I don’t deal very well with uncertainty. The absence of new posts over the past few weeks was due not so much to sheer laziness as to a nagging feeling that I shouldn’t make any updates to my electronic life until my real life gains some definition. While waiting for some semblance of certainty, I ignored my family and avoided my friends. I wasn’t looking for solitude or wallowing in loneliness – I was simply hibernating, laying low until I could finally produce a worthy piece of news for those who take an interest in my future. And now I sense that my hibernation has outlived its usefulness. I fear that if I lay low any longer, to the outside world and maybe even to myself I will appear to have died in my sleep.
It is time to come clean – I still have no news to give. I accepted a job offer in Shanghai and rejected one in Hong Kong, but I have yet to sign a contract or fix a start date. I worry that my employer will back out at the last moment, I fret about getting a visa, I question my own decisions. Have you ever played with a toy that looks like a tube filled with liquid, and the harder you try to hold on to it, the faster it slips out of your hands? If you have, imagine that that tube is your life – a future that you have worked hard to create for yourself – and understand what kind of mental strength is needed to make light of the situation and maintain enough self-control to hold on to the last bits of sanity you may still possess.
All that I can do is keep waiting.
May 27, 2008 at 9:52 am
“enough self-control to hold on to the last bits of sanity you may still possess”
I read that phrase and I thought you need to calm down… as we say in spanish “you are the one holding your lfe’s reins”. don’t worry so much, Lyuba, and please have a little more faith on yourself.
waiting is uncomfortable but necessary -and maybe you want to spend some time having fun too, not only hibernating-.
how’s that for an optimistic message?
I hope you buy it