What the heck are you waiting for?

When your towels are too old to take hitchhiking across the galaxy.

Dear friends,

When do you decide to buy new towels?

How long do you wait after moving into a new home before you start decorating?

After you’ve written a novel, how long should you let pass before you decide what to do with it?

Well, to answer those questions, here’s my confession about my maladaptive waiting habit.

And the introduction to the novel I will be publishing very, very soon through this newsletter (I know—FINALLY some fiction).

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What the heck are you waiting for?

My most recent life-altering epiphany started with the towels. The towels that I’ve had for six years, which I bought back when I first moved into my flat. I took them out of the dryer, one random March day, having put them on an airing cycle to soften them up after they’d been air-dried, and they weren’t softened up at all. Of course they weren’t—they’d been doing a pretty good impression of cardboard for about a year at that point. I could have taken them down to the beach, stood them on their ends and jammed them into the sand to use as a series of windbreakers… or shields should anyone try to pelt rocks at me. They’d stopped absorbing water a long time ago and yet I still insisted on using them. And then, on this very random, not-at-all-special day in March, I suddenly thought… what the heck am I doing? Why haven’t I bought new towels yet? I have literally said to myself, every time I wash these darn things: ‘I really need new towels’—but kind of in a sad way, as if I didn’t have it within my power to precure new towels.

Was there a towel shortage? Did I need to take out a loan to afford new towels? Were there moral and ethical reasons why I couldn’t drive down to the nearest supermarket, purchase new towels and bring them home to use?

No.

So why hadn’t I done it?

Because… I was waiting.

What was I waiting for?

I have no idea. But I was. Waiting. For some reason. And this wasn’t the first time I had done this: waiting, for no particular reason, to do something pretty simple that would enhance my life in a small but significant way.

It was like this with replacing the bedroom curtains and buying a new sofa. Asking for new carpets in the flat. Buying a proper mattress instead of layering up toppers on the old one (like some commoner’s version of The Princess and the Pea). Buying a thermos mug for work so I could actually have a hot cup of tea in the day… for some insane reason, it took thirteen years to fix that one. 

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with waiting sometimes. It can be good to wait. Patience is a virtue and all that. But not replacing the emergency black-out curtains you borrowed from your sister three years ago, after the landlord fixed the security light outside your bedroom window so that it flooded the room at night with the light of a thousand suns, with ones you actually like and that properly fit the window is kind of weird… and stupid.

So WHY? Why do I always wait absurdly long before making such small but obvious changes?

I think it’s because, over the years, from my very early days, waiting has been hard-wired into my psyche.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Money.

For various reasons, which I won’t bore you with here, my finances have ebbed and flowed over the years. Most times I’ve had just enough to get by. For a little while I had more than enough.

When I moved into my flat, six years ago, I was jobless (by choice), living off my savings (by choice) and so had to be very careful with my spending. I had to live strictly within my means, starving artist style, which meant picking up bargains wherever I could get them. I bought a truly ugly sofa off Gumtree for £60 and hid it under a throw kindly donated by my parents. A lot of my kitchenware I got free from a friend’s landlady who was clearing out her kitchen—and yes, that means none of it matches. I hate the shape of the drinking glasses I own (they make it impossible to properly clean and dry them). I have a cabinet that I bought at the dump for £3, sanded, painted and fixed with new handles myself. I own exactly five pieces of furniture that I bought brand new specifically for my flat over the past six years—and two of those are the washer-dryer and fridge-freezer. Everything else is preloved. And I love preloved stuff. I love a bargain. But there is a difference between owning preloved stuff because you want it and buying it because you have no money and therefore no other choice.

After a few years of living frugally, my emergency, cheaply-acquired furniture became, well, so part of the furniture that I completely forgot that my ugly £60 Gumtree sofa that was really, really bad for my back was only supposed to be a temporary solution until I could buy something more comfortable and less offensive to the eyes.

When I did—finally, nervously, guiltily, as if I’d committed a serious financial crime—purchase a new sofa, one of the men who delivered it took one look at my T.V. and went “’Cor, that’s old! You should replace that next!”.

I replied: “Well, it does keep turning itself off mid-programme…”

Even when I went back into teaching and started earning a regular income again (enough, at least, to get by) I still lived in the belief that things such as new towels were beyond my means.

2. Socialisation

I have been trained to wait.

Wait for what, exactly?

This is a little embarrassing to admit, but… for marriage.

I’ve been raised in a culture—specifically a church culture—that sees marriage not only as the primary goal of adulthood, but also the only rite of passage into it. There’s a reason, you know, why people over the age of 30 get asked ‘When are you going to settle down?’. And settling down always means ‘getting married, buying a house and having kids’.

