Talk to some people and they’d tell you I am infuriatingly impatient. Talk to others and they may have even been convinced that my patience is saintly.
For me, at least, patience comes down to how I’m grappling with desire and control. The more I want something, and the more I think I may have control over it, the less patient I will be. And, sure, I have some control issues, but it’s the desire metric that always gets me stuck in the shit, because that seems to map quite well to an exponential growth curve.
What is it about unabridged desire that compels you to operate completely against your own self interest?
I worked on my control issues first. That helped. That made me…inconsistently patient. Realising that I don’t deserve agency over other people’s timelines, for instance, made me a lot more reasonable. But…
But if you think you can actually be patient about something you really, really, REALLY want, I fucking defy you. I think you just worked on the desire metric a long time before me and you’ve forgotten the scorching agony of candescent, raw wanting.
Good for you.
I have taken the edge off my desires now – cooled and soothed them with perspective – and that is not a sad thing in any way. They were, to quote myself from 2015, “so much more than I possibly could contain within this fragile human shape”.
I am still, by most measures, a desirous woman. Where would the fun be otherwise? But I am tempered. I can find pleasure in the wanting, now that it doesn’t consume me. Mostly.