In the Waiting Line

Sometimes, you have to wait and I might be exceptionally impatient but waiting is my most anxiety-inducing feeling. I call it a feeling instead of an action because it actually requires complete inaction, desperately wanting to do anything out of the readiness to make the nothingness stop.

I was in the Catkills with dear friends a few weeks ago. I always wanted Catskills friends, it’s one of those things I fantasized about when I moved to the East Coast- I’ll have Catskills friends and I’ll have Hamptons friends. It takes a year or two to establish your chosen family as a transplant and until you do, you don’t get invited to the fun weekend getaways- the ones that make you feel like you might be too old to be there but it would’ve been nice to be invited anyway. (I see you, Surf Lodge.) I felt high on normalcy being there- no masks, no obsessive hand washing (calm down, we all quarantined and got tested beforehand!), just my little Brooklyn family, four dogs and one of everything from the Costco freezer aisles. 

I was in the hot tub one morning, drinking a mimosa, listening to the Killers and counting snowflakes like they were crap on my to do list. My new apartment snowflake, my work burnout snowflake, my confusing relationship snowflake- there were a lot of fucking snowflakes. I stopped counting and made a rule - You don’t get to feel stuck or sad sitting in a hot tub in the Catskills. I was making a list of things to wait for, forgetting to appreciate the very thing I spent two noob-Yorker years waiting for. 

I think back to pre-Covid days of riding the subway to work- I used to challenge myself to keep my phone in my pocket and look around me. If you look up from your phone on a subway, you’ll see the majority of the world waits on their phones, because it’s uncomfortable to sit quietly knowing that you’ll get wherever it is you’re supposed to go without distracting yourself on the way. You’re a passenger on the subway, there’s nothing you can do to make the damn train go any faster. And in case you’re in a hurry, you can usually count on a “sick passenger” or “stuck train” to remind you that you control nothing beyond your reactions, especially in Manhattan.

I now find myself on auto-pilot, navigating my annual snowball effect of massive changes. Since becoming a New Yorker, February has, without fail, been my frantic season of endlessly-unfolding changes. Jobs, apartments, relationships, trips back to Seattle to visit family and the other figure-outables that have come with the chore of getting older. This season of change feels harder, like my wheels for change don’t turn without extra grease and I require the full force of my circle helping me push while I keep it all in Neutral. 

I wish I wasn’t the person who wakes up and immediately scrolls through her phone but sadly, I’m normal and not one of those people with a zen morning routine (#blessed). I scroll for a few minutes and thumb over to the “memories” icon every day. On this exact day, February 24th, I was curing my anxiety with a punching bag, wearing shiny spandex I bought to impress strangers, begging the internet to tell me where in New York I should live, looking for hope after viewing my twenty-sixth potential apartment, hunting for Ukrainian comfort food like my grandma used to make, and maybe even glamorizing my stuck-ness, like I was the first person to ever feel lost in the waiting. 

Examining all of the little wars I fought with myself in past years and seeing where it led me feels like finally acknowledging a million life-advice billboards I walked past, looking for purpose in difficulty. Those dark moments of waiting- they’re comforts now. Like, girl, you did all that and you didn’t even pause to think about how. 

I’m guilty of wishing I could just be done with something. Well, there is no “done.” It’s a scary feeling when you have big plans and hopes for yourself and those plans fall through or stop progressing. So you take your place in the waiting line- there’s snacks there and limited responsibility. Waiting is part of the human experience and those lulls are a beautiful silver lining.

Lucky for me, my waiting line has Catskills cabins, mimosas, gratitude and a mile-long list of things and people I once hoped and waited for. What’s yours comes in time. The waiting line is a fine place to be.