Friday.
The Q4 budget conversation was yesterday at 10:30. Three people, a shared slide, forty-five minutes. I had prepared the night before: pulled the actuals, looked at the comparable quarter from last year, thought through what questions would come and what the right answers were.
I showed up. It went the way it should have gone. Afterward, my manager sent a follow-up note that started with “good points from Leigh.” I filed it in a folder I’ve kept for twelve years called “feedback,” because I’ve always kept a feedback folder, because you never know when you’ll need evidence of a thing.
I will not be there for Q4.
I’ve been trying to figure out what it says about me that I cannot do the work at less than full effort, even now. I’m twenty-two days from handing in my notice. I am not a person who believes in coasting out of something, I know that about myself, but the degree to which I showed up yesterday as if it mattered is giving me something to think about.
I want to say it’s integrity. I almost typed that it’s integrity, right here, and then stopped. Because I’m not sure that’s accurate. Integrity is a choice. What happened yesterday didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like what I do. Like the thing that happens when a problem is in front of me and I have information relevant to the problem.
The question is whether that’s integrity or whether it’s just the shape I’m in after twenty-four years. I don’t have a clean answer. I’ve been sitting with it since about seven this morning.
Here is what I know. I have filed 124 of these posts. I have sent every outreach email I said I would send. I made the phone call when I said I would make it. I told Doug when I said I would. I told my mother and Zoe when I’d worked up to it. I have not once let the blog lapse because something at work got hard.
I also prepared a slide deck for a Q4 meeting I will not be there to follow up on.
These feel connected. I am a person who, given a task, does the task. That’s not a complicated thing to say about yourself. It’s not a character flaw. It might even be something good. But I’m standing at the end of August trying to figure out whether “person who does the thing in front of them” is a quality I built, or something the institution built into me over twenty-four years, and I cannot fully distinguish between them.
The performance review that started all of this said “Meets Expectations.” I keep thinking about the word meets. The standard arriving and someone deciding I arrived at it. Twenty-four years of doing the thing in front of me, correctly, and what they registered was arrival at a standard. Not motion. Not direction.
I’m not still angry about that. I want to be honest about it. What I am is curious about what I was building, all those years of doing the work right, if nobody on that side could see what it added up to.
Maybe the Q4 meeting is one more piece of the same evidence. I show up, I do it correctly, in twenty-two days I’m leaving, and the good points from Leigh will sit in someone’s inbox and Q4 will proceed without me.
I’m not sad about that. I need you to understand that I am genuinely not sad about it. I’m leaving on purpose. November 14 is the date. September 19 is when I hand in the notice.
I just cannot figure out whether doing the work right all the way to the last day is integrity, or simply me being me, or whether those are the same thing with different words on them.
I’ll let you know if I work it out. I probably won’t have an answer by Monday.