Saturday morning. August 1.
The call is this afternoon. I decided that before last week ended, and I have spent exactly zero time thinking about it since, which probably means I’ve been thinking about almost nothing else.
I opened the analytics this morning before I started writing this. I do that now, the way I used to scroll Slack before anything else started, which tells me something about what replaced it. This morning there was a session that ran about an hour and five minutes, working through posts from late May into June. Fourteen posts. The timestamps were too spread out to be a bot. Somebody sat with this for over an hour.
I have no way to know who. That is one of the genuinely strange things about writing in public: I can see the visit, the duration, the rough shape. I cannot see the person. Whoever that was has read fourteen posts about my employment contract and my attorney intake form and the question of whether I’m leaving something or moving toward something, and I don’t know their name or their situation or what they were looking for.
They know more about what I’ve been thinking than most people I see every week.
I’ve been sitting with the order things came out of me, and it is not a flattering order.
This blog went up April 23. I told Doug on May 18. My mother found out on July 26. Zoe has been reading since sometime in late June, and we still haven’t had the real conversation. There are people I sit on calls with twice a week who have no idea I’m planning to be gone in November. “Planning” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. November is the line. The planning is ongoing.
But whoever read fourteen posts this morning knew all of it before most of them did.
I started this as a commitment device. Put it in public so I couldn’t quietly retreat. That was the logic, and I still think it was sound. What I didn’t fully reckon with was that putting something in public means there are people on the other side of the public. That sounds obvious. It was not obvious to me in April. I was writing to nobody, or to a hypothetical someone, not to a person spending a Saturday hour reading posts I wrote in May.
The stranger part, the one I keep coming back to: the blog is apparently where the honest version comes out first. Before the organized one. Before whatever filter produces a version I’m willing to say out loud to someone I love. The strangers got the real thing before Doug did. Before my mother did.
I’m not sure what to do with that. I’m also not sure it’s something to fix.
I am going to try to give my mother the honest answer when I call this afternoon.
What I know about my chances: I have been building the organized answer for five days and I can feel myself doing it, and I have not yet found the honest one underneath. I told myself on Wednesday that I needed to stop rehearsing. I did stop. I have not located what I’m supposed to say instead.
The honest report is probably something like: I don’t know exactly when, and the further back I look the further back it goes, and I’m not sure “when” is even the right question. That’s not a clean answer. It doesn’t arrive anywhere. It just says: I have been this way for a long time, I finally stopped explaining it away, and the thing that stopped me was a Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot when someone I didn’t fully respect told me I met expectations.
I think my mother will understand that without needing the whole architecture. She spent thirty years watching which people got heard and which ones got thanked and moved along. She asked the follow-up question in under two minutes. She may already have an answer to her own question that she’s been waiting to see if I’ll reach.
The call is at two. Three days to August 4. Still no name in the calendar entry.