Thoughts From The Waiting Room

On three women friendships, not knowing, and marriage.

I'm in a liminal phase of my life right now. Waiting quietly to turn a page. There's a serenity I'm in touch with as I write this, and I suppose I have, at least in part, my past self to thank.

In November last year, I made a quiet, half pact with myself to create tolerance for uncertainty.

In some podcast I was listening to while walking around my mother's apartment, I heard Dannagal Young say a certain striking thing about how our brains tend to frantically grasp for closure when faced with uncertainty. It turns out, we're not wired for not knowing - and waiting.

Now this is not a novel idea - the spiritual and artist circuit has long peddled the virtues of embracing the unknown - Rumi, Ram Dass, Eckart Tolle, Pema Chodron, Rupi Kaur (and even Karan freaking Johar I’m pretty sure) have all said it, one way or the other.

But a combination of Young's framing, and my readiness for the message helped me realize that the price for not tolerating uncertainty was steeper than mere misery. It was actively reducing the circumference of my life.

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Something poignant about this woodblock print illustration of the skeleton woman. Buy here.

Next month, K and I will have been together 6 years. We can now see each other in clear hospital light - the stuff that is solid and sublime, and the stuff we really, really would prefer not to talk about unless we're fighting.

After a particularly rough weekend morning, I escaped to an afternoon to myself - consisting of staring like a ghost at overpriced skincare and ceramics at high end stores, and attempting to read and write at an aggressively air-conditioned cafe.

As I headed out the door, I quickly grabbed my copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves - a book I've had for five-plus years, but have found impenetrable. My friend Z’s fascinating sounding Jungian therapist has referenced this book a lot, and so I decided to try again.

So I settled myself into a seat by a large window, quelled the feminine urge in me to roundhouse kick the man sitting opposite me wearing a cap (you have to trust your intuition when you see a douche), and ordered a latte.

Then I picked up the book, placed a hand on it, closed my eyes, asked it (and my subconscious) what I needed to know, and opened to a random page.

It opened straight to the story of The Skeleton Woman. It's an old Inuit folktale apparently, and it goes like this: A young woman is thrown into the sea and becomes nothing but bones on the ocean floor. Years later, a fisherman accidentally hooks her skeleton while fishing. Completely terrified, he flees to his snowhouse, unknowingly dragging her tangled bones behind him. When he discovers her jumbled skeleton in his home, he eventually moves beyond fear to compassion, untangling and arranging her bones. While he sleeps, she drinks one of his tears and uses his heart as a drum to restore herself. They wake embraced, beginning a relationship of abundance.

I thought about what Clarissa might really mean.

This was a direct personal attack, no question. Because I am the fisherman, running from K's bones. And K is the fisherman, running from mine. We're also both skeleton women. Tangled and dragged and waiting to be seen completely. And terrified and bothered by the sight of the bones.

I'm beginning to think that the price of deep connection is the confronting of this skeleton woman in our partners. And I can't say for sure, but it might even be a sacred privilege, and our life's greatest work to do that job well.

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Like everyone, I watched The White Lotus and thoroughly enjoyed Mike White's mischievous, profound writing. I thought this season was by far the best of the three, and K was least surprised that I enjoyed his exploration of prayer and spirituality as a means to save us from ourselves.

I initially felt like the weakest link in the show was the three women friendship between Laurie, Jacyln and Kate. The premise that they are catty to each other felt obvious and almost cartoonish. But then I realized that my critique was a cover - this caricature friendship was, at least in part, a mirror - and I was, in fact, triggered.

I've orbited in three-person female friendship constellations for decades - in life and at work - and sometimes they are the same thing.

My oldest friendship trinity has weathered three decades - and that friendship feels like a type of nourishing pond to me. We live in three different cities, and are leading entirely different sorts of lives. But when we meet, (even if online in our newly opened 3 human Book Club), it's instantly like we're characters in some indie film where women actually talk about something besides men and other people. The thirty-year perspective we have on each other's lives gives everything this gorgeous, textured historicity. So to that extent, I'm with Laurie on time.

I'm no longer afraid of any feelings that come up for me in this friendship, because we've been through the wringer since we were barely 15 and we've come out okay. We know in our bones that our love for each other is more than any ephemeral human unpleasantness. Every 'fight' has only served as comedy material months after.

But in others - mostly those that have come together circumstantially, I have to admit that we sometimes perform an unconscious version of friendship. There's an inevitable shock you feel when you note the gap between what we'll say to each other's faces, and what we'll say behind our backs. It is almost violent - it is solidarity as a fashion statement, rather than solidarity for the strength and joy and nobility of it.

I've been both perpetrator and victim in these dynamics. I've smiled and nodded while dying on the inside and I've felt the sting of discovering someone's true opinion after accepting their performance of support. None of us are innocent here, and none of us are villains. We're just caught in a tragic dynamic and we don't know how to stop.

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All this making space for not knowing has given me at least one gift - a lighter mind. I'm not compulsively meaning-making. And it's like the inside of my mind is experiencing an ambient, pre-surrender.

This weightlessness paired well with the immersive experience of meeting my beautiful baby niece for the first time. Babies are pristine.

Watching my niece navigate a kid's playground with her beginner's mind was a thing of soft sunlight. Words cannot express the innate connection and gentle love I felt for her.

During that same trip, I watched K inhabit a home with his parents. There is a bittersweetness to going back home and witnessing our parents aging. I saw K negotiate this in real time - he was simultaneously more childlike and parental. The inversion of roles has been set.

Something about all this family time made me consider things like the circle of life and the enormous political and economic enterprise that is the act of having children in 2025.

We saw our siblings raise their babies - and we saw how it brings out the best in them - my brother as a girl daddy is a revelation - she's quite literally unearthed a softness in him that is a far cry from his 'Raw is War' days. Love argues that creating life is transcendence itself. Children connect you to continuity. To life's impossible scale—both vast and microscopic. Everyday magic.

But then I also see the daunting relentlessness of parenting. How it's an endless parade of little logistics. Each tedious necessity piling upon the next until they threaten to upend your identity completely—replacing purpose and its pursuit with the potentially mundane mechanics of keeping another human alive.

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Am I drawing conclusions? I hope not. I’m willing to be surprised.