Waiting Becomes a Personality Trait

When I lived in Hawai'i, I remember constantly having this strange thought in the back of my head: this is supposed to be it.

Not in a cynical way either. I mean literally it. The kind of life people fantasize about while sitting in traffic or staring at office walls or surviving another gray winter somewhere far away from the ocean.

And I remember feeling guilty sometimes because I knew how fortunate I was to even be there. People save for years to visit Hawai'i for one week, and I was living there full time. Everybody kept saying the same thing:

“You’re living the dream.” “You’re so lucky.” “I would never leave.”

And the weird part was… they weren’t wrong.

But underneath all of it, I felt like a wilting flower.

I didn’t really know how to explain it at the time because nothing was technically wrong. My life looked beautiful from the outside. But day after day, I kept feeling this growing disconnect between the life I was living and the person I thought I was supposed to become. I wanted work that felt meaningful to me. I wanted to build things. I wanted to feel like I was contributing to something larger than myself. And instead I felt emotionally underwater all the time, like some part of me was slowly falling asleep while the scenery around me remained breathtaking. I remember telling my boyfriend at the time, now husband, that I felt like a plant dying in perfect lighting.

And honestly, I think the moment that really crystallized the feeling happened one weekend at his family’s cabin on the other side of Maui. It’s genuinely one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been. No pressure to be anywhere. No rush. You spend the day swimming or reading or talking on the porch while the water stretches out endlessly in front of you, and at night everybody gathers around the fire telling stories while the wind moves through the trees. It honestly felt like the kind of place people move to after having some major revelation about what life is REALLY supposed to be about.

And for the first day or two, it was wonderful. Truly. But somewhere around the third day, I remember sitting on the wooden porch looking out at the water while everybody else talked and laughed around me, and this strange unease started creeping back in again. Not panic exactly. Not even unhappiness. Just this growing feeling of: okay… but what is the point of this?

I remember feeling horrible for even thinking it because there I was in literal paradise having an existential crisis. At one point I was talking to my husband’s cousin trying to explain this weird restless feeling I couldn’t shake, and all I could think about was this AJR lyric from “Inertia”: “I’m an object in motion, don’t ask where I’m going, because where I am going is right where I am.”

Which honestly felt terrifyingly accurate.

Because I think part of me was scared that I could spend years moving through beautiful places and routines and jobs and milestones while internally remaining in the exact same emotional place.

And I KNOW how ridiculous that sounds because I understand the point of rest. I understand that not every second of life needs to be optimized into productivity. But I also think there’s a difference between rest and stagnation, and I think deep down I was terrified that if I stayed too still for too long, parts of me would quietly go numb from underuse.

I think that fear got so loud at one point that I actually called my aunt crying and told her I felt like I was getting dumber.

Which sounds dramatic when I say it out loud now, but I genuinely didn’t know how else to explain the feeling.

It wasn’t that Hawai'i wasn’t beautiful. It was. It wasn’t that my life was bad. It wasn’t. I just had this growing panic that all the things people had poured into me over the years … the education, the opportunities, the encouragement, the sacrifices, the expectations … were sitting dormant inside me while I floated through another sunset feeling vaguely spiritually enriched but deeply unfulfilled.

And I remember trying to explain to her that I felt guilty all the time because so many people would KILL for the life I was living, and meanwhile I couldn’t shake this feeling that I wasn’t fully applying myself to anything. Like parts of me were slowly going unused.

So eventually I overcorrected in the most dramatic way possible and moved to New York City, which turns out is a great place to go when you are terrified of stillness. Because suddenly everything became movement. Subways. Meetings. Deadlines. Coffee shops full of people typing like their lives depended on it. Everybody walking fast and on the phone. Everybody optimizing something. Everybody becoming something.

I loved it. I still do. I mean talk about so many professional hoop jumpers in one place.

But eventually even New York started producing the same feeling in a completely different costume.

I remember one night sitting at my laptop painfully adjusting bullet points and rewriting headlines on a presentation deck for my boss at probably an unreasonable hour of the night. And the funny thing is, nobody was forcing me to care that much. I genuinely WANTED the deck to be good. I liked the challenge. I liked trying to make the story clearer and sharper and more emotionally compelling. But at some point after staring at the same slide for too long, I suddenly had this weird out-of-body thought:

why am I spending this much of my one wild and precious life thinking about bullet points?

And then immediately after that thought came another one: 

does this even matter?

Around that same time, I became mildly obsessed with Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism, because I think I was starting to realize how fragmented my attention had become.

New York has this culture where everybody is busy ALL the time. Calendars packed weeks out. Constant movement. Constant urgency. Constant low-level anxiety about whether you’re maximizing your time correctly.

And I remember feeling like I was “minoring in majors” with a lot of my work, spreading myself across so many things that I wasn’t always sure where my deepest energy was actually going. One of my coworkers recommended the book because she was feeling the exact same thing, and the two of us kept having these conversations trying to figure out:

how do we do less… while somehow still doing everything?

Which, in hindsight, is probably the impossible equation modern work culture keeps handing people. And I think that’s when the question started shifting for me. It stopped being:“Am I doing enough?”and started becoming:“Does the thing I’m doing actually last?”

Because we spend SUCH a huge percentage of our lives producing things. Emails. Decks. Meetings. Revisions. Tiny details nobody outside the room will probably ever notice. And sometimes those things genuinely do matter. Sometimes enormously. But I think somewhere along the way I realized I want the things I spend my life making to have some kind of emotional afterlife to them. Not legacy in the grand ego-driven sense. I don’t need statues built in my honor or a building named after me or whatever terrifying thing LinkedIn probably dreams about at night. I just want to believe the energy we pour into our lives leaves something meaningful behind.

I remember being at an animation premiere recently talking to a filmmaker who told me how watching The Lion King as a kid made him want to create films in the first place. And I remember feeling this strange jolt in my chest because suddenly all the questions I’d been circling started clicking into place a little differently.

I think about that a lot now whenever I send someone a song.

Anytime one of my friends or family members is having a bad day, I instinctively send them The LEGO Movie’s “Everything Is Awesome!!!.” Especially my dad. And every single time, it makes him smile.

And lately I’ve been sending people The Wild Robot’s “Kiss the Sky” whenever they need a reminder to believe in themselves a little more because every time I hear it, I feel the same thing:

maybe I can fly too.

And I think that’s what I mean when I talk about longevity. Not for fame, nor for legacy. Just the idea that something somebody created can continue living inside other people long after the original moment has passed. That art can become encouragement. Or comfort. Or emotional shorthand between people who love each other.