The sentence is in the document. I am trying to hold this at its actual size, which is: I copied twelve words from one file into another file, both on the same laptop, on a Saturday morning. That is what happened.
That’s accurate. It also leaves out the part where I spent four months unable to write those twelve words, which is why stating the accurate version doesn’t entirely tell the truth.
Sunday mornings run differently from other days. I don’t plan this, but the rhythm exists. Coffee first, then the dog. Something to read that has nothing to do with any of this. My mom calls, or I call her, roughly alternating but not exactly.
She called at 9:47. We talked for twenty-one minutes. Zoe’s applications, which are in the stage where things are technically in motion and no one knows anything yet. Doug. Whether I’m keeping busy.
I said yes.
I did not describe what I’d spent Saturday doing. Not because it’s a secret, but because “I moved a sentence from one document to another and this took me most of June to manage” is a sentence that requires context, and the context is 175 posts, and I have not figured out how to give my mother 175 posts in a Sunday call.
The email tab was still open on my laptop while we were talking. Three words. I could see it from the kitchen table.
After we hung up, I opened the draft and deleted the three words. Started over.
They weren’t wrong, exactly. They were the first three words I wrote yesterday morning, right after I moved the sentence, still running on whatever that was, and they sounded like that. I wanted the email to sound like today.
I wrote a new version. Then a second version that was different in exactly one way, and the one way was the right thing to change. Forty minutes, which sounds like either too long or just right depending on what you’re used to spending on a single email. For me it was a little of both.
I didn’t send it today.
There’s an honest reason and a slightly more honest reason.
The honest reason: I don’t send cold professional emails on Sundays. I’ve been on the receiving end enough to have an opinion about it, and my opinion is that it reads as someone who hasn’t thought about your Sunday. This is true.
The slightly more honest reason: I found a reason not to send it today, because finding a reason not to do things today is a pattern I named last week and am apparently still in.
I think both things can be true. I think the second one is a little more true.
So here is what I did with the forty minutes, and then with the hour after that: I wrote five emails. Not just the one. Five outreach notes, each to a different person, each with a specific reason that is not “I used to work at a company, please respond.” And I put them in a folder on my laptop I named, with characteristic subtlety, “send Monday.”
I am going to send them tomorrow morning before 9am. Before I can open the folder and decide I need to sit with them for another day, which I can absolutely feel myself being capable of.
Marcus is still quiet. Five days now. The referral email is nine days quiet. I have been trying to treat both silences as data I don’t have yet rather than data I have, and I am managing this about half the time.
November 1 is seven days out. Five conversations I said I need. Zero confirmed. Five emails in a folder.
I picked a photo for this post tonight, from a photographer whose name I looked up and spelled correctly, because I would want the same. That part was straightforward.
Everything else I can still talk myself out of before 8:59 tomorrow morning.