It is 7:42 in the morning and the attorney meeting is at 1pm. I have done everything I can do to prepare, which means I have approximately five hours of being ready with nowhere to put the readiness. The questions are numbered. The folder is on my desktop. The printed agreement has a Post-it on page three. There is nothing left to do that would help.
So I made coffee and sat down and found an email from a stranger.
She gave me three sentences. Her name was Sandra, just the first name, which I understood. She said she had found the blog, though not how. She said she was also in corporate, had been for years, and had been trying for a couple of years to figure out if there was something on the other side. She said this was “the first thing that has made me feel less crazy about wanting out.”
I read it twice. I did not know what to do with it.
I want to say I started this to hold myself accountable, which is true. I want to say I started it because I could not find anyone writing from inside the moment, before they had the clean retrospective story, which is also true. Both of those things are about me and what I needed. What I did not fully reckon with, or maybe I did and just did not let myself believe it, is that writing in public means other people can read it.
That sounds obvious. It is obvious. I apparently did not process it.
After I read the email I went to the analytics dashboard. I do not usually look. I had told myself I was not writing for an audience, which was convenient, because I had also assumed the audience was approximately zero. The number I found was 412 sessions over 37 days. Sessions are not the same as people. But 412 was not what I was expecting. I closed the tab. Then I opened it again.
I have been writing this as a wall of words since the beginning. No images, plain and undecorated. That felt appropriate, like the plainness was part of the honesty. But today when I was putting this post together, I found myself wanting it to look like something I had made with attention. So I went looking for an image, which is a thing I have not done before for this.
I found one I liked, something about the quality of light, nothing literal about the subject. And I noticed immediately that I wanted to find the photographer’s name and say so somewhere on the page. Not because anything requires me to. Because someone made something and the decent thing, the thing I would want if it were mine, is to say so. I credited the photographer. It took me about four minutes and I am not sure what that instinct says about me, but I noticed it.
Sandra’s email is still in my inbox. I have not written back yet because I do not know what to say. Thank you feels true and also insufficient. She is not asking me for anything, which is part of what makes it hard. She just wanted me to know.
I have been writing for 37 days and I told myself it was a ledger, a commitment device, something to keep me honest about what I said I wanted. I did not think of it as something that could find someone else in their Tuesday and make it slightly less bad. Now I have evidence that it did that at least once, and the evidence is in my inbox, and I have not figured out what to do with it.
I have barely told the people in my own house that this thing exists. Doug knows. My kids don’t know. My mother doesn’t know. And somewhere out there Sandra does know, and read something I wrote at 9pm on a weeknight, and felt less alone about wanting out of a job she probably cannot name in public either. That fact keeps landing in a different place each time I turn it over.
The December emailer still has not written back. Four days. I am checking my inbox more than is useful. I know this about myself.
The attorney meeting is in four hours and ten minutes. I have eight questions ready. The ninth still does not have words.
I do not know what Sandra is going to do. I do not know what I am going to do with the fact that 412 sessions happened while I was telling myself nobody was there. I do not know what the attorney is going to say about the two names on my list at 1pm.
I am going to go refresh my inbox one more time and then try to do something useful between now and 1.