Wednesday morning. Still working on the same problem. The dog doesn’t know this and walked me the usual route, which helped and also didn’t help.
I’ve been trying to locate the honest answer to my mother’s question for four days now. What I’ve been doing, and I can see this clearly, is building the most honest presentation I can. Selecting the most accurate pieces. Arranging them in a sequence that feels true. Arriving at a structure that is, in its own way, genuinely honest, and still not the same thing as the honest answer.
Because the honest answer is what comes out before you’ve decided what to say. The organized version is what you produce after you’ve thought about it. I have been thinking about this for four days straight, which means I have been in the organized version the whole time, and I keep arriving at variations of the same structure.
I’m not sure how to get out of that by preparing harder.
This morning I opened the laptop to write this post. Before I started typing I thought: okay, what happened today that I want to say, and how do I want to open it. I was going to write about the problem, explain the problem, get to some version of where I am with the problem. The structure was already forming.
Then I caught myself. Same move, different medium.
I’ve been writing this blog for 96 days. I did not have a plan when I started. I had a problem I couldn’t solve, and a fear that without accountability I’d quietly back away from it, and so I started writing in public and trusting that something would be forced by the writing. That’s more or less what the first post said.
Something did happen. I’m not sure it’s the thing I was expecting.
Going back and reading things I wrote in April and May, I was sometimes saying things I didn’t fully know I thought until after I typed them. Day 14: my core value might be “attention,” not a process. I didn’t know that before I wrote it. Day 20: the writing itself has become something I want, not just a commitment device. I found that in the middle of a sentence. Day 52: I opened a blank document I would not yet name, not sure why I was doing it until I kept doing it.
The blog is where the honest version comes out first. Before I’ve organized it. Before I’ve reviewed it for internal consistency. It’s not perfectly raw, I still choose the words, but it’s closer to first draft than anything I say in a meeting or on a phone call. It’s what I actually think before I’ve decided what I think.
My mother asked “when did you know know” because she wants to hear me say the thing I actually think, not the thing I arrived at through four days of preparation. And I have been preparing. That is what I do.
Maybe the answer is: I’ve been saying it here, 96 times, in pieces. If she wants to know when I first knew, the closest thing to an honest record isn’t anything I could tell her in a phone call. It’s in the posts going back to April 23.
I haven’t sent her the link. She knows the blog exists. When I told her about it last Sunday, she said “I’m glad you told me.” Whether she’s found it, whether she’s read any of it, I genuinely don’t know. I haven’t asked.
I’m still going to call her this weekend. I still need to say something out loud that isn’t organized. I’m not convinced that the blog being the honest record changes what she’s actually asking for, which is something I can say in real time, in her direction, without reading off a structure I’ve been assembling since Tuesday.
But I’m less certain now that the answer is something I can prepare into existence. The more I prepare, the more organized it gets, which is not the same thing as more honest. And I know how to prepare. I’ve been doing it for twenty-four years. What I’m not as practiced at is saying the first thing that comes before the organizing starts.
Five days to August 4. Still no name in the event. Four emails, still quiet.
I’m going to call her before I’m ready, or not at all.