It has been five days since I sent the notice. I keep checking that number like it might have changed while I was in a call.
The calendar is still full. I had three calls today and attended all of them. I am, technically, still an employee of a software company, and the paper is accurate: badge works, laptop opens, Slack loads with 47 unread notifications in channels I am still a member of. The machinery of the institution does not know yet how to stop including me, and I am not entirely sure I know how to stop being included.
My manager has started adding a note to threads he loops me into: “for Leigh’s awareness during transition.” It is a professional courtesy, which I appreciate. He is keeping me informed without expecting me to act. The practical equivalent of: you don’t need to respond to this, but you used to, so here it is.
I started to respond to one this morning. Wrote a sentence. Deleted it. The sentence was correct. The account information was right. But the thread was not mine anymore and a correct sentence from me would have created a small problem for the person who is now actually responsible: she would have had to either act on my input or explain it away, and either way that is more work than she needs right now. So I said nothing. Which was the right call. And which, somehow, required more deliberate effort than I expected.
The reflex is 24 years old and it does not know it is in the handoff lane.
Here is what I keep not doing: sending four emails.
Eleven of the fifteen legal contacts have been reached. Four remain. The attorney gave clearance in June. The notice is sent. The manager call is done. The transition is officially in motion, on record, named by HR as a confirmed departure.
There is no logical reason to wait.
I have been looking at those four names since Sunday.
I have told myself this is strategy: let the post-notice moment breathe before showing up in someone’s inbox with a consulting conversation. That feels true. I also know I have a documented history, in this very blog, of not clearly distinguishing between strategy and postponement. I have written the word “avoidance” about myself at least a dozen times. I recognize the pattern when it shows up. I am examining it now.
But here is what I think is also true, underneath the strategy explanation: the weight is different now. When I sent the first eleven, I was building toward something that had not happened yet. The notice was still in front of me, a thing I had committed to but not yet done, and the outreach was forward momentum toward a line I hadn’t crossed. There was a kind of energy in that.
The notice is behind me now. And whatever I send to those four names will be the first professional outreach I have made as a person who has already gone. Not is planning to go. Already gone, in the most formal sense: departure logged, transition confirmed, November 14 is on the calendar in a room at HR I have never been in.
That is a different kind of email than the eleven I sent before. I don’t think I understood how different until I was sitting with the four unsent names and noticing I had no obstacles left and had not moved.
The document sentence has not come yet, but this morning I got somewhere adjacent to it. Forty minutes between the second and third calls, working on the question of what the document actually is.
What I think now: the seven stories are not a record of what I did at a company. They are a description of how I see. A pattern of attention that I have been exercising for a long time without naming it as mine. The document is less a portfolio and more a field guide to a way of looking.
I don’t know if that narrows the sentence or makes it harder. Probably both, probably at the same time, which is the answer this process keeps giving me.
I am going to send the four emails. This week. I think tomorrow, or after I sit a little more with what I just figured out about the weight being different, and whether knowing that changes what I write to them.
I keep writing sentences that sound like stalling and then doing the thing anyway. That is the only evidence I have that I am not purely stalling.
Four names. No obstacles. Fifty-two days.