4th quarter's shower thoughts

i have final in 7 hours

There was this one week back in 2023 when, on several occasions, people told me—admiringly—that I’m a person with a lot of patience. Which confused me. I think they meant that I possess grace and an ability to wait or explain things without frustration, which they saw as a strength. It felt like a compliment, a recognition of my willingness to give of myself, hinted at something deeper—a certain level of sacrifice. But at the same time, I know for a fact I'm a control freak who wants things a certain way and pushes through to get it done. How does that even work?

When you’re a control freak, every moment of waiting can feel like a failure. Waiting is the antithesis of control—it’s the act of not making something happen, of suspending your usual way of acting on the world. The urge to direct, to force an outcome, conflicts with the stillness and surrender that patience requires. It's like losing grip on everything as if waiting is a form of powerlessness, an admission that you cannot control the outcome.

In a way, I do take pride in being patient, but I also find enormous agony in the act of waiting. The childish question of why me? Why is it always me who has to wait, endlessly? At times, it feels like patience and grace morph into sacrifice, into some sort of dehumanizing act of self-sabotage and self-minimization.

Where does the waiting end? Does it ever? Does it truly result in the kind of niceness and fruitful endings people assume? Or does it just drain you completely, leaving behind nothing but the hollow shell of a person you once were?

Words lose their meaning. Sickness as a metaphor. Pain as a romanticizer. Waiting as a slow decay.

Does it matter at all in the end?