Learning to Sit With it

Part 4 of 5 • When Your Life No Longer Fits 

I have never been particularly comfortable with uncertainty.

My instinct has always been to do something with it. Make a plan. Find the next step. Keep moving until the thing that feels unresolved begins to resolve.

So when it was finally time to get back on my feet, that is exactly what I did.

I updated my resume. Started looking for roles. Sent applications.

Then I sent more.

Over the months that followed, I would apply to more than 200 jobs.

At first, I approached the process the same way I had approached almost every other professional transition in my life: with effort, discipline, and the assumption that if I kept moving, eventually something would work out.

Until then, it usually had.

Effort had always produced some kind of movement.

This time, it wasn't producing resolution.

Applications disappeared into the void. Conversations went nowhere. Opportunities seemed promising and then vanished. Rejections accumulated.

And there were moments when I panicked.

I wanted a job. I wanted financial security. I wanted somewhere to direct my energy again.

I wanted an answer to the question everyone kept asking me, and that I kept asking myself:

What comes next?

For a while, another question sat underneath it.

Why isn't anyone hiring me?

It was an uncomfortable question, particularly after a career in which I had grown accustomed to being capable, employable, and able to make things happen through effort.

So I did what had always worked.

I kept trying.

But somewhere among all of those applications, the question began to change.

Is this even what I want?

The job descriptions had started to blur together.

Fast-paced environments. Multiple roles compressed into one. Constant optimization. Constant urgency.

Different companies. Different wording. Often the same underlying expectations.

These were environments I knew how to succeed in.

That was part of what made the realization so uncomfortable.

I could still imagine myself doing the work.

I just wasn't sure I wanted the life that seemed to come with it.

And those are two very different things.

Part of me still desperately wanted the familiar structure.

A title. A salary. A clear direction. Something that would reassure me that I was moving forward again.

But another part of me had begun to wonder whether returning to the version of life I had worked so hard to leave would actually resolve anything at all.

I didn't know what to do with that tension.

So I kept doing the thing I knew how to do.

Looking for a way forward.

There is a familiar narrative about periods like this: when one door closes, another opens.

I kept waiting for the door.

It didn't appear.

There was no obvious opportunity arriving at exactly the right moment. No new structure presenting itself neatly enough for me to step from one life into the next.

There was just uncertainty.

And I hated it.

What did I actually want from work now? What was I willing to give to it? What was I no longer willing to give?

How much of what I was chasing belonged to me, and how much belonged to the version of success I had learned to recognize?

I'd spent years learning how to navigate professional environments, how to recognize opportunities, how to make decisions and move things forward.

But all of those skills had been developed within a world whose rules I understood.

Now I was questioning the world itself.

And I had no idea what to do with that.

There is a particular discomfort in watching time pass when you don't know what you're working toward.

Days become weeks. Weeks become months.

You start wondering whether you're falling behind, even when you're no longer entirely sure what you're supposed to be catching up to.

I'd always associated progress with movement. With having a direction. With being able to point to something and say, I'm getting somewhere.

Without those familiar markers, I felt lost.

And for a long time, I tried to outrun that feeling.

I filled the uncertainty with activity, hoping that if I kept working hard enough toward an answer, I wouldn't have to spend too much time confronting the questions themselves.

But there was only so long I could keep doing that.

Eventually, I was left with the very thing I'd been trying to avoid.

Not knowing.

I couldn't manufacture a direction simply because I wanted one. I couldn't make the uncomfortable questions disappear by keeping myself busy.

And I couldn't keep pretending that wanting the uncertainty to end was the same as knowing what I wanted to come next.

I had to acknowledge that I didn't know.

That I might not know for a while.

And that, for the moment, there wasn't anything I could do to change that.

I think that's where acceptance began for me.

Not in feeling peaceful about the uncertainty, or suddenly trusting that everything would work out.

I still worried about money. I still wanted a plan. I still had days when the lack of direction felt unbearable.

But I was beginning to understand that I could accept where I was without having to like it.

The life I'd known no longer fit the way it once had, and I didn't yet know what belonged in its place.

And somewhere in that acceptance, I could finally consider a possibility I'd been resisting.

Maybe I wasn't failing to find my way back.

Maybe I didn't want to go back.

That realization didn't change my circumstances, but it changed what I was willing to consider.

That a path doesn't have to continue simply because you once committed to it. That being good at something doesn't obligate you to keep doing it forever. And that you're allowed to change your mind about the life you thought you wanted.

I'd always believed deeply in persistence. In continuing to try, finding another way, refusing to give up simply because something was difficult.

I still do.

But I was learning that persistence doesn't always mean pushing forward. Sometimes it means having the patience to stay with a question long enough to recognize that the answer may have changed.

There was permission in that.

Permission to want stability without forcing myself back into a familiar life. Permission to let what came next remain undefined for a little longer.

Learning to sit with uncertainty didn't mean I stopped wanting answers.

It meant I stopped believing I had failed simply because I didn't have them yet.

And perhaps that was the permission I needed most.

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