On the Dissonance of Waiting

I sat in Starbucks today, reading my newest book, waiting for my tutoring student to show up.  A little early for what I thought was our 3:30 appointment, I checked the clock at periodic intervals.  Sometimes she ran a little late, so when 3:30 came and went, I didn’t worry too much.  But after finishing another chapter, I checked my phone again and saw it was almost 3:45.  Should I text her?  I wondered.  She isn’t usually this late.  I hope she’s okay.  After hemming and hawing about what to do, I picked up my phone to text her.  It was then that I remembered: although our normal time was 3:30, we had agreed on a 4:00 meeting time for today.  Exhaling, glad there wasn’t a scary reason for her delay, I picked up my book again.  She showed up at 4:03.

This is the exact kind of story that people use when they are trying to tell someone who is waiting for something—and who has been waiting for a long time—why they shouldn’t despair.  I know it’s so hard to wait, they say.  But keep your chin up.  Everything will turn out okay in the end.  Timing is so important.  These anecdotes—usually well-intentioned and meant to be supportive—can be helpful.  Being reminded that our human stories can end happily, that the nervewracking middle portion of the story is just a warm up for the satisfying ending, gives us hope.

But there are times when these stories are infuriating.  Because sometimes the ending that we hope for never comes.  Or it feels like someone else in our lives gets our perfect ending.  Or one of our storylines comes to an unexpected, not necessarily unwelcome, conclusion and we fail to appreciate it because we were looking for something entirely different.  Stories are one of our greatest weapons in trying to understand being human, and the collective stories we tell create that “Me, too!” moment that I believe powerfully bonds us together as few things can.  But—and this is hard for me to admit—stories can do so much damage to our ability to see reality for what it is and to appreciate the unique paths that our lives take.  When we begin to apply others’ stories, real or fictional, to our own, we lose sight of what’s in front of us—what’s real.

How do we balance this?  The hope and the reality (both our own realities and the realities of others)?  The hopes that we all have for certain things, those castles we build in the sky when we are young, are a source of fuel as we venture out on the path that we desire to follow.  Once we pick a place to set up camp and as we begin to build in earnest, on land this time, we come to know more about the soil, the climate, the resources, and the people who populate the land on which we’ve chosen to build, and the reality can create dissonance with the dreams we once had.  Dissonance can be beautiful—just ask any musician.  But there’s still something not quite right about it.  It’s unsettling.  And how do we know the difference between dissonance that is supposed to be a part of the musical score and dissonance that comes from hitting a wrong note?

There was a week in June when half of my stuff was here in my storage unit in Michigan and the other half was still at my apartment in Fort Wayne.  I was staying at my parents’ for the week so I could start work, a job I had lined up a few months before moving back—a repeat employer.  One of the million items on my moving To-Do list was researching insurance.  A friend had recommended someone she knew at a large local insurance company and I made an appointment.  (I’ll leave them nameless—not because they did anything heinous, just because it feels like the classier move.)  Five minutes into my appointment with the representative my friend had referred, he stopped the meeting and said, “Can I ask you something random?”  He was married, so I figured it wasn’t going to be an awkward date invite.  I said, “Sure.”

“Have you ever thought about doing this?” he asked.  “Um, selling insurance?” I said.  “Yeah, you’ve got such a friendly personality and high energy.  I think you’d be great at it.  Can I give you a five minute pitch for our company?”  I told him he could, and, despite not selling me insurance that day, he sold his company well enough to get me to agree to speak with a recruiter.

“This isn’t my plan,” I told myself as I walked out of the building with both insurance information and a possible new career path, “but maybe it’s what I’ve been waiting for!”

For the next month (yes, month), I followed all the steps involved in the interview process.  There was an essay I had to write, a four-hour seminar I had to attend, multiple phone and in-person interviews I had to survive, and informational surveys I had to give to people I both knew and did not know (to see if I was capable of talking to strangers about insurance).  But the activity that gave me the most to think about was the list of 200 people I had to make.

