A countdown to freedom can make the present feel like a corridor rather than a room.

Counting down to a release turns the time before it into transit. The weeks stop being places you live and become distance to be covered, and everything inside them gets valued only by how close it brings the ending. That is how people can survive a hard stretch and later find they remember almost nothing of it.

If you are waiting out a job, a course, a treatment, or a season, try to keep one part of the week that is not about arriving. Something you would do even if the end date moved. It does not make the corridor shorter, but it keeps a room inside it, and you will have lived some of that time rather than only crossed it.