jessa

This fear of feeling like a failure has been nagging at me during the quiet moments of the day, when I am left alone with the voice inside my head. It settles in—uninvited, unhurried—like it knows I won’t chase it away. And then, as if to answer something I hadn’t yet said out loud, I came across this while catching up on the blogs I follow:

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Willingness by Banter Republic

I feel like I am already grieving a version of myself that I have built through dreams and expectations, just because I am not seeing it materialize yet. The grief feels premature and entirely real at the same time.

And while I am in another season of waiting, I feel lost in the motions—or in trying to do something that gives me self-worth.

Will I still be able to find my way back to self-worth if I never meet my imagined self? Will I grieve the loss of a path I have already imagined? And if I do grieve, would I even let myself call it that?

The waiting is stirring up my sense of self, especially when everything feels contingent on one outcome. I find it hard to invest fully in everything else, knowing that I am in a season of waiting and impermanence.

I even find myself pouring energy and time into activities that keep me busy, as a way of feeling productive and present while the bigger picture is out of my hands. It happened before too when I was out of contract work and uncertainty about my future felt widest. I relearned how to crochet. I started a cardigan, working at it as if there were a deadline; as if finishing it would mean something had been resolved.

I still have a few more days before—hopefully—I will receive some news about the thing I have been working on since last year. And I have been thinking: regardless of the results, I want to find a sense of purpose that doesn’t live entirely inside that envelope. One that doesn’t require a particular outcome to feel real.

Maybe that is what this waiting is actually asking of me: not patience, but a quieter kind of reconstruction. A way back to myself that doesn’t depend on arriving anywhere specific.