What exactly are you waiting for?

I used to spend all of my time waiting. Waiting for my life to look a certain way, waiting for my body to look a certain way, waiting for a certain boy to look my way. I thought that if I could just be patient, things would change and then I would finally be happy. That if I only had all of these things I was waiting for, then and only then could I be truly happy. 

But there is a big difference between being patient and being passive, and while I wasted time waiting for things I thought would finally make me feel fulfilled, I was actually letting my life pass me by without notice. 

Like a lot of people, I had a tendency to live in the future, rather than the present. My days were spent daydreaming about what my life would look like down the line, when I had a great job and a killer body and a loving partner and all of the money I could ever possibly need. I would spend hours in my own mind, visualizing and writing and rewriting a future that hadn’t happened yet, all while ignoring the goings-on of my current situation. 

It felt good to picture my future, to believe that there would be a time in my life when I could be truly content. But this future felt so far away, and I had no idea how to get from where I was currently to where I wanted to go. And because I thought it was impossible to be happy if I wasn’t living out this specific vision, I was miserable all the time. 

I resented my life for not reflecting back to me the grand visions of eternal contentment I had dreamt up, and found myself frustrated with the lack of change in my day-to-day life. 

I couldn’t understand why I felt so stuck, so trapped by my own choices and circumstances. I was 24, had moved back in with my parents for “2 weeks” a little over 6 months prior, and was quickly running out of money. At that point, I wanted to be happy with a desperation that was borderline frightening and I was beyond sick of waiting around for it to happen. 

So what did I do? The only thing that I could - I stopped waiting for things to change to find things to be happy about. My circumstances weren’t changing, and so I made a promise to myself that I would find something to be happy about every single day. I still spent hours daydreaming about the joy and love and excitement and adventure that my future might hold, but I stopped believing that I had to get there before I could be happy. 

Even if my life didn’t look like what I thought it would, even if it wasn’t the life that I still hoped to find and create for myself, that did not mean it couldn’t make me happy. And the more I looked for reasons to be happy, the more reasons to be happy I found. 

I dedicated pages in my journal to my gratitude for the freedom I had gained, the security of living at home and the happiness to be found in spending so much time with my family as an adult.

I went for walks around my neighborhood almost every day and listened to my favorite songs and thought about how lucky I was to call such a beautiful place home, how lucky I was to have the time and the ability to enjoy it in this way. 

I created a work schedule for myself that was more play than work and used the money I saved to go on trips all over the world, to experience a small fraction of what international and domestic travel can do for your mind and your body and soul. 

I stopped thinking about this time in my life as a waiting period for what came next, and instead saw it for what it was - my life, waiting for me to live it. 

I stopped being a passive audience to the unfolding of my life and started actively participating in it. I chose to make the most of this time in my life, to take all the free time and the slow living and the uncertainty of the future and channel it into appreciating every moment. And that’s how I finally found real, true, actual contentment for the first time in my life.

I never had to wait for it, there were no conditions or qualifiers that I had to check off to get there. I just had to choose to look for it, to look for reasons to smile and reasons to be thankful and reasons to love things exactly as they are. And once I started looking, I couldn’t stop. Everywhere, everyone, everything - there was no shortage of reasons to be happy, reasons to be grateful and love myself and my life exactly as it was. 

And while a part of me still longs for the future (only because I know my life is only going to continue getting better), I’m not waiting for it to actually live. The future will come whether I want it to or not, so I may as well enjoy every moment of the present as best as I possibly can.