I wrote the Marcus email yesterday afternoon, as I said I would. Sent at 3:41pm.
It was seventy-two words. I know that because I counted them after I hit send, which tells you something about the quality of my confidence.
The first Marcus note introduced me without a badge, which I had decided was a significant thing to figure out. The second was a follow-up, which I have done a thousand times in various directions. The third one I have no good name for. It was not clever. It did not have a new angle. I said: I have followed up once. I am not certain this is the right moment or the right ask. But the idea I wrote about in October is still the idea I think matters, and I would like to know if you want to talk about it. I will take no for an answer.
That last sentence. I had it in the draft and took it out twice. It felt like begging. Then I put it back because it was true, and the note needed at least one true thing that did not sound like positioning.
Three hours later I was looking at the analytics. I do not do this every day. I do it when I am restless and do not have a better place to put the restlessness.
173 posts. That is the number. One hundred and seventy-three consecutive days of writing something that was not required, not assigned, not tied to any calendar event or Q3 deliverable. I started this as a commitment device. The idea was that if I said I was going to leave in public, I could not quietly un-say it. That part has worked.
What I did not expect is that the blog would become the most consistent thing I have built in the last six months. Not the contact log with four entries. Not the five conversations I am trying to have by November 1. Not the rate research or the LLC paperwork or the outreach emails I spent weeks deliberating over. The blog. One hundred and seventy-three times, I sat down and wrote something that was true, and 173 times it was still there when I came back the next day.
I want to be careful not to make more of that than it is. Consistency is not the same as a signed client. I have not built the thing I set out to build yet. So I am not writing this as a declaration. I am writing it because it is a fact I keep coming back to and cannot explain away.
Twenty-three days until November 14.
I know I will not have a client by my birthday. That was never the actual target. The target was not sitting in that job on November 14, and I already hit that in September. But the date still has weight. It has been the spine of this whole thing for seven months. In twenty-three days it becomes a Tuesday, and I will have to decide what a Tuesday means when it is no longer pointing at anything.
Marcus has not responded. The referral email has not gotten a response. The five-conversations target I set yesterday is still five conversations short, and November 1 is ten days out. I set it ambitious on purpose, probably. I have not fully decided whether that was smart or a way of giving myself something dramatic enough to distract from the waiting.
What I know is that I wrote the third note and I sent it. It is sitting in someone’s inbox right now whether or not they have opened it. Sitting in an inbox is not the same as being read, but it is not the same as never being sent, either. That is the specific quality of writing to silence a third time: you cannot know. You decide whether to write it. Then you find out what the quiet meant, or you do not, and you keep going.
I kept going.