Tuesday morning. 7:43 AM. The highway, headed west. Coffee in the cupholder. Radio on, something about inflation I wasn’t listening to.
I said it.
“Your enterprise accounts are at risk and your dashboard doesn’t show it yet.”
Fourteen words. Alone in the car. The radio was still on, which meant I had to say it louder than I would have liked.
I’m not sure what I expected. A shift in air pressure, maybe. A physical confirmation that something had changed. That didn’t happen. It sounded like my voice saying a sentence I’ve been staring at on my phone for four days. No fanfare. Just highway and the tail end of a segment about grocery prices.
But I said it. That’s different from yesterday, when I thought about saying it and didn’t.
Here’s what I noticed. The sentence doesn’t sound like me when I read it on a screen. It sounds like a slide deck, or a website header. When I say it out loud, it sounds like something I’d actually say to a client. The words are the same. The posture changes.
I said it again. Quieter the second time, like a conversation. Then I did something I wasn’t planning on. I kept talking. To nobody. In my car. On a Tuesday.
“I can fix that. I’ve been fixing that for twenty-four years, and I can tell you exactly how it works, and you should probably pay me for that.”
That last part came out in a rush. Not polished. Not rehearsed. Just true. And immediately embarrassing, because I’m a 49-year-old woman giving a pitch to a dashboard.
I want to say that was the Moment. Capital M. Everything crystallized, clouds parted, etc. That would be overstating it. What it actually was: the first time I heard myself describe what I do as something worth paying for, using my mouth instead of a phone screen or a private notebook. Screens and notebooks are safe. You can close them. You can pretend you were just thinking. When you say something out loud, even to nobody, you made a sound in the world. It existed in air. You can’t unsay it.
I got to work at 8:12. Sat in the parking lot for about three minutes, which is apparently my version of processing. Then I went inside and did my job. Eight hours of doing the exact thing I just told my steering wheel someone should pay me for.
Every meeting, I noticed myself noticing. A junior account manager about to lose a renewal because she doesn’t see that her contact has been cc’ing someone new on every email for two weeks. A dashboard that says everything’s green. The three things that aren’t green that nobody has language for yet.
I used to think this was just being good at my job. It is being good at my job. But “good at my job” is what I say when I don’t want to examine what it means to be this good at something for this long and still get a thumbs-up emoji for it.
That’s too bitter. Let me back up.
I am good at a specific, valuable thing. I have done it for someone else’s company for twenty-four years. And I said out loud this morning, for the first time, that someone should pay me for it directly. Not a salary. Not a bonus I hit two-thirds of the time. Directly.
I drove home. Doug was making pasta. Zoe was at the table, something about AP History. Max at practice. Normal Tuesday.
Doug said, “how was your day?”
I said, “fine.”
Fine. After the car. After eight hours of watching myself perform the product. After hearing my own voice say “you should probably pay me for that” to a windshield.
Fine.
I have now told a steering wheel more about my plans than I’ve told my husband. I’m aware of how that sounds. I’m aware that the longer I wait, the weirder it gets. I know that “fine” is a door I keep choosing to close.
Almost two weeks ago, Terri asked me who signs the check. That question is still open. But there’s a different question sitting under it now, one I wasn’t expecting. Who do I need to say this to before it becomes real? Terri heard the idea. The internet has been reading about it for almost three weeks. I told my car this morning.
There’s one person left. And he was standing right there, making pasta, asking how my day was.
I’m working on it.