Note: I wrote this piece last December and I worried that this piece would lose its impact if I met someone. Surely I would meet someone before an entire year passed, right? Wrong. So this piece still stands. I’m in a different place with my singleness than I was when this was written but this piece has purpose so I’m releasing it. I’ve updated the years to reflect the additional year of waiting but the message is where I was a year ago. If you’re waiting on something, I hope this piece resonates with you and makes you feel seen and less alone.
I am not a fan of the holiday season. I think a lot has to do with the end of the year being a marker when I always look back and see what happened this year. It’s been a marker for years that things didn’t happen that I wished did, that I prayed for, that I set out the year so positive they would happen. It’s also a reminder that I don’t have a significant other as everyone else shifts around to 4 Christmases I’m left with a lonely reminder that I don’t have that and in the years where I did…it reminded me that another year went by without an engagement ring, without moving to the next stage, without progressing forward. Many Decembers for me ended in despair. I always wish I could fast forward from Halloween, my favorite holiday, to March. Skip Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and Valentine’s Day and my birthday, a reminder that I’m a year older.
This year, December brings some of those same feelings but it also leaves me in awe. For the last 4 years, my life seemed stagnant, no matter how much I prayed, my friend’s prayed, all the prayer lists prayed, all the things that should have worked out didn’t. I’ve never felt so stuck. I’ve never sat in the wait for so long and in some aspects I’m still sitting in the wait, the limbo. There is nothing worse to me than limbo, the not knowing, the waiting for something to happen and absolutely nothing happening except disappointment after disappointment. The rollercoaster of getting my hopes up and then having them dashed over and over is exhausting. Exhausting might be an understatement. There have been points where I have asked my best friends to pray my prayers for me. For them to have hope for me because I simply couldn’t have it for myself anymore.
I saw people get their yeses and sometimes that gave me so much hope that maybe my yes was right around the corner and sometimes it made me feel like God forgot me.
MOLLY INCLÁN
There were points people were lucky I didn’t straight up punch them in the face when they told me “it’ll happen when you least expect it”, “it’s just not my time yet”, “it can’t last forever”. While I sat in that wait I saw a lot of people pass through their own wait way faster than mine. I saw people get divorced, find new significant others and walk down the aisle a second time while I sat in the wait. I saw people struggle through infertility and get their blessing and even celebrated birthday parties for their rainbow babies. I saw people hate their situations and all the pieces aligned and they ended up with the job, the husband, the baby, the new house etc. while I just sat. I saw people get their yeses and sometimes that gave me so much hope that maybe my yes was right around the corner and sometimes it made me feel like God forgot me. I endured over 110 rejection letters probably more but at that point what’s the use in counting I think the lesson of endurance had already been learned. There are points where I wonder if you’ve been on more dates than you can count but none led to any semblance of a relationship and if I’ve never been single longer than about a year since I was 18 and now I’m hitting year 5 completely single…at what point do you just accept you’re probably just going to be single forever?
As soon as life looked like it was going to turn around, COVID hit and took my plans completely off track and pushed me into a track I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. That’s how life felt for a long time like I didn’t even get the option to make choices, life made them for me without consulting me. But at the end of 6.5 years of waiting I have to say, things happened, things I wouldn’t have chosen for myself but are greater than anything I could have thought up myself. I ended up in grad school, after a year full of rejections I applied for one internship and received it, my concentration in grad school changed, my post-grad plans changed, my address changed, my heart changed, I started to find myself this year, I found myself around the most diverse group of people imaginable and they included me, they taught me, we celebrated all the holidays I didn’t even know existed, I felt what it was like to genuinely cheer people and their successes on, I learned to let life take me where I’m meant to be and I learned that you can open your heart again even after someone tries to destroy it, I learned what it was like to receive grace, I learned what it was like to want to be a better person for someone who was a rock for me, I learned it’s okay to walk to the beat of your own drum and I learned the wait is longer than I want most of the time but the answers they do come. They are better than what I asked for and as much as I used to hate the wait, as many times as I lost it over the wait, the frustration, the feeling of being forgotten or unseen, the wait has purpose which makes it slightly more bearable.
Wait isn’t another four-letter word we shout with disdain. The wait has purpose.
MOLLY INCLÁN
I found purpose in the wait. You can find purpose and still be angry, still be frustrated, still cry over it. So while you may be just like me and find these few months really hard to sit through and wish they would speed by, I’d like to help you reframe that into something a little more bearable. I’d like you to know I’m sitting in the wait with you. I stopped trying to hurry through the wait and embraced the fact that maybe there’s something that has to happen for me or for my person before I’m going to be ready. I joke with my friends that God keeps me single to give me good blog content. Maybe I have a purpose that needs to be fulfilled before my wait can be over.
I truly believe there is nothing more impactful than a good testimony. Maybe that’s the point of the wait. Maybe it gives me credibility. Maybe if I write the real, raw truth of the ugly, hard parts of life maybe the story is more impactful if you walk it with me. If you get to wonder if the happy ending exists with me. Maybe you’ll go back and read this one day or maybe you’re following me years after this blog post and maybe you’re going through the archive like I always do when I find someone who writes about their happy ending but references when things weren’t so good. I go and search back in their story, right before it started coming together to see if they felt the darkness and forgotten like I do at times. I don’t want to tell my story in retrospect, it all turned out happily ever after but let me tell you about how it was when it was bad. I always try to remember the fact that knowing the end of stories makes them less impactful. It marginalizes their faith. I think when we know the happy ending is coming it feels easy to have faith but what if we don’t know the happy ending is coming or if it is ever coming? What if happily ever after might not be in the cards for me? That’s when faith becomes real, becomes personal, becomes risky. That’s when I put myself out there to look like a fool, like the girl who believed something good was coming and it never did.
So that’s it, that’s the post. Walk with me. Sit with me in the wait. Savor the joy that we encounter along the wait. The wait isn’t all sadness. There are good parts. Happy parts. Fun parts. There is beauty in this season. Know that I’m there with you. Let’s watch what unfolds. Wait isn’t another four-letter word we shout with disdain. The wait has purpose. We just have to wait to find out what it is.