It’s Monday. Doug made coffee. I came downstairs, he handed me mine, asked how I slept, I said fine, which was true, and that was most of breakfast.
I was expecting more. The next installment of the conversation we’d started Sunday night, maybe. His questions arriving, one at a time, the way I’d been bracing for. What I got was a normal Monday morning, which I think was a kindness he was extending and I was too sleep-deprived to receive properly at 7am.
He drove Zoe to her early practice. I opened my laptop and had three meetings before noon.
This is what I’ve been sitting with since: I told him everything. I really did. The consulting idea, the problem statement, the competitive research, the four case studies. The woman in Texas charging $275 an hour. The spreadsheet with four years of runway. I said I also wanted to write something, I didn’t know what, and I said that too because it was true.
And then I held one thing back.
Not on purpose. Or maybe on purpose, but I didn’t decide to. I said yes to “is this what you want” and felt this wave of something that might be relief and we moved on, and I did not say: I mean to not be in this job on my 50th birthday. Which is November 14. Which is approximately six months from now.
I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Some part of me was protecting the conversation. What I said felt complete, and I didn’t want to overload it. He asked what I wanted, not when. I answered what he asked. That’s honest, technically.
But there’s another part that wonders if the date is the one piece I’m not actually certain about. Not the wanting to leave. That I know. But November 14 specifically, with Zoe’s applications in the fall and all the logistics that follow. There is a version of me that has been using that date as a private commitment device and another version that might be using it as a prop. The kind of deadline you set to feel like you’ve decided when you’re still partly deciding.
I don’t know which version was operating Sunday night.
What I do know: he doesn’t have November yet. He knows I want to leave. He knows it’s real. He’s holding questions. One of them is almost certainly about timing, and when he asks it I’m going to have to decide in the moment whether I say six months or whether I say I’m still working on that.
Neither answer sounds great.
I had a 2pm meeting today that I have been in some version of for 24 years. Enterprise account review, the kind where you walk through QBR data and everyone nods and agrees things are going well and you schedule the next one 90 days out. I ran it the way I always run it. Fine at it without trying. And then I was back at my desk and I kept thinking about the gap between the person in that meeting and the person who was at the kitchen table Sunday night.
Not that they’re different people. They’re the same person. That’s the thing. The same competence that does the 2pm meeting is the competence that built the competitive landscape. The same capacity for reading what’s actually happening in a room. I have been acting like these two things are in opposition, like leaving means abandoning one self to become a different one. I’m starting to think it’s more like moving the furniture into a different room.
Or that might be too clean. I tend to get tidy when I’m tired.
I’m going to tell Doug about November. Soon. I’ve been saying soon for a while now, I know. But this time there’s a difference: he already said okay to the thing that mattered most, and he meant it. November is a detail compared to that.
I just haven’t decided yet if I believe the date myself.