where I’m headed for the next few years, I’m waiting on resolutions to arguments that might never come and feelings of solace that I am only just regaining.
Appropriate photo representation of actually physically waiting.
But if the past few months have taught me anything it’s that I’m waiting for nothing. There is no point waiting for better days because they are, quite simply, not coming. Not because life is destined to be awful or because things can only get worse, but because better days are right here and there will always be another challenge, another emotional test, but right now I have everything I need and it would be incredibly foolish to suggest otherwise.
There is no time like the present.
Honestly, there really isn’t. This might be a personality flaw but I find the longer I am made to wait for something the less I care. There’s only so much emotional strain I can put myself through because I yell ‘fuck it’ and throw generic nondescript office documents into the air. It might be a personality flaw, but a worse one is my tendency to think I need to have everything be ‘just so’ before I start working on the things I want to work on and moving in the direction I want to be going. That’s a proper flaw not just because it holds me back, but also because it stops me enjoying what is right in front of me.
And to put it politely, if I’m not enjoying that I must be out of my fucking mind.
Who doesn’t enjoy their incredibly flexible job that pays them just enough to let them travel and spend weekends with their friends and none of that even matters because what makes my life what it is are the people in it. To suggest I’ve put my life on hold waiting for an email suggests that the only things I consider to be achievements are the career-based movements that said email would bring. That’s not true and it never has been, I’ve been torturing myself with pressures I don’t even believe in because I know the achievement of having people to call when I’m sad and a group of friends to go to the pub with are just as important to me.
If this is what waiting looks like, long may it continue.
None of those things are on hold, they’re right here and I get to have them every single day. I get to book trips and make plans and write and podcast and there’s no one stopping me from doing any of those things, apart from the fact I’ve been fooled into thinking I can only be successful ‘when x happens’, that I’ll get stuff done ‘after I know about x’.
I don’t even believe in that! I don’t even believe in constructed ideas of success based on your career or income! I believe in having money, and stability and healthy social relationships - it scares me how easily I was drawn into believing things that everyone else says about life and forgetting how to live my own.
So as of today I am not waiting, this is just a period of time like any other, and it deserves the same excitement and respect and hard work that I would like to imagine myself capable of. The irony is that I stopped posting weekly (and altogether) because things got heavy, in a way that felt like it might never pass. They are better now, waiting for an email doesn’t deserve putting my life on hold, but waiting to adequately restore my self-esteem was a worthy cause and it was always going to take a bit of time. I didn’t wait for that to happen either, I went out there and got it, and so now, I will make this time count, too.
xx
