A reframe for women who have been told to wait.
You have been told to be patient.
You have been told this since you were small.
By a teacher who wanted you to wait your turn.
By a parent who needed five more minutes.
By a manager who could not yet give you the answer.
By a partner who would get to it.
By a doctor whose receptionist asked you to take a seat.
By the time you were thirty, you had absorbed patience as a virtue.
The kind of virtue women are praised for.
Patient with the children.
Patient with the team.
Patient with the senior who keeps missing the point.
Patient with the husband whose patience has not been asked of him in the same way.
Patient with the timing of your own life, which everyone seems to have an opinion on.
The praise was real.
The instruction was older than the praise.
You were not being asked to be patient because patience was the right response to the situation.
You were being asked to be patient because your waiting kept the situation comfortable for someone else.
This essay is about how to tell the two apart.
Two kinds of patience
The first kind of patience is strategic.
It is the patience of the gardener who knows the tulip bulb will not bloom in October, no matter how often she checks.
The patience of the writer who knows the third chapter needs to sit for two months before the structural problem will reveal itself.
The patience of the strategist who knows the company is not yet ready for the conversation that needs to happen, and waits until the room can hold it.
This patience is active.
It involves attention, judgement, and the careful management of one’s own restlessness.
It is closer to a discipline than a virtue.
The person practising it is not waiting passively.
She is timing herself precisely against an unfolding situation she has read with care.
The second kind of patience is disappearance.
It is the patience that is asked of you when there is no real reason for the delay, except that the asker would prefer you not to insist.
The patience of the woman whose promotion has been deferred for three years and is told to wait one more cycle.
The patience of the mother whose own ambitions have been parked at the kerb of family life and is told her time will come.
The patience of the friend who has been waiting for an apology that will never arrive, and is told to give the other person time.
This patience is passive.
It involves the slow erosion of insistence.
It is closer to a fading than a discipline.
The person practising it is not timing herself. She is being timed out.
The two patiences look the same from the outside.
They both involve waiting.
They diverge entirely in what they are doing on the inside.
The diagnostic
You can tell the two apart with one question.
Ask yourself: is the waiting moving toward something specific, or is it absorbing pressure that should be applied elsewhere?
If the answer is the first one, the patience is strategic.
You are waiting for a real condition to ripen.
The bulb in October.
The third chapter.
The room that cannot yet hold the conversation.
The waiting has a destination.
You are managing your own restlessness in service of an outcome you have chosen.
If the answer is the second one, the patience is disappearance.
You are not waiting for anything to ripen.
You are absorbing the pressure that would otherwise have to be felt by someone else.
The manager who has not yet given you the answer is not waiting for a condition to ripen.
He is hoping that, given enough time, the question will stop being asked.
The husband whose patience has not been asked of him is not waiting for the right moment to do his share.
He is benefiting from the assumption that the share is yours to bear.
The question is brutal but it is clean.
Most of the patience that has been asked of you, in most domains of your life, is the second kind.
The professional version
There is a meeting you will be in.
It might already have happened.
It might still be ahead.
It will go something like this.
You will raise a thing that needs raising.
A team member who is not delivering.
A strategy that is not working.
A budget that has been promised and not delivered.
You will raise it carefully, because you have been trained to.
You will use the language of constructive input.
You will offer alternatives.
You will end with a question rather than a demand, so that the room can absorb it without anyone having to feel called out.
The person in the room with the authority to act on it will hear you.
He will not act.
He will say something like “good points, let us sit with this for a while,” or “we are still gathering information,” or “the timing is sensitive right now.”
You will sit with the answer.
You will tell yourself, that evening, that he is being careful.
That he is processing.
That you have been impatient before and it has hurt you.
That patience is the mature response.
Three months later, the team member is still underperforming.
The strategy is still not working.
The budget is still not arriving.
The room has metabolised your raising of the issue as something that has been “handled” by being received, rather than something that requires action.
This is the structural use of the request for patience.
The request did not exist to give the situation time to develop.
The request existed to absorb your insistence so that the system could continue running without changing.
I am not asking you to never be patient at work.
I am asking you to know when the patience being requested is the strategic kind, and when it is the disappearance kind.
The first one is sometimes correct. The second one almost never is.
The personal version
There is a conversation you have probably had.
You were going through something.
You raised it with someone you trusted.
They listened.
They were warm.
They said, in language that varied, “I hear you.
Give it time.
These things take a while to settle.”
Some of the time, that was wise counsel.
The thing did need time.
Time did help.
Some of the time, that was the personal version of the professional patience.
The friend was not advising you.
She was managing her own discomfort with the situation you were describing.
She did not know what to do with what you were telling her, and “give it time” was the response that allowed her to be present without having to actually engage.
The friend was not malicious.
The friend loved you.
The friend was also not, in that moment, available for what you needed.
“Give it time” was her way of being present without being available.
You can love a friend who does this and still notice that she did it.
The two are not in conflict.
The work of being a person in a long life is to know which advice was useful, which advice was self-serving from people you nonetheless love, and which advice was a way of being asked, gently, to disappear from a conversation that the other person could not metabolise.
What strategic patience actually looks like
I do not want you to think this essay is an argument against waiting.
There is a version of waiting that is one of the most powerful things a person can do.
It is the waiting of someone who knows exactly what she is waiting for, who has done the work to verify that the waiting is going to pay, who has set conditions for herself about what she will do if the waiting fails to produce, and who carries the waiting like a held breath rather than a slow exhalation.
The woman who waits strategically does not lose herself in the wait.
She uses the wait.
She does the slow work that the wait makes available to her.
She watches the situation she is waiting for, with care, and revises her timing as new information arrives.
She knows the date by which the wait will become disappearance, and she has decided, in advance, what she will do on that date.
Most patience that is asked of women is not this.
Most patience that is asked of women is the slow, polite absorption of pressure that should have been redistributed.
You are allowed to notice the difference.
You are allowed to stop performing the second kind.
You are allowed to keep the first kind, and use it carefully, in the rooms where it actually applies.
The closing
Patience is not passivity dressed up in better language.
Patience is the discipline of waiting with intention.
The waiting that has a destination, a timeline, a decision point, and a version of you who is doing the slow work that the wait makes available.
If you are waiting and you cannot answer what you are waiting for, what the timeline is, when the wait will become unacceptable, and what you will do on that day, you are not being patient.
You are disappearing, slowly, in a way that has been made to look like a virtue.
Notice the difference.
Use the first kind.
Refuse the second.
The people who have benefited from your second kind of patience will not like the noticing.
That is information, not a problem.
If this landed, you might also like:
The Cost of Being the Person Who Always Holds It Together
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