The yearning is in the waiting

On staying close to what matters most

It’s Friday, 8:24 in the morning. It’s the day after I found out I didn’t get the job at Imbue. I’ve had to feel a lot of different feelings in the last 15 hours, with more to come, I’m certain. In brief, I’ve felt everything this past month. I’ve felt joy, excitement, and aliveness. I’ve also felt doubt, fear, anxiety, and, more recently, sadness, disappointment, grief, and helplessness with maybe even a healthy dash of despair.

I’ve rarely felt this way in life, especially not for a job. When I got my investment banking and WeWork jobs, I mostly felt relief because I’d checked off the box of something I was supposed to do. I felt alive when I left because it was something I wanted to do.

Imbue felt alive because I wanted it. Did I want to work in AI? It’s cool, but I’m not kept up at night by it. What felt more alive for me was the possibility of an integrated life, one where I can show up fully as myself at work. I didn’t experience this at either of my two jobs. When I reflect now, it’s clear that this sense of ‘being myself’ was what I really wanted. I didn’t believe it was possible with a ‘normal’ job.

The gamut of emotions affirms that the Imbue role was special. And it wasn’t an idea I’d concocted in my head, as I’ve done before with work and people. It was real, embodied in the flesh. The final rounds of interviews took place in person over a two-day, paid trial project. I lived what it would’ve been like to work there. The 20-minute walk to the office in Hayes Valley. Taking my shoes off at the door to put on slippers. Having conversations about my writing, healing journey, and YouTube channel because people were genuinely curious. While factors like the spacious floor plan and fully-stocked pantry were nice, it was the people who, in welcoming me, helped me feel at home. And now, it’ll remain a memory rather than a beginning.

I’m devastated.

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The storm passes, as storms do. In the days after, amidst the calm, I kept returning to the same thought: the yearning lies in the waiting.

When we were kids, yearning was the air we breathed. We’d yearn for a slice of cake or a cookie after dinner. We’d look up at the stars or the ceiling of our room and yearn to grow up. After all, growing up was where all the key moments awaited: getting a driver’s license, going off to college, moving to a big city to chase our dreams, falling in love. And yet, we lose that capacity to yearn as we, paradoxically, get older.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting long enough to know what I actually wanted. In college, the urgency picked up, setting the ticking clock to get ‘somewhere.’ I’d hear about kids who got this internship or that full-time offer and feel behind. I felt pressure, not to explore what I wanted, but to catch up—to appear like I had it figured out. I never gave space to ask: “What do I want? What’s actually mine?” Without the waiting, without the space, my wants became whatever would make me look good rather than what brought me alive.

Why? Because waiting means being with uncertainty. As uncertain as it is how long we’ll be stuck in traffic, it’s just as uncertain when we’ll meet our life partner or find an aligned job. Uncertainty is sailing in a vast ocean. There’s no land in sight, just the gentle or rough chop of the waves and endless swaths of blue. It’s disorienting. It’s terrifying. It’s soul-crushing. Time becomes unmoored—no longer a week or month or year, just this endless, formless this. And yet, it’s the very going through this process and feeling all that comes up that contributes to the sense of yearning. This is what I’ve been living for most of this year. And the longer the waiting stretches, the more mundane it becomes.

As a kid, my yearning was simple—a slice of cake, Christmas morning. But as I continue to discover more of who I am, the yearning deepens. Deeper still, with the last eight months. The guitar lessons, the e-bike—I want those. But what I yearn for, what keeps me up at night, is an integrated life. One where I can show up fully as myself and be welcomed at all hours of the day, not just outside 9-5.

And so I wait.

My days look more or less the same. I wake up, look on LinkedIn and BuiltIn for new jobs, searching the same queries each time. On Fridays, I get a newsletter that’s been a bit more fruitful. With each application or email I send, another ‘thing’ to wait for begins. I check my inbox multiple times a day, as if the more I refresh, the more likely I’ll hear back. There’s this feeling of deflation, tiredness, that I feel in certain moments. A feeling that I must keep going when all my body wants to do is rest. But a Part of me doesn’t believe I can; it wants me to exert more effort to try and make something happen.

When I left banking in March of 2022, I had plenty of interview processes and a couple of job offers within a month. I didn’t really have to yearn because I didn’t have to wait all that long. Whereas this time around, I’ve been sailing in the not-knowing since March of 2025, with no real end in sight. I’m adrift in the ocean, while Parts of me pray we’ll be carried off to land—certainty—sooner rather than later. And honestly, as much as the waiting has sucked, I’m grateful that I didn’t find a job immediately. I can’t say I would’ve felt what I do now, this deeper sense of trust and safety in the not-knowing. An intimacy with my yearning.

It showed up when I asked Rachel to pray with me. I’m not religious, but something in me needed to. That night, and the nights after, on my knees or lying in bed, I’d whisper, “Hey God, I know this is out of my control and all, and that you care deeply for me…but it’d be really great if I got this job. I really want it.” A yearning that had nowhere to go but to the silence of the dark, hoping it’d be heard.

We need to come so close, closer than close, that we can taste it. Feel it caress our skin. Then have it move away again, leaving us helpless and stuck in place, powerless at its departure. That’s when we truly feel the yearning. To want something with not just all of your heart, but all of your being.

To me, yearning comes from that deepest place ‘within’ us—our souls. It’s the compass pointing us towards aliveness. Not away from emotions, but towards all of them. Because to be fully alive is to experience everything, rather than to deny certain things in favor of others. By cutting ourselves off from the more challenging emotions, we’re unable to feel the bliss of being alive that shows up not only when the job comes, but when we’re sitting by a window with the sun pouring in, and we’re reminded that “Yes, I remember now. I’m alive.”

In the past, I didn’t know how to wait without dissociating. I didn’t yearn. I’d pull out my phone or forecast the future when things would be all dandy instead of feeling the unrest patiently awaiting me right now. Now, I make space to wait, to not know. Whether it be closing my eyes for a minute or two, or sitting on the meditation cushion, unmoving. Instead of reaching for something, I stay right here, right now.

I’ve learned that yearning isn’t something to resolve or get rid of. It’s something to stay close to. The Sufis have a practice of this: yearning for reunion with the Beloved, with God. They don’t try to make the yearning go away. They stay with it, through all the moments of disappointment and hurt, because within that staying is where they glimpse the Divine. The yearning itself is God’s presence. I’m learning the same thing. By staying close to my yearning—through the deflation, inbox refreshing, and prayers in the dark—I find what’s most alive in me. The yearning itself becomes the compass.

Maybe we need to wait more these days. Not as punishment, but as practice. To create space for our yearning to surface and show us more of who we are—what we actually want, not what we think we should want.

My heart is heavy right now. My energy is dimmed but not out. I’ll continue to yearn, to pray in the dark, to refresh my inbox, and keep going. Because the yearning is showing me what I actually want. Not just a job, but to be in the world again, showing up as all of myself.

I am alive. I am waiting.

The yearning is in the waiting.