I was maybe two hundred meters from the door of the hub when the sky broke open. Not the gentle kind of rain that lets you make a run for it — the pouring kind, slamming down all at once, like someone tipped a whole bucket of water over the city. I sprinted, both arms clutching my laptop bag to my chest like a child. Those two hundred meters felt like two kilometers. By the time I made it, I was soaked from my hairline down to the tips of my shoes, water dripping into a little puddle right under my feet.

I'd prepared for this for almost a week. Slides tweaked until two in the morning. The demo test-run a dozen times. An outfit ironed flat that was now plastered to my skin. I pulled out the laptop and pressed the power button. Black screen. Pressed again. Still black. A strange line of text flashed once and vanished. My heart dropped somewhere far below.

Two hundred meters and a small panic

I sank onto a chair in the lobby, shivering from the cold, my head spinning through options. Borrow someone's machine? All my files were inside the dead one. Present with no slides? I'd rehearsed with the slides; open my mouth now and there'd be nothing there. I genuinely almost cried. That mix of angry and sorry-for-yourself tears, the kind that says "why does everything I worked a whole week for fall apart over a few clouds."

Then, out of nowhere, I laughed. Alone in that lobby, drenched, hair matted, probably looking ridiculous. Because it was funny, really. All week I'd worried about everything under the sun — fumbling my words, getting a hard question, slide number seven being a little ugly. I worried about all of it, except one thing: rain. The one thing I had no power over whatsoever.

Sitting and watching it fall

When there's nothing left to do, you somehow calm down on your own. I sat there a long while, watching the water run down the glass in long streaks.

And while I watched it, I noticed something I'd known forever but never truly felt: there's a clear line between what I hold and what I don't. I hold how well I prepare. I don't hold the sky. I don't hold a laptop that decides to die. I don't hold whether today turns out to be my day.

I poured a whole week into making the part I control flawless. Then a cloud — the thing I couldn't control at all — erased it in five minutes.

My exhaustion that day, it turned out, didn't come from the rain. It came from my insisting on gripping something that was never mine to hold.

The security guard saw me sitting there shivering and handed me a dry towel. I wiped the laptop down, propped it by a fan in the lobby, and waited. Half an hour later, once the rain had thinned to a drizzle, the machine flickered back to life, as if it hadn't just nearly made me cry. I missed the first part of the session. They let me present afterward anyway. And the thing I'd dreaded most — fumbling — passed by smoothly, because by then I didn't have an ounce of energy left to be nervous with.

Now, every time my plans jump the rails — and they jump it constantly — I think back to that soaked lobby. To the moment I stopped bracing, sat down, and let the rain just fall.

There are some rains you can't dodge, no matter how carefully you check the forecast. The only thing you really get to choose is the face you'll wear while you're standing in them.