Stagnant Readiness

I told y'all I had a name for it

There is a particular kind of waiting that no one ever warned me about. It is not the calm, spiritual kind—the kind people like to romanticize when they talk about patience. It is not the passive kind either, the one where you simply sit still until life catches up. No, the waiting I have been living inside is something far more complicated, far more emotionally disruptive, far more spiritually disorienting. I only recently found the language for it: stagnant readiness.

Stagnant readiness is the state of being fully prepared for a life that has not yet arrived. It is waking up every day with the sense that you have the skills, the wisdom, the emotional maturity, the spiritual clarity—and yet nothing around you reflects it. It is knowing you are capable of moving forward, building more, being more, stepping into more—and still finding yourself standing in the same place. It is readiness that has nowhere to go.

There is a particular pain to that kind of readiness. A particular pressure. A…