Your Life is Happening in the Hallway (Whether You Like it or Not)

What does it mean to be patient? It means having the ability to wait for something calmly, even & especially when you want that thing REALLY FUCKING BADLY.

Whenever people told me to “just be patient,” I never found it helpful. Like what does that mean? How do you expect me to wait around, shut up, sit in the corner, and stop having the deep desires I have? It felt like being told to hold my breath until the world decided it was finally ready for me. It felt like starvation.

I wanted to write about this to discover for myself: What does it actually mean to be patient? As someone who has struggled with this my whole life, and who is currently in a season that is testing every ounce of my resolve, I needed to figure out how to actually be patient, rather than just endure it.

The irony was immediate. As I sat down at my computer to begin, the internet wasn’t working and the page wasn’t loading; how ironic that when I went to go write about being patient, it forced me to be. And what allowed me to be patient? If I sat there and waited, staring at the screen, I wouldn’t have had any patience, but instead I decided to get out a paper and a pen and start writing.

If I had sat there staring at the blank, loading screen, I wouldn’t have been practicing patience; I would have been practicing obsession.

I’m sorry but we can’t “Just chill”

We mistake suppression for patience. We think it’s about clenching our jaws, swallowing our frustration, and pretending to be “fine.” But as long as we feel blocked, and as long as we refuse to look at anything but that block, we will stay angry and stuck.

Patience isn’t about waiting; it’s about agency. It’s about finding the things you can control while the thing you want is out of reach. Instead of staring at the spinning wheel on my screen, I got out my pen and a notebook. I stopped waiting for the internet to give me permission to be a writer, and I just started writing.

Patience is what we do with our hands and our hearts while the outcome is still in the air. We can still want it, we can still care deeply, but we cannot allow the “wait” to be the thing that determines whether or not we move forward today.

I hate Moovit

I’ll start with how we see this showing up in the smaller moments. In Israel, staring at the Moovit app is the death of me. If I sit and obsessively refresh the screen to see exactly when my bus will arrive, I leave no room to sit and read. I don’t notice the people around me, and I simply miss the world. We act as if the intensity of our staring will somehow pull the bus toward us faster.

But the bus will get there when it does. We have to accept the universe’s timing, or else we live in a state of constant disappointment. We become reliant on everything going exactly as planned just to feel okay—which is a dangerous way to live, because life rarely goes exactly as planned.

But what if patience is being stuck on that bus and realizing the delay just gave you time to chat with a stranger, or a moment to finally breathe? If you still care about getting to your destination when you arrive, then the goal was real—but now you have a new story, or a new friend, to join you when you get there.

Don’t Be an Outcome Slave

I’ve had to unfortunately learn this lesson over and over because, frankly, I am not a patient person. I’ve spent months waiting to start my internship, and now that I’ve finally begun, I’m still just… waiting. I am reliant on my supervisor, waiting for clients to be assigned, waiting for the moment I can finally sit one-on-one with a human being and do the work I was born to do.

Last year, I was in an internship where things also fell through, and I ended up with only one long-term client. It felt like a robbery of my potential. This work is the thing I am most passionate about; I love the deep, meaningful relationship you are able to build with someone. I feel so incredibly grateful when people give me a look into their inner world. I have so much love, so much insight, and so much burning energy to give—and right now, it feels like it has nowhere to go.

When you have a gift that you aren’t allowed to give yet, it feels like it just sits there burning inside you. And eventually, it starts burning you.

For so long, all I could focus on was the “missing.” The clients I wasn’t seeing, the hours I wasn’t clocking, the growth I was “losing.” I convinced myself that my life was on a shelf. I told myself I couldn’t move forward until I could start. I couldn’t be happy. I would only be “okay” once I had my caseload. We all fall into this trap:

• I’ll be happy when I’m finally in that relationship.

• I’ll be happy when my body looks like that.

• I’ll be happy when I finally land that job.

And maybe we will be. I know that when I work with clients, I do light up; I am fulfilled and happy. But when we anchor our “okayness” to a future event, we make ourselves permanent hostages to a version of life that doesn’t exist yet.

I realized I was literally starving myself of all the other things I wanted to focus on—my writing, my own growth, my creative voice—because I was so obsessed with the door that wouldn’t open. I was so busy mourning the clients I didn’t have that I wasn’t even present for the person I was becoming in the waiting. I wasn’t giving myself permission to reach for anything else while I stood there, fixed on that one, single door.

Grow in the Hallway (Don’t Just Rot)

I think sometimes we mistake doing other things as “distractions,” just to keep us busy while we wait for the thing. Sometimes we scroll, we numb out, we wait for “real” life to begin, but these aren’t really ways we practice true patience; these are ways we practice suppression.

The more meaningful things we do while we wait—the writing, the poetry, the drawing, the deep conversations with friends—these are the things that allow us true patience. This “hallway” time is where I actually learn and grow in ways I couldn’t have known otherwise. When we are forced to turn away from the bolted door, we are forced to look at ourselves.

We develop a resilience and a depth that only comes from being made to wait. We learn how to sit with our own discomfort, how to find meaning in the “in-between,” and how to nourish ourselves when the world isn’t feeding us what we want. This time isn’t just the placeholder we tend to think it is, it’s actually a crucial part of your life, it’s the classroom. The person who eventually walks through that door will be so much more capable because of the time they spent in the hallway.

Looking for the Key in the same damn spot

Life opens doors at the right time. Our job is to walk through the doors we can open, rather than sitting there stuck, trying to pry open the one that is bolted shut.

It reminds me of when I was looking for my key the other day. We get so convinced that the thing we lost is in one specific spot. We keep returning to it—one, two, ten times—because we feel like it just HAS to be there if we only look hard enough. But no matter how many times we look there… nothing. The key is rarely ever where we have looked for the thousandth time. The key is almost always in the spot we never looked, simply because we told ourselves it just HAD to be where we thought it was.

When we become impatient, it’s often because we are obsessed with one specific door. We stand in the hallway, bruised and exhausted from throwing our shoulders against a door that is dead-bolted shut. We convince ourselves that if this door doesn’t open, we are stuck here forever.

But maybe we find the key the moment we stop trying to force the lock. Maybe we find it as soon as we become more curious than we are desperate. When you stop prying at the bolted door, you finally have the capacity to look around the hallway. You might realize the way into the room isn’t through the front door at all. Maybe there’s a side entrance, or a window you ignored. Maybe the way in is through the backdoor that wasn’t even locked to begin with.

Stop Prying, Start Peeking

This is the fundamental difference:

Obsession is staring at the closed door, waiting for it to change, and refusing to look anywhere else.

Patience is acknowledging the door is closed and choosing to build something meaningful in the hallway.

patience isn’t waiting, and it isn’t suprresion, it’s controlling what you can, and allowing for any outcome. It is the shift from force to curiosity. It is the realization that while you can’t make the door unlock, you can stop standing in the dark and start looking for the way that is already open.