# The Waiting Room - Proposition By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-12-09 There's a particular kind of loneliness that arrives when you've figured out what you want but can't yet have it, not because you're blocked by fear or confusion, but because the door isn't open and you can't force the timing. You've positioned yourself, built the runway, started living as if the transition has already begun, and still: you wait. The self-help industry has no patience for this. It wants you to leap, burn the boats, trust that the net will appear. But this is often reckless advice from people who had safety nets they didn't notice, or who got lucky and retroactively called it courage. The honest truth is that some doors only open from the other side, and the only thing you control is whether you're ready when they do. So you stay in the holding pattern. You absorb the cost. And the people who love you see only the hours, the weight, the way you've arranged your life around a future that isn't guaranteed. And, they worry. You can't quite explain to them or yourself that you're not suffering, or that whatever you're absorbing is the price of staying ready. So you perform the complaints they expect, the small solidarity of shared grievance, because the alternative is becoming illegible: the one who claims to have made peace with circumstances that look unbearable from the outside. Here's the harder thing no one says: you may have also outgrown the people you're performing for. Not morally, not in worth, but developmentally. You've moved through enough stages to see that every framework is partial, that the complaints are a game, that the suffering is mostly optional, and you can't unsee it. This creates a second loneliness layered on the first. You're waiting for external circumstances to shift, but you're also waiting in a place where fewer people can meet you. The forty-year-old who suddenly asks whether the container they built is actually theirs. The one who knows exactly what transition they need but is banking runway until it's safe to move. The person who has stopped believing in the game but can't yet afford to stop playing. We don't have good language for any of this. We call it stuck, or burned out, or midlife crisis, because those frames let everyone feel like they understand. But the waiting room is not a crisis. It's a strategy. It's the recognition that patience is not passivity, that staying ready is a form of action, that the timing isn't yours to control. The real skill is learning to wait without collapsing into either despair or false peace. Holding the tension between _this is hard_ and _this is working_, between _I want out_ and _I'm not ready yet_. Your body will keep score of what your mind rationalizes away and you have to be honest about the cost. But cost doesn't mean the strategy is broken. The waiting room is not the obstacle to the life. The waiting room is part of the life. And the people who eventually walk through their doors are not the ones who skipped the waiting. They're the ones who stayed awake through it. #### Related Items [[Waiting]] [[Life]] [[Development]] [[Patience]] [[Reflection]] [[Family]] [[Friends]]