There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from waiting for someone to change. To show up. To choose you. To finally become the person they keep promising they will be. You wait and wait and wait, and one day you realize you have been standing still while the rest of your life kept moving.
“Still Waiting” is the song Tom Bruggemann wrote about that exact moment.
“I spent years waiting for things to be different,” Tom says. “Waiting for people to keep their word. Waiting for situations to change. And one day I just woke up and thought, what am I still doing here?”
The song is not angry. That is what makes it so devastating. It is tired. It is the sound of someone who has run out of hope but has not yet figured out how to walk away. And if you have ever been in that in-between space, where staying hurts but leaving feels impossible, you will recognize every word.
The truth is, most of us have been the person who waits too long. We stay in jobs, relationships, and situations long past the point where they serve us, because walking away feels like admitting we wasted all that time.
Tom wrote this song because he finally stopped waiting. And sometimes the bravest thing you can do is just leave.