The waiting game

I feel somewhat like I'm hanging about in some existentialist waiting room of life at the moment.

I'm waiting to feel better, or at least less catastrophically unwell. The crashing fatigue, shakes, muscle weakness and severe anxiety attacks that have succeeded my tonsillitis and penicillin course are not yet abating (although they will ... I hope they will). For now, I am back to working a few hours a day at home if I can, resting as much as possible, cancelling social and other commitments, and having to be very parsimonious with my teeny tiny daily allocation of spoons. That's just how life rolls when your genome is broke, and I accept it - sort of. It doesn't make the waiting around easier, though.

I'm waiting to hear if my daughter has a place in the high school we'd like for her next year. We should hear the week after next, and as it gets closer, the tenterhooks get tighter. She *really* loves the school and so do we. It'll be such a relief to hear we're in, if we are, and a real disappointment if we miss out.

I'm waiting to see what current structural changes at my workplace will mean for not just my role, but those of my colleagues and friends. Change in organisations is inevitable and even healthy in its context, but the ferocious constancy of change in this one is its own special kind of fatiguing. Waiting, uncertainty, speculation and the frustration of having to set everything up for several possible contingencies is taking its toll.

I'm waiting for inspiration to strike me and guide me with my novel. Yes, I have a vision - shadowy, but real - of how it ends, but I have the frustrating sense that there are things I need to do along the way that just aren't gelling yet. I'm pushing out words every few days, but it's the mechanical, linking scenes I'm doing, not the master narrative - because I'm waiting for the story to reveal itself to me.

I'm waiting in several areas of my personal life, too, that I won't go into here, but again, the sense of being frozen in a time bubble waiting to be unstuck is palpable.

It's not that waiting is always so terrible, but, being a control-oriented person, I don't like uncertainty a whole lot, and most of this waiting comes with a hefty dose of Don't Really Know What Happens Next. With some of it, of course, the possibilities are finite. Daughter will, or will not, get into the school etc. With other areas, the range of outcomes is disturbingly open, and this, this, I do not like.

Most of my current level of Highly Craptastic is tied firmly to my body's dear little freak-out at the bacterial invasion and the gut-flora-killing penicillin, of course. But it wouldn't be surprising if the body malfunction was getting a bit of an assist from the mental stress of so damn much waiting, all at one time. I won't be sorry when this logjam starts to clear and things start moving again.