Left Waiting

Finding meaning while life keeps happening

There’s a quiet myth that waiting automatically makes you stronger. That if you just endure something long enough, something noble will emerge… like character brewed through patience.

Cliche’s like “The Night is Darkest Just Before The Dawn”, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, spring to mind.”

I’ve been observing people lately. And I should say this early, what I am seeing, I’m not exempt from any of it.

Waiting does things to us. Subtle things. It seeps into the edges of who we are and shows up as shorter fuses, firmer opinions, less tolerance for grey. Certainty starts to feel like stability, so we cling to it. Disagreement begins to feel personal. Even questions start sounding like traps.

I have seen those cracks widen during detention. Not dramatically, but slowly. The torture of waiting while life kept happening right around me. Births. Funerals. Milestones. The world expanding while your own life sits in a holding pattern you never agreed to.

It isn’t the waiting that breaks you. It’s watching meaning unfold at a distance while your own days feel paused.

That’s when the hardening starts. You feel the pull to decide things prematurely, to adopt firmer beliefs, sharper edges, anything that gives the illusion of control. I did it too. Waiting doesn’t turn you inward in some monk-like way. It irritates you first.

Epictetus understood this long before timelines, systems or notifications. A former slave, he had no interest in pretending the world was fair. His obsession was control, or more precisely, knowing what wasn’t in your control and refusing to let it colonise your inner life.

Some things are up to you. Most things aren’t. Confuse the two and you suffer twice.

That idea hits differently when your future is suspended and everyone else’s seems to be accelerating. When you’re waiting on decisions, answers, permissions, outcomes. When the world keeps moving and you’re left managing the noise in your own head.

What changed things for me wasn’t waiting better. It was using the waiting. Mental Health First Aid accreditation. Studying the psychology of wellbeing. Developing an app. Writing a book. Working through a counselling diploma, now about sixty percent done. Not as achievements, but as anchors. Refusals to let the waiting hollow me out. I need to find a “thing” and when that “thing” is complete I go find another one. Or I think I would have struggled a lot more.

None of it cancelled the grief. One of the hardest parts of this season has been the list of bereavements I wasn’t there for. Funerals missed. Goodbyes delayed or denied. Loss experienced at a distance, which somehow makes it heavier. There’s no lesson that redeems that. It doesn’t get reframed. It gets carried.

Moments I can never get back with people I love.

The Unshackled Take is this.

Waiting doesn’t just build character. Sometimes it exposes the fractures already there. The work isn’t pretending you’re above it. The work is noticing when the wait is turning you sharper, narrower, less generous, and choosing not to let that be who you become.

Tolerance isn’t about being endlessly open. It’s about staying human while you disagree. Strength isn’t certainty. It’s restraint. It’s being able to sit in uncertainty without hardening into someone you don’t recognise.

Epictetus had it right. Freedom isn’t getting what you want. It’s not handing your inner life over to things you can’t control. Governments, timelines, decisions, other people’s lives unfolding at a pace you can’t match.

The wait may be out of your hands. What you do inside it isn’t.

And if that sounds unglamorous, good. Most things worth keeping are. You are stronger than you think.

We all have moments of weakness. That’s what they are though. Moments... They will become memories and the future you’re fighting for will be worth it in the end.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends

Stephen