Waiting is a Trap
the personal & raw story of the night before my life burned down
Hot take: Fear doesn’t keep you stuck.
I know that’s what we’re sold. That fear is the problem. That we need more confidence, more certainty, more readiness, more blah blah blah before we make moves….
We’re told that fear is the enemy and that once we conquer it, everything changes.
And look, I get it. Fear has a strong gravitational pull that affects us all in moments…
But when I look at the women I know, love and work with, (brilliant, capable, badass, self-aware women who have done so much inner work and who are genuinely fearles) I don’t see fear holding them back.
I see waiting.
The Comfort Trap
When you wait in life, it’s because you’re comfortable enough. You’re maybe…70% happy. Happy enough that the friction hasn’t become unbearable yet.
So you wait until the relationship gets bad enough to justify leaving. Until the work feels truly intolerable before considering what else you could be doing. Until the friendship is draining your life force before you set boundaries.
You’re wait until you feel ready (Hint: ready is a myth).
You’re waiting until you get a sign (Hint: you wanting a sign is the sign).
You’re waiting until you magically feel prepared to do the thing you know you need to do.
I get it.
We’re sold the narrative that waiting is responsible. Patient. Even wise.
But what I’ve learned (mostly the hard way, lol) is that when you wait too long to make a change, life eventually makes it for you.
And when that happens, life is not gentle about it.
Burning Down the House
Let me elaborate with a painfully honest story (as we all know I love to do)
A year and a half ago, I was at the tail end of a relationship that looked good on paper. Juicy in many ways. Fun. Electric. Strong polarity. Chemistry. Shared love of nature. But if I’m honest with myself, I was feeling one foot in and one foot out often enough that I should have paid attention.
Especially during my luteal phase, when my body would whisper no. This is not it. But instead of listening to my intuition, I dismissed it as confusion because that was more convenient. I gaslit myself into thinking I was just a “one foot in, one foot out kind of girl.”
So I moved in with him. Even though I was unsure. Even though something in me was saying wait, no, not this.
And you know what? Right away, I just knew it was wrong.
I remember the exact moment. We’d just laid down the last rug, the final furnishing of our home to mark its completion. And as I stood there looking at this perfectly curated home we’d built, complete with a view of the ocean, I felt something sharp and undeniable in my gut.
This isn’t right.
That same morning, right after laying down the rug, I went outside and sat in my car feeling humbled and confessing to someone close to me that I had made the wrong decision.
This man… he wasn’t my person.
While he was great most of the time, his loud ego lashed out every time there was conflict (and he was starting conflict more and more frequently).
And let me be clear, I wasn't scared to leave him. I was excited and I knew it was right. But I feel trapped, like it would be too inconvenient and hard to uproot my life. Like maybe I couldn’t find better. I felt trapped by my own resistance to the identity shift that leaving would require.
(Because that’s what the ego does—it protects us from big changes because it knows what follows is a new identity, and the ego hates what’s unfamiliar.)
So I cried in my car, feeling trapped, and decided: I’ll wait out the lease. One year. That’s manageable. That’s responsible. I’ll just work on myself in the meantime.
When I stepped out of the car I smelled smoke. I looked up at the palatial mountains that overlooked our Palisades hill and our dream home, and saw a thick plume of smoke rising and I felt an incredible sense of calm wash over me.
Our house burned down in the Palisades fire the next day.
Little did I know that day that God was looking out for me. That what was a massive tragedy for most (and for me at the time) would become one of my greatest teachers and blessings.
I had been waiting to let go of a version of my life that I had outgrown but was attached to, and then it was taken out of my hands.
All because I didn’t want to accept that I had already outgrown the life I was clinging to.
Shortly after, I left him.
I decided not to wait any longer because life is too fucking short to wait and see what happens.
The Cost of Waiting
I don’t tell that story for drama. I tell it because I see the same thing happening quietly in so many women’s lives right now.
Not always with literal flames, but with the slow erosion of staying too long.
The exhaustion of carrying a life that no longer fits.
The damn passing of your life—this is your ONE life, and time is the only thing you cannot get more of.
The dissatisfaction that hums underneath everything when you’re not where you’re meant to be because some part of you has already moved on, and the rest of you hasn’t caught up yet.
The dissonance between who you’re becoming and the life you’re still inhabiting.
This is a lesson about choice.
Let me be clear, you can choose to make the big identity shift before life forces you to.
But choosing requires you to be brutally honest about something most of us avoid looking at directly:
Where in your life are you waiting?
Where are you telling yourself not yet—about the relationship that’s already over in your heart, the work that’s been soul-crushing for months, the expression you can feel pressing to come through, the version of yourself you already know is ready?
So I’m asking you this:
What would it feel like to choose instead of wait? What would life look like if you trusted that you don’t need the house to burn in order to rebuild?
What would it feel like to honor the version of yourself that’s already moving on, instead of forcing her to drag the rest of you along?
P.S. Hi Substack, I missed you. Lots more writing coming soon.
-Bela
This is soooo infinitely true….. and still a hard pill to swallow HAHA