You Are Not Waiting Wrong

You learn early how to wait

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

You learn it in classrooms, in lunchrooms, in the way you hover at the edge of circles & try to read the room before stepping in. You learn it by watching who gets invited, who gets ignored, who gets laughed at for trying too hard. You learn that wanting connection too openly can make you look needy, embarrassing, expendable.

So you wait.

You stay in receive mode. You listen. You laugh at the right moments. You don’t interrupt. You don’t take up too much space. You don’t assume you’re welcome unless someone makes it obvious. And even then, you’re not totally sure.

They call it social anxiety, or being shy, or being an introverted extrovert. Labels don’t matter much. What matters is that you are wired for connection but trained to approach it like a wild animal. Slowly. Carefully. Ready to bolt.

And when the silence stretches just a little too long, when the conversation stalls & you don’t know how to restart it without feeling foolish, you disappear. You fade. You tell yourself you were never really part of it anyway.

I know this because I live here too.

When I feel safe, when I feel seen, when I feel like someone actually wants me there, I can’t shut up. I tell stories. I ask questions. I make jokes. I light up. I become the version of myself people later say they miss, which always feels a little ironic.

But the moment I feel the temperature change, the moment I sense that I might be tolerated rather than wanted, I retreat. I pull back before anyone else can do it for me. It feels like self protection. It probably is. It also costs me things.

Growing up, I watched social groups form & harden. (It’s worth noting here that we moved a lot, I attended 13 schools in total) School cliques with unspoken rules. Youth groups where belonging depended on how closely you mirrored the dominant personalities. Friend circles that felt solid until they suddenly weren’t, & no one ever quite explained why.

Later it was mom circles, or work friends, or activist spaces, or professional colleagues who bonded intensely under pressure & then drifted once the project ended. It was family members who floated in & out of my life depending on the season, the crisis, the distance. It was people I loved who loved me back, just not always in the same rhythm.

Over time, I started to believe that relationships have expiration dates. That eventually I would say the wrong thing, need too much, be too quiet or too loud or too much myself. That there was a threshold I always crossed without realizing it.

So I learned to leave first. Or to shrink. Or to wait quietly until the current carried me away.

But we don’t talk enough about the people who don’t leave.

The ones who reach out without ceremony. The ones who text something random, share a meme, ask a question, tell a story, circle back months later like no time passed at all. The ones who don’t keep score. The ones who understand that life pulls us under sometimes & doesn’t hold it against us.

We don’t talk enough about how healing it is to know that someone thought of you on a random Tuesday & decided that was reason enough to say hi.

Those relationships don’t always look intense or constant. They live in the background. They coexist with jobs & kids & grief & burnout & joy. They don’t demand performance. They don’t punish silence. They don’t require you to prove your worth every time you reappear.

They just let you come back.

And maybe that’s the part you need to hear.

If you are someone who waits, who hesitates, who worries about being a bother, you are not broken. You are responding to a world that has taught you to be careful with your heart.

If you are someone who fades when the noise dies down, that doesn’t mean you don’t belong. It means you learned how to survive spaces that weren’t always gentle.

And if there are people in your life you haven’t talked to in a while but still think about, people whose presence feels like a soft place to land even after long stretches of quiet, you are probably welcome there.

You can reach out.

You don’t need a reason. You don’t need an update worthy of the interruption. You don’t need to apologize for the time that passed.

Sometimes connection isn’t about showing up loudly. Sometimes it’s about trusting that the door never actually closed.

~AK