Moodshop · free to read

The waiting is its own thing

Nobody warns you that waiting is harder than knowing. Knowing gives you something to do. Waiting just asks you to keep being a person while the most important fact about your life sits in somebody else's inbox.

You have probably already lived through both versions in your head. The good one quickly, almost superstitiously — then the other one in detail, several times, as though rehearsing it might soften it.

It won't. You can't pre-grieve something into being smaller. All that does is make you live the bad version for certain instead of maybe.

Here is the only useful thing anyone can tell you: the outcome is already whatever it is. It was decided before you started worrying. Your fear isn't influencing it and neither is your hope — which means you are allowed to set both down for an hour without anything bad happening because you looked away.

Eat something. That sounds stupid and it isn't. Waiting burns through you quietly, and you will want your strength for whichever answer arrives.

Text someone. Not necessarily about this. The point isn't to be talked out of it — the point is to be reminded that you exist inside a life with other things in it, and that the life continues on the far side of this either way.

The answer will come when it comes. Until then you are allowed to be a person having an ordinary hour.