Waiting makes me live too many lives at once

Dear Delyara, There is something unresolved in my life right now, and I can feel how quickly uncertainty turns me into someone I don’t fully like being. I become mentally crowded. I rehearse. I imagine outcomes. I prepare emotional responses to futures that may never happen. I check my own mood as if I’m monitoring weather for a storm I’m not even sure exists. It’s exhausting. People say uncertainty is part of life, and of course that’s true. But for some of us, uncertainty does not feel like open space. It feels like suspended impact. It feels like standing in a corridor waiting for a sound that may or may not come, and not knowing whether to sit down, run, or just keep pretending you aren’t listening for it. That’s how waiting feels in my body. I don’t really wait. I brace. I think that’s what makes uncertain periods so expensive for me. It is not only the lack of answer. It is the amount of emotional labor my mind creates in the absence of one. I do so much unpaid future-work in those spaces that by the time reality arrives, I often meet it already tired. Tonight I can feel that happening again. My body is in one room, but my mind is scattered across four or five possible tomorrows, trying to protect me from all of them at once. I wish I knew how to rest inside maybe. I still don’t.