You are waiting to hear about the role or the results or whether they are going to say yes.
Whether the thing you did three weeks ago was the right thing.
Weather or just going to be fine.
And you have thought about it thoroughly.
You have run it.
If it goes well.
And you have run it if it goes badly.
And you have run.
The awkward middle version where it half goes well.
And you have to decide what to do next.
None of it has helped.
And you're going to do it again tonight.
I want to be precise about what is actually happening there.
Because it is not what it looks like.
It looks like preparation.
It feels responsible.
You're thinking it through,
Considering the angles,
Not being caught off guard.
But look at what it produces.
Every scenario you run generates another scenario.
You do not narrow anything.
Each pass adds a branch.
And if it goes this way,
Then what?
And if they say that,
Then what?
The tree gets bigger every night and never once gets smaller.
That is the 10th.
Real preparation converges.
It gets more specific.
It ends.
This does not end because thinking cannot do the job you have given it.
Uncertainty is not a thinking problem.
It is a missing information problem.
And thought produces no new information.
It only recombines what you already have.
Which was exactly the material that was insufficient to begin with.
You could do this for a hundred more hours and know precisely as much as you know right now.
Then why keep doing it?
Because of what the alternative feels like.
If you stop rehearsing,
You are just a person sitting in a room with something important happening somewhere else.
To you,
Without you.
And that is the actual intolerable thing.
Not the not knowing.
Than not having a job.
Your mind is not stupid.
It has noticed you are helpless and it is manufacturing something for you to do because rehearsal feels like agency.
And helplessness feels like nothing at all.
It is a kind of work you can perform while entirely powerless.
Which is almost touching.
And it is costing you.
Your free time.
So here is a suggestion.
And it is a small one,
But it changes the whole shape of your overthinking.
Stop trying to reduce the uncertainty.
You cannot.
That is not a failure of effort.
It is not your effort to reduce.
Give yourself a job instead.
Because you were never really asking for the answer.
If someone could have told you the outcome,
Yes,
You would take it.
But underneath that,
What you are asking for is something to do with your hands while you do not know.
Something that makes you a participant rather than a person being happened to.
And there is almost always one.
It is smaller than the thing you are waiting on and it is not a substitute for it.
But it is yours.
I will say the other half of this plainly because it is the part that gets skipped.
Waiting is genuinely hard and it is not a character test.
If it is sitting heavy on you,
Say so out loud to somebody.
Not so they can fix it,
Because they cannot.
But because carrying it silently does not make you stronger.
There is nothing brave about going through something difficult entirely on your own.
So ask yourself,
What is the smallest thing here that is still mine?
Not what will resolve it,
Not what will speed it up or improve your odds.
Something in this situation that is genuinely inside your control.
However minor.
Sometimes it returns actual information.
One email that asks a question you have been guessing at.
One person who would know.
That is the best version,
Because it converts a guess into a fact.
But often there is nothing like that available and the honest answer is smaller.
Prepare the thing you will need if it goes the other way.
Write the note.
Tidy the file.
Get the one document ready that either outcome requires.
Then do that one thing.
And notice what it is for.
It is not going to change the result.
That is not what it is for.
It is for you.
It gives the part of you that has been running scenarios all week something real to hold.
And that part will accept an actual task over an imaginary large one almost every single time.
That is the whole practice.
One thing that is still yours.
Do it and let the rest be somebody else's to decide.
You're not bad at uncertainty.
You have been trying to think your way out of something that was never going to answer to thinking and then judging yourself for not managing it well.
There is something in this that is still yours.
It is probably quite small.
Go and do that one thing.