If you’re not married, or at least engaged, you have not yet ‘arrived’ at adulthood. You are still in limbo, still playing at being a grownup, still in the waiting room of ‘real life’, unable to put down roots and establish yourself as a proper member of the community until you’ve walked down the wedding aisle and legally bound yourself to another human being for life. Even when you’re in your late thirties.

Unmarried? Still single? Not even in a long-term relationship, living-together situation? '

Sorry, you are not an adult. You’re stuck in the waiting phase.

Don’t go on holiday to that place you’ve always wanted to visit with your girlfriends or even by yourself… wait until your honeymoon. Don’t start saving for a mortgage… wait until you’ve got a second income from a future spouse so you can buy a house together. Don’t get too stuck into your career… you might have to move to accommodate your spouse’s job or take maternity leave once you start a family of your own. Don’t invest too much in your friendships, especially with your still single friends… you won’t have time for them soon anyway, once your schedule is filled with mother and toddler groups, children’s birthday parties and playdates with other couples and their children.  

Don’t buy a new sofa or new towels… wait until you’re moving into your first home with your new hubby, so you can pick out furniture and kitchenware together, as a couple, and persuade your wedding guests to pay for it through your gift registry.

And if you think I have a bone to pick with how married couples get given preferential treatment over single people in church culture, you’re right—I do. I’ve watched church communities gather around newly weds to support them in financial, material and practical ways whilst my single friends, who have worked hard to bolster their single income and form a social network (often entirely one-sided in effort and initiative), have been dismissed, ignored and forgotten when they’ve reached their own significant life goals.

When I moved into my flat, I didn’t really invest in it as a place I would be living in long term. I still had this idea that at some point I would finally buy my own place when I got married or had earnt enough to take on a mortgage on my own. I was waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Six years passed. And I was still waiting. Even though I’m long over the whole marry-or-die culture, I’ve not been able to quit the waiting part—waiting to properly settle down, own my space, buy new towels.

Well, I’m not waiting anymore.

Thanks to the revelation of the old, cardboard towels, I decided to stop waiting.

I bought new towels—I’m going to need them if I ever go hitchhiking across the galaxy¹.

I also bought new bedroom curtains and I’m going to actually, finally, decorate my bedroom this summer. I’m going to start replacing my kitchenware and those annoying drinking glasses. I’m going to book the trip to Japan that I’ve been dreaming of taking for a couple of years now.

I might even quit my job and retrain to do something else.

Life is too short to keep hanging about in the waiting room. Long covid has taught me that. You never know what is going to come at you in this life, so don’t wait for the things you can and should change now. Change your job. Take that trip. Buy new towels. Go hitchhiking.

Just stop waiting—for better timing, better health, more money, whatever it is that holds you back.

So, with all that in mind, I’ve decided to publish the novel I finished writing three years ago, here, through this newsletter.

I’m a bit nervous about it, because I’ve never used this sort of platform to publish a novel before. But I’m also excited because it’s about time I kick this story out of the nest and into the real world.

So, without any further waiting, let me introduce you to my speculative, dystopian novel:

The Dying Fall -- a speculative, dystopian novel

The Dying Fall

‘that strain again, it had a dying fall’

Twelfth Night—Shakespeare

Music has been classified as a Degenerative Recreational Drug (DRD) for more than a hundred years but that doesn’t stop nineteen-year-old Carrie buying music buds from her dealer, Nano, in exchange for scraps stolen off the electronics line at work.

The penalty for breaking the DRD laws is high and if her addiction is discovered, Carrie will have to choose:

Go on the run, like her father.

Undergo neuro-sensory corrosion, like her neighbour, Mrs Giles.

Or die, like her sister, Savannah.

Struggling with her grief, her strained relationship with her mother, and family secrets that are beginning to surface, Carrie spirals further into her addiction and the underground music scene of undersounds and illegal music production.

With rising government quotas, increasing energy rations, stricter curfews and an insurgent group stirring up public unrest from the shadows, Carrie’s life is about to get more complicated and dangerous.

The smartest move would be to give up on the music.

But how can Carrie give up on the one thing that gives her life colour and meaning?

How can she give up on chasing the high of the dying fall?

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Thanks for reading, friends! I have some questions for you:

1. How good are you at waiting? Do I hold the world record for waiting to buy new towels?

2. Waiting and procrastinating are not the same thing. Discuss.

3. On the flip side… some things are totally worth waiting for. What have you waited for that was worth the wait? How long did you have to wait?

I’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment or get in touch using the buttons below.

Chapter One of The Dying Fall will be with you VERY soon!

Take care!

PJ

1. reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams