Lizards are much more chill about these things.
I’m currently engaged in everyone’s favorite game, “hurry up and wait.”
I’m supposed to hear back about a job interview this week, to determine whether I’m going to progress in the selection process or wash out. It’s for a good job where the pay might be a little tight, but workable, that would help me advance my career. Y’know, ideal stuff. The sort of ideal that means I haven’t wanted to risk getting too far with any other potential job.
It’s put me in a bit of a bind. I’ve luckily been able to talk to a couple recruiting/temp agencies in the meantime and not get far enough to worry about making a choice, and I’ve been very clear with them I can’t accept anything until I hear back about this job. Still, I haven’t been able to look for work that might help me pay the bills at the end of the month, something that could start right away and get a pay period in before the rent’s due. Think construction labor or certain service industry gigs. Where the interview and onboarding process are fast and you get started right away. Not that I’d be guaranteed to get that sort of job so quickly. Far from it. Things are tight out there right now for a lot of people, and there’s a lot of competition. But I haven’t felt able to try.
I was talking to my psychiatrist last week, and she’s the one who used “hurry up and wait” when I described how I was needing to wait two weeks from the interview to hear back. I hadn’t thought of it that way before that point, because I very much understand that interview processes take time and I knew I was one of the earliest interviews based on the possible time slots I was offered. At this point it’s feeling more and more true, though, as the days tick down towards the end of the month and I feel like I can’t make any big moves. Not that I’m sure what move to make.
It made me think about patience. As a kid, my mom would tell me I had a tendency to be impatient. I’m not sure I 100% agree with that assessment, but I digress. As an adult, I’ve been told I have bottomless patience. It’s a double-edged sword. I’m good at being on hold. I’m good at working my way through bureaucracies and complicated procedures. I know in many cases everyone is doing their best, but people make mistakes or need breaks or I don’t know the whole truth behind how everything works, so it might take longer than I think it will and I stay patient. I do my best to be understanding and kind, to hear people out and understand, and to keep in mind that not everyone thinks or behaves like I do, and I should be patient and accepting of them as they are.
This leads to the other edge of the sword. (insert a joke about the tip here.) This patience can make me a doormat. I’ll give people more grace than I should, waiting too long before I push back to properly set boundaries. I can give the impression I don’t have needs, or that my needs don’t matter because clearly it’s not bad enough for me to say something so it’s fine, right?
It’s caused friction in my life (I guess I’m a doormat with grip strips). I once was at a party and was ready to head home for the night, and told the person I was driving home as much. Half an hour later (what felt like the longest half hour of my life due to exhaustion), it seemed like they hadn’t been saying their goodbyes and they ended up in my area of the party again. Leaving was brought up again, and I was told that I “should have been more forceful” when expressing my desire to leave the first time if I wanted to actually get going. I thought (and still think) that’s pretty bullshit, but I doubled-down on being patient and tried to take it as a lesson for communicating with this person in the future, doing my best to smother my irritation and anger in the process.[1]
Not my best moment.
Again, the patience has had a lot of benefits, too. It’s not all doormat incidents. The thing is, when you’re the person who supposedly has infinite patience, it becomes incredibly hard for people to tell when you’re running out of it. It becomes hard to be the one to tell other people you’ve run out of it. In my case, you try to find reserves far longer than is healthy. You run out of mana and cast from hit points, so to speak.
I wonder at which point my patience hurts more than it helps. At this rate, it feels like I’m never going to swing back towards having less patience enough to ever find the answer.
I did notice one person I’m impatient with constantly, though: myself. There’s so much I want to do and achieve, and I get angry at myself for not having gotten any closer already. The worst part is, there’s no upside. Some people are able to use that impatience to drive themselves hard and improve quickly. In my case it’s more like shifting to too high a gear while traveling uphill in an attempt to go faster. Instead of ascending, you just stall out.
I’m feeling stalled out right now, both externally (job hunt) and internally (oh god so many things). Patience and impatience, coming together like matter and antimatter to blow up in my face and leave a void of nothingness behind.
Hurrying up and waiting.
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[1] This ended up being an example of a larger negative pattern with how I communicated with this person, which I think is the core of what eventually caused that relationship to fall apart. Good times.
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