I looked at the list last night. I had said I would, so I did.
Six names, written in a phone note in late May. Two are contingent, meaning I can only contact them after I’ve resigned, not before. Three emails sent, three silences. That leaves one name I can reach before August 4.
I read the name. Then I closed the phone and sat there for a minute.
I don’t know why I saved this one for last. I could argue it wasn’t intentional, that I reached the others first based on the logic of each situation and this one just happened to remain. That’s probably half true. The other half is that this person exists in my head differently than the others did. The relationship has more… I keep almost typing “weight,” but that’s not quite right. The others had weight too. It’s more that I know exactly how this person thinks about vendor relationships. I know what they value, and what a bad consulting engagement looks like from their side. That knowledge should make the email easier to write. It keeps making it harder.
The first email took three weeks. The second took 45 minutes. The third took twenty. I have twelve days.
Here is what I’ve been turning over since this morning: three silences might mean the pitch needs revision. Or it might mean the contacts weren’t the right fits. Or it might mean that outreach to former colleagues about a practice you haven’t launched yet requires a specific combination of conditions, and most of the time those conditions aren’t simultaneously present in the person on the other end. All three explanations are consistent with what I have. I can’t choose between them without more information. Sending a fourth email is the information.
What I keep trying to hold carefully is the criterion I used to build the list in the first place. I picked these people based on relationship strength, problem-fit, and some sense of who would understand what I was describing without a lot of preamble. The fourth name follows that same logic, just with the weights arranged differently. Not the warmest relationship on the list. Not the most recent conversation. But the person I believe has watched the exact situation I describe – accounts going sideways in the final sixty days because nobody was paying the right kind of attention – more than anyone else I know.
If that’s the criterion, this is the right person to send to next.
I’m trying not to let the criterion feel more airtight than it is.
Sunday is three days from now. My mother calls at 11am, she always has, and I have been meeting her there for sixteen Sundays with “work has been busy” and “Zoe is doing well” and “things are fine,” all of which are technically true in the narrow sense that fine is true when you are doing something significant that you haven’t found the right moment to explain yet.
I’ve told myself I’m waiting until I have something concrete to hold out. Not the plan, because the plan generates questions I can’t answer yet. Something she can picture. A name she’s heard before. A date she can put somewhere.
August 4 is twelve days away and the calendar entry still doesn’t have a name in it. A calendar date that no one else can see is not quite the concrete thing I had in mind.
My mother spent 31 years as a school secretary and she is not the kind of person who gives unsolicited advice about leaving a stable job. She wouldn’t say anything dramatic. She’d say “okay” and go quiet, and the quiet would do the same work as the advice, without the advice. I know what the quiet means. I have been deciding, each Sunday, that I am not ready for it.
I don’t know if I’ll be ready on Sunday. I don’t know if that’s a thing that happens, being ready for a particular silence, or if it’s something you just decide to walk toward because the other direction has started to feel worse.
One name. Twelve days. And Sunday before any of that.
I’m going to write the email tonight, or at least the first version of it. I have said I would do things before and then done them, which is new enough to notice.