Holding Pattern

I have a few other posts in the works, but in the meantime (i.e, to buy a few days while I finish them), here’s a short update on how “things” are going.

Short because not much is happening, since I’m currently stuck, not by choice, in a holding pattern as I  . . . wait.

Not that I’m doing nothing. It’s just that I’m not doing what, in an ideal world, I’d be able to: get up early, eat a hardy breakfast, and head to an office where I’d spend all day overworking myself (this, in case it wasn’t clear, is my ultimate life goal; I get happy shivers just thinking about it). Instead, I’ve been getting ready for what I increasingly conceptualize as a hypothetical surgery but is in reality one that, when it materializes, will, I’m sure, seem to come out of nowhere: despite having this anxious prep period, I’ll inevitably scramble when I get a date. I’ve also been doing some freelance work, which has been both fulfilling and comforting, in that I sometimes worry that I’m not as capable as I used to be.

Mostly, though, I’m waiting. For a date. For a solution to my seizures, one of which made me miss book club last evening (sorry, fellow book club members 😦 ). When I feel guilty for not being more “productive,” for not “progressing in life”—two thoughts that nag me as I wait for surgery and am not looking for a full-time job, even if for very good reasons—I try to remind myself, as my husband always does, that what I’m doing, the waiting itself, and all it entails, is hard, hard work.

Because it’s true. Waiting is hard. Existing in this holding pattern is exhausting. In the end, though, I have to trust that it’ll be worth it, that facilitating this next step in my treatment and the answers it will yield is by leaps and bounds the most productive use of my time.

Which means that I’ll count the hour I spent reading the New Yorker and eating ice cream this afternoon as work, and I’ll only feel moderately guilty about it.