one day, i am gonna grow wings

a piece based on Radiohead's 'Let Down'

If you would like to listen to the song that inspired this post, click the play button above. The length of the song should match up with how long it takes to read this…I tried! Happy reading :)

Jia | Joy in Abundance

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We are always waiting. Not out of leisure, but out of instinct. Waiting is stitched into the fabric of being human—woven into our blood, passed down in our silences. We wait for clarity, for resolution, for some sign that we’re moving in the right direction, even if we have no idea where that is. We wait for an irregularity in the monotony of our daily lives, a sign in the sky, something that will finally make the quiet suffering feel like it had a purpose.

We wait for the text that changes the course of our day. For the apology we know will never come, but still imagine anyway. For the job, the realization, the sudden calm that will sweep over us and make us feel aligned…make us feel okay. We wait for a version of ourselves that will finally feel real—whole, unfractured, no longer dragging the weight of so many false starts.

There’s a kind of stillness in this waiting—not peaceful, but hollow. An underlying ache that never quite speaks in full sentences. It doesn’t scream, but it doesn’t sleep either. It hums beneath the surface. It’s there in the late-night drives to nowhere, when the road is dark and the radio plays a song we didn’t know we needed. It’s there when we sit alone in our cars after long days, engine off, hands still on the wheel, unable to go inside just yet. When we scroll through old messages not to remember, but to feel something stir. When we make coffee in silence and stare out the window—not because the view is beautiful, but because it doesn’t ask anything of us.

This waiting lives in the spaces between things. Between leaving and arriving. Between who we are and who we meant to become. It’s not dramatic. It’s subtle. A slow erosion. The sense that life is happening around us but not to us. Like being in a room behind glass—watching, but untouched. Alive, but slightly removed.

And yet, we cling to the wait. Because even if it hurts, it gives us direction. It lets us believe we are on the verge of something. That at any moment, life might begin. That this isn’t it—not yet. And maybe that’s the most dangerous kind of hope: the kind that sedates us, that makes the present feel like purgatory, all while keeping us tethered to a future we’ve never seen but still believe in.

Radiohead’s “Let Down” doesn't just describe that feeling—it lives inside it. The song is a slow unraveling, a kind of existential sigh. Disappointment, not as an event, but as a state of being. The dull ache of routine. The slow disintegration of wonder. And yet, buried in the middle of it all is this one fragile line: “One day, I am gonna grow wings.”

The line is everything.

That line—so raw, so explosive—doesn’t tiptoe into the song; it bursts out of it. It’s not a whisper, it’s a cry. A last-ditch declaration hurled into the void with everything left in the lungs. It’s the sound of someone who has lived in the weight of disappointment for too long and refuses to be buried by it. A voice clawing at the sky, demanding something more. Not a polite request for transformation, but a primal insistence that this can’t be all there is. It’s the moment where the soul refuses to settle into numbness, where even in despair, it stakes its claim on the possibility of flight. It’s the vow we tell ourselves when no one is watching: that we will not stay stuck forever. That we are meant for more. That there’s still some sliver of transformation waiting just beyond this version of ourselves.

But I keep coming back to the same question: is that promise a form of faith, or a kind of self-deception? Is it what keeps us alive—or what keeps us asleep?

Because hope, for all its beauty, is double-edged. It can be the fire that keeps us moving. But it can also be the chain that keeps us waiting. The subtle poison that makes us postpone our lives until we feel “ready,” “worthy,” “changed.” We start to live conditionally: I’ll feel joy when I get there. I’ll be whole once this happens. I’ll finally breathe when I grow my wings.

And in the meantime, we endure. Because what else can we do? We wake up, we go through the motions, we fill our days with tasks and distractions, hoping they’ll string together into something that feels like purpose. We live as though the present is a prelude, a draft, something we’ll rewrite once the real story begins.

We exist in this liminal space—between the life we have and the life we keep promising ourselves. Between the person we are and the person we’re convinced we’re supposed to become. Days lose their sharpness, their weight. They blur, becoming rehearsal. Moments become placeholders, stand-ins for the imagined brilliance of some future moment we’ve pinned all our hopes on. Even joy, when it comes, feels like it’s not the real thing—just a shadow of something greater, something we keep telling ourselves is still out there, just out of reach.

This is the trap: we mythologize the future so completely that the present becomes unbearable in comparison. The life we are living right now is reduced to a stepping stone, a waiting room. We romanticize our becoming so much that we forget to exist. We begin to measure our worth not by what we are, but by how close we are to some invisible finish line. We start believing that healing, wholeness, meaning—those are things that happen after. After the breakup. After the breakthrough. After we lose the weight, find the job, move cities, change names, grow wings.

But what if the wings never come? Not because we are unworthy or incapable, but because we were never meant to fly away. What if growth isn’t a grand ascent, but something quieter, more patient? What if it’s not linear or vertical, but circular—returning us again and again to the same truths, asking us to see them with new eyes?

We are so obsessed with transcendence—with the idea of rising above our circumstances, our pain, our limits. But maybe the miracle isn’t in transcending this life. Maybe it’s in learning how to stay inside it without flinching. To sit with the discomfort, the longing, the ache, and let it soften us instead of breaking us. Maybe it looks like doing the same hard thing again—but with more honesty this time. Maybe it’s crying and still going to the grocery store. Maybe it’s choosing not to dissociate during a conversation. Maybe it’s not leaving, even when leaving would feel easier.

Because there is something sacred in the staying. In the way we keep showing up for the small, unremarkable rituals of life even when they feel meaningless. In the way we carry our unanswered questions and unfulfilled dreams with us, not as burdens, but as companions. In the way we keep loving—even when love is hard, scary, messy, imperfect.

Maybe the wings come not as escape, but as endurance. Not as a way out, but as a way through. They are there in the quiet resilience of waking up each day and trying again, even when the weight of yesterday still lingers. They are in the courage to keep choosing ourselves, even when our own minds are the battlefield.

And maybe the real awakening isn’t about discovering the future or transcending the now. Maybe it’s realizing that there is nothing to wait for. That there is no moment of arrival, no sudden transformation waiting to make us whole. This—this breath, this ache, this ordinary and imperfect now—is it.

And maybe then the work is not to escape it, or to keep looking beyond it, but to learn how to live inside it. To meet ourselves here without apology. To let the unfinishedness of things be not a failure, but a fact of living. Because if there’s no promised moment coming to save us, then the spirit it takes to keep going anyway—to find meaning in the middle of the mess—that, too, is a kind of miracle.