The Only Problem Is My Impatience
I hadn’t realised until this year just how impatient I am. It must have always been there but perhaps I mistook it for something else: ambition, perhaps, or hustling. Looking back now I see my years of longing to be “further forward” and the frustration that I was “not there yet” to be symptomatic of my great capacity for impatience.
I was ordering university prospectuses by the bucket load when I was in year ten - three years before I could even do anything about making that decision, so impatient was I to be moving on to that next part of life. When I think back to my first job out of uni, my memory of it is being constantly frustrated by the fact I hadn’t been promoted yet, didn’t have a better job title yet, had to sit here and do this work before taking the next step. Even in my work now, even writing this post, I am impatient to have it done and over with because I want to move on to the result.
This year I have been a part of some group coaching, with a recurrent theme throughout being “what is actually the problem here?” - and for me the answer often boiled down to impatience. The problem wasn’t not knowing what I wanted to do, the problem was being impatient to know definitively. The problem wasn’t loneliness or this person or that person but my impatience to hurry relationships along faster than they were ready for. The problem wasn't that I didn't have the capacity to make all the things I wanted to make, but my impatience to have everything done already.
Sometimes these things accidentally serve us - ambition can be helpful for getting us to do the thing, until it turns toxic and burns us out. But I’m sitting here racking my brains and I can’t think of a way impatience serves me. It draws me out of the present and stops me being here in my life; more than that, it makes me actively reject my actual life because it’s not what I want it to be yet. It narrows the vision, meaning I don’t have any perspective around what’s important nor am I able to see what else might be possible. It makes me ungrateful and selfish, stamping my feet because things aren’t the way I want them. It doesn’t galvanise me but makes me check out because “what’s the point, it’s taking soooo loonngggg?!”.
Identifying that I am an impatient person has been freeing. Because now when I start to feel panicky and frustrated and overthink I can identify it as impatience, and I can choose for that to not be a problem: “oh no, it’s just impatience - in the real world there’s not a problem here”. It’s as if the impatience is staging a production of generalised panic, but now I can look around the side of the set and see it is nothing but stretched canvas, not reality at all. And once I’ve realised it’s just impatience, and once I’ve decided it’s not a problem - then I can get back to living. I can get back to serenity.
