Two days. I drafted the notice this morning.
Not a letter. I will not send a letter. What I drafted was an email, two paragraphs, subject line with my name and the word resignation, standard professional language. I wrote it in eleven minutes at the kitchen table at 6:15, reread it twice, and changed “leaving” to “transitioning out of.” Then I closed the laptop.
It is the easiest thing I have written in four months.
I have three pieces of writing I have been trying to produce. One is the second sentence in the plain document, the one after “which is why,” the sentence about the mechanism. One is the honest version of the things I have been covering with “fine” when Doug asks how my day was. And one was the notice, which I finished before the coffee was done.
The notice sounds exactly like me at work: professional, cordial, correct. I have valued my time here. The relationships, the work. I am committed to a clean handoff. I will be happy to discuss the transition. The language lands just right, which means it gives away nothing I did not intend to give away.
I reread it and felt nothing complicated. That is information.
The professional version is always the outside version. I have the outside version of myself trained to an extremely high level. Twenty-four years of practice. Two paragraphs in eleven minutes. I changed one word and closed the laptop.
The document sentence requires the opposite. To describe the mechanism from the outside while I am still inside it. To look at something I have been running continuously since approximately 2003 and explain what it is, not just what it does. The professional communication never asked for that. The outside version is what the situation requires, so I produce the outside version, and that is appropriate and efficient and also, I am starting to understand, a skill that has cost me something I cannot fully price yet.
I think the document sentence and the thing I have not said to Doug are the same sentence. That is a new thought from this week. I have been treating them as two separate problems. The seven stories in the plain document on one side, the “fine” and its complicated actual meaning on the other. But the thing underneath both of them is probably the same word, or the same two or three words, and I have not found them.
I do not know if that is useful to know right now. Maybe it means that when I find one I will have both. Maybe it means I have been waiting for the wrong thing to unlock. I keep picking at that.
Doug is at a client dinner in the city tonight. Max had practice until eight and came home talking about a scrimmage. I had the house to myself for two hours this afternoon and used them for: reheating soup, fourteen pages of a novel I have been reading since July, and a long time at the kitchen table not writing the document sentence.
I am not afraid of Friday. I have been checking, all week, the way you check a weather forecast you expect to change. What I keep finding is: not afraid. I am not going to call it readiness because that feels like a word you earn on the other side, not a word you assign yourself the Thursday before. But it is not fear.
The notice is ready. The document sentence is not written. The honest version for Doug is still somewhere between me and the sentence I do not have yet.
I keep expecting those three things to be connected, to find one and unlock the others in a sequence. That would be a tidy version of this.
They are probably just three things.
Probably.