The clearance arrived Tuesday.
Not permission. I know the difference and I keep saying so because I think I need to keep saying it. Legal clearance. The attorney’s opinion, not a guarantee, is that both contingent names fall outside what a court would likely interpret as solicitation under my agreement, provided I reach out after I have actually resigned. The missing exhibit cuts in my favor. I asked eight questions and got answers to seven. The ninth still does not have words.
I came home. Made a sandwich. Wrote Sandra back. And then I waited for something to shift, and it didn’t quite.
What I had been telling myself, for weeks, was that I needed the clearance before I could move. That was technically true. The attorney confirmed it explicitly: wait until you’re independent. Don’t reach out to the contingent names before you’ve resigned. So I was not stalling. I was being careful. There is a meaningful difference between those two things.
I’m not sure I believe myself.
Here is what is also true: four of the six names were never legally contingent. They’re contacts I built outside my current company, relationships that belong to me, not to my employer. Nothing on the backward map, nothing the attorney said, requires me to wait on those four. I could have called them last month. I could call them today.
The phone calls have not been made. Not one.
The December emailer has not written back. Seven days now. I’m no longer checking the sent folder to confirm the email actually went. It went. The silence is what it is.
I don’t know if I am connecting those two things in my head, the unanswered email and the calls I haven’t made. The connection might not be real. But I sent one thing to one person, carefully, and seven days of nothing came back. And now I am looking at five more names and the phone sits there and I am not picking it up. That is just a fact about this week.
Terri said something in our call, all the way back at the beginning of this, that I keep returning to. She said the hardest moment is the first conversation where you tell a real person, someone who is not your spouse and not a former colleague who already half-knew, that this is what you do now. Not that you’re thinking about it. Not that you’re exploring your options. I do this. I help companies save enterprise accounts in the final 60 days before they lose them. Can we talk?
I have said that sentence to a steering wheel at 7am. I have not said it to a human.
I was looking at this blog differently yesterday. Not at the numbers, I’m trying to stop checking the numbers every morning and mostly failing. More like the way you look at something you’ve built when you’re not sure it’s finished yet. I’ve been choosing photos since Day 37, thinking about the mood of a thing, crediting the photographer by name because it seems like the right thing to do and because I would want the credit if the work were mine. Yesterday I was looking at the image from the previous post and I thought: I would not have chosen it a month ago. A month ago I was not thinking about what I was making. I was thinking about whether I was going to make anything.
That’s a small thing. I’m noticing small things.
The backward map has July for first client conversations. Six weeks, give or take.
The ninth question, the one I couldn’t form words for in the attorney’s office, is getting closer to having a shape. It is not a legal question. I’m fairly sure now it is something like this: when you have been a Senior Director at a known company for 24 years, some of what walks into the room with you is you, and some of it is the badge. What I don’t know yet is the ratio. What I genuinely cannot tell you is how much of the authority people have responded to over two decades belongs to me, and how much belongs to the institution behind me.
That’s what I’d be finding out, the first time I say I do this to a real person.
I thought about making one of the calls this morning. Not making it. Thinking about making it.
I am aware that thinking about a thing and doing a thing are not the same thing. I’ve been living in that gap for a week. I just wanted to say it out loud before I let another day go by.