The Waiting Room

So, like… what am I supposed to do now?
In between what was and what will be?
Self-love is so boring.

It’s hard enough to make the hard decisions the first time.
But holding them in the quiet is even harder.

The waiting feels less like preparation and more like punishment.
Punishment that makes my mind, my heart, and my body beg for comfort—anything familiar.
But then I remember what that comfort costs.
Going back would mean rolling back all the progress I’ve made.

So instead, I sit with the silence.
I’m in the proverbial waiting room—
Not waiting on anybody else; waiting for me.

My old, shrunken self dying in one room,
And my new, evolved self being born in the next.
But where does that leave me in the interim?

This latest transformation felt like mental diarrhea.
All week I was emptying myself—crying out years of pain, grief, confusion. Daily.
I felt hollow. Like I’d finally let it all out.

But you know how your stomach is fucked up and you poop and feel better—
but then you’re like hmmm I don’t think I’m done?
This is that.

I was whining that I was ready.
All this violent emptying of the things that made me who I thought I was left a void.
And so I thought I was ready.

Ready to be filled with new habits, new patterns, new energy—Tay 2.0.
Then another wave of shedding came.

This one brought a weight so heavy on my chest, I couldn’t feel the rest of my body.
I struggled to breathe.
I was in my bed, but I felt like I was drowning.
Not in water, not in a place.
I wasn’t in my bed or even in my room.

I was floating—lost—drowning in the waves clashing between what I want and what’s necessary.

I got on the floor to ground myself.
To feel like I wasn’t disappearing.
I did a grief meditation, hoping to come back to my body.

I cried.
I bargained.
I hoped.
I wished.
I wondered.
I reminisced.

But after all that…
I’m still here.
Still sitting in the uncomfortable chairs of the proverbial waiting room.

And while it feels like punishment, maybe it’s a sacred pause.
Maybe the waiting room is the only place where what’s dying and what’s being born can coexist.

Maybe I’m being offered this moment of rest, because I don’t assume that building myself will be any more peaceful than it was to break myself down.

So still I sit, in the proverbial waiting room.