The Sound of Waiting

The vibration of a low E string against the pads of Reese K.L.’s calloused fingers is the only sound in room 506, aside from the rhythmic, mechanical sigh of the oxygen concentrator. I am sitting in a plastic chair that has seen at least 216 similar vigils, watching Reese tune his guitar with a level of focus that feels almost like a prayer. He doesn’t look at me; he doesn’t even look at the man in the bed whose breathing has slowed to a shallow, 16-second interval. He is listening. Not just to the pitch of the strings, but to the atmosphere of the room, gauging the precise moment to let the music break the silence.

There is a script for this, of course. There is a script for hospice care, a script for grief, a script for the ‘quiet, dignified passing.’ We are all playing our parts, wearing our carefully selected expressions of solemnity, yet the air in here feels thick with the exhaustion of the performance.

The Cinematic Whistleblower

Earlier this afternoon, at exactly 2:06 PM, I sat in my car and typed a 66-line email to my supervisor. It was a masterpiece of controlled rage, a linguistic firestorm that I had been stoking for 46 days. I used words like ‘systemic failure’ and ‘profoundly disillusioned.’ I felt the heat rising in my neck, a physical manifestation of the performance of being ‘the person who finally stands up.’

But then, just as my thumb hovered over the send button, I felt a wave of nausea. I realized that the email was just another script. I was playing the role of the righteous whistleblower, using phrases I’d seen in movies and read in articles. I wasn’t being honest; I was being cinematic. I deleted the draft. The silence that followed was terrifying because it left me without a character to inhabit. I was just a person in a car, sweating in 86-degree heat, with no idea what to say if I couldn’t use the pre-written lines of a corporate drama.

We spend the majority of our lives in this state of scripted certainty. We go to weddings and funerals and job interviews, following a teleprompter that is invisibly etched into the collective consciousness. I remember attending a cousin’s gala back in 2016. The venue was draped in silk, and every woman seemed to be wearing a stunning silhouette from these Wedding Guest Dresses, moving with a grace that felt practiced and polished. I found myself adjusting my tie 116 times in the mirror, wondering if my smile looked like a smile or just a configuration of muscles that I had memorized. We are terrified of the moment the script fails us. We call that moment ‘stage fright.’ We treat it like a pathology, a glitch in the human operating system that needs to be medicated or coached away. But in this quiet room with Reese, I am starting to think that stage fright is the only honest emotion we have left. It is the physical sensation of the mask slipping.

The Void Where Music Begins

Reese K.L. has been a hospice musician for 16 years. He has played for 996 people as they crossed the threshold from the known to the unknown. He tells me, in a whisper that barely carries across the 6 feet between us, that the best performances are the ones where he forgets the chords. He says that when his mind goes blank and his heart starts to race-the classic symptoms of a panic attack-that is when the music actually begins to matter.

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In that moment of pure terror, he is no longer ‘The Musician’ providing a service. He is just a man with a wooden box, trying to find a sound that makes sense of the void. The patient, too, has dropped the script. You cannot perform death; you can only experience it.

The frustration of our modern existence is that we are constantly encouraged to curate our personas, to build a digital and social presence that is 106% polished, leaving no room for the stutter, the hesitation, or the awkward silence.

The Cost of Being Relatable

There is a peculiar kind of loneliness in being a perfect character. When you follow the script to the letter, people aren’t interacting with you; they are interacting with the role you are playing. If you are the ‘strong one,’ people lean on you until you break, but they never see the cracks because you’ve learned to paint over them. If you are the ‘funny one,’ you have to find a punchline for every tragedy, even your own. This is the core frustration: we are so busy being relatable that we’ve forgotten how to be real.

Reese once told me about a woman who spent her final 56 hours trying to apologize to her children for things they had already forgiven. She was stuck in the script of the ‘guilty parent.’ It wasn’t until she lost the strength to speak-until the script was physically taken from her-that she was able to just hold their hands and exist with them. The silence was more healing than the 136 apologies she had already uttered.

The Mandate of Performative Labor

I wonder if we could learn to induce stage fright on purpose. Not the kind that paralyzes us, but the kind that wakes us up. What if we intentionally chose the word we didn’t rehearse? What if we admitted, in the middle of a high-stakes meeting, that we are actually quite frightened of the outcome? There are 466 ways to deflect a difficult question, but only one way to answer it honestly, and that usually involves a shaky voice.

We are conditioned to see that shakiness as weakness. We are told to ‘fake it until we make it,’ a phrase that is essentially a mandate for lifelong performative labor. But making it to what? To a place where we are so good at faking it that we can no longer distinguish our own heartbeat from the rhythm of the script? That sounds less like success and more like a very comfortable prison.

Leaving the Final Chord Hanging

As the sun begins to set, casting a 76-degree glow across the room, the man in the bed takes a deeper breath than the ones before. Reese doesn’t stop playing. He shifts to a chord that feels unfinished. It’s a suspension that demands a resolution that doesn’t come. It’s uncomfortable. It makes me want to reach out and pluck the string myself just to finish the thought. But Reese leaves it hanging. He is comfortable with the unresolved. He is comfortable with the stage fright of the moment.

I think about my deleted email again. I realize that the most honest thing I could have done wasn’t to send a 66-line manifesto, but to walk into my boss’s office and say, ‘I am tired, and I don’t know how to fix this.’ That would have been unscripted. That would have been terrifying. That would have been real.

We are all waiting for the curtain to fall so we can finally take off our makeup, but we forget that we are the ones who keep pulling the curtain back up. We are the actors, the directors, and the audience of our own dissatisfaction. We judge others when they flub their lines because it reminds us of how precarious our own performance is. If I admit that Reese K.L. is more than just a ‘hospice musician,’ I have to admit that I am more than just my job title or my grievances. I have to face the 596 possibilities of who I might be if I stopped trying to be someone recognizable. It is a vast, unmapped territory. It is the silence between the notes that Reese is so careful to protect.

Maybe the goal isn’t to be fearless. Maybe the goal is to be full of fear and to step into the light anyway, without a single line memorized. The next time you feel that cold bloom of stage fright in your chest-before a date, before a difficult conversation, or before you make a choice that changes everything-don’t try to suppress it. Lean into the trembling. That is the feeling of your soul trying to break through the character you’ve been forced to play. It is the only part of you that isn’t a rehearsal.

Reese finally stops playing. The silence that rushes back into the room is different now; it is heavy, but it isn’t empty. It contains the 16 years of his experience and the 6 strings of his guitar and the unwritten future of everyone still breathing. I stand up, my knees cracking with a sound that feels like 26 years of accumulated tension, and I realize I don’t need to write that email at all. I just need to learn how to speak with a voice that isn’t trying to be heard, but is finally trying to be honest.