For the company to determine whether my market was any good or not, I had to list the first 200 people I would call if I got the job.  These were supposed to be the people who would give me referrals because they know I’m a trustworthy person or people who might need some insurance help themselves.  Not only did I have to list each person’s name and contact information, but I had to include his or her job title, where they work, their age bracket, how I know them, their estimated salary, and what the strength of the relationship was.  I procrastinated on this task and had to do it all in one day—and it took me the whole day to complete.  The nerdy part of me found it interesting to see all of my people broken down into these different categories.  But the “strength of relationship” column was the hardest for me.  I’m one of those people who sees everyone I know as a pretty good friend.  Having to choose a number from 1 to 5 to classify each person felt hard.

It was filling out this chart that made me so aware of why this wasn’t the job for me: I wasn’t interested in making my relationships mercenary.  I didn’t want to be that person whose name popped up on a friend’s caller ID, only to have them silence my call, afraid that I was calling for more referrals.  I didn’t want to see every person I met, from there on out, as a potential client.  Doing this activity helped me see that choosing that job would have been a misstep for me, an I-hit-the-wrong-note kind of dissonance.  So I turned the job down.

In many ways, insurance would have been the easy answer to the questions that have been pressing on me since July 2016, when I knew for sure that I was going to quit my teaching job at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.  My constant companions since have included (but are not limited to) the following questions: What’s next?  If not teaching, what?  If this plan I made when I was 18 years old isn’t the path I want to keep following, how do I go about finding a new path?  How am I going to make money?  What if I never find a job I like?  How do I find a sugar daddy so I can look pretty at parties and make cupcakes for a living?  (I kid, I kid.)

Questions like these—the ones that center around what form our lives will take—create dissonance.  They do in mine, at least.  They are jarring and heavy and all-consuming.  They are unsettling.  And work isn’t the only topic of those questions, although that’s been my primary source of dissonance since the day I graduated.  The questions that haunt adults are many in number.  And always that core question: is this dissonance, this natural dissonance that comes with adult life, is it because I’m playing the wrong note or is it because that’s how it’s supposed to be?

What I’m finding out is that the What-Kind-of-Dissonance-Is-It Game is closely connected to becoming comfortable with waiting.  Time is the only indicator of whether a choice we make is a wrong note or if it’s a blend of gorgeous, unsettling dissonance.  Sometimes, we get that time cushion before we make a definite choice, as I did with my job interview last summer.  But sometimes we make the best choice based on the information in front of us and we wait to see what happens.  Either way, waiting is the only way to know.

Except I’m totally and completely and 100% not okay with waiting.  Rome wasn’t built in a day; we just have to play the waiting game; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again…blah blah blah.  All of this feels like petty BS as I find myself again—of my own making—in a situation where I’ve quit my job and need to find a new one.  I’ve done this so many times in my adult life that I’m beginning to worry I will keep doing it because it’s normal.

This time feels different, though—a conclusion I’ve been able to reach, in part, because of the generosity of a friend who offered me free rent at a safe place where I can sort through all I’ve done so far in my adult life and make a clear decision about what is next.  In the five months since I’ve moved home to Michigan, I can see, looking back, that I’ve taken the most highly functional route I could find when I’ve completely upended my work life in the past.  I mean, let’s be real: the last time I quit my teaching job because I was overworked and cried every day, I started my own business.  I went straight from one stressful thing to another, without giving myself any leeway to do what I’ve been doing since July: take stock of what’s here, gather up what I’ve learned, make choices thoughtfully.

(Note: None of that is to say that starting my own business was the wrong choice or a thoughtless choice.  I’m incredibly proud of my LLC and the fact that I lived off of it for three years.  It’s just not a storyline I want to repeat at this juncture.)

I’ve been that drowning person who is flailing about, using up all my energy in an attempt to stay afloat, not realizing that the secret to floating is to lay back and stare at the sky.  But not this time.  This time, I’m waiting.  I’m laying back and staring at the sky.  I’m refusing to check my phone every three minutes as I wait at a Starbucks.  Oh, I’m working, too.  I’ve got four jobs right now, all situations that have showed up at just the right times (thanks, God!).  For those nice, compact storylines, I am thankful.

But as I float and stare at the sky, I’m also thinking about all the things I’ve learned along the way—about myself, about work, about adult life, about what makes me tick—and I’m taking stock of those tools and resources that will help me build my best life brick by brick.  This transition from Indiana back to Michigan has been more challenging than I expected, and I chalk that up to taking a different approach than the ones I’ve previously tried.  But Rome wasn’t built in a day.  I suppose my life (and yours) won’t be, either.