It is Saturday morning. I have coffee. The house is quiet in the specific way houses are quiet on Saturdays, which is different from the quiet during a workday. Workday quiet has the shape of something organized: everyone is elsewhere on purpose, and the absence is scheduled. Saturday quiet means Doug is running an errand and Max is at a friend’s and I am alone in a house that will be full again by noon, and there is a document open on my laptop that I have promised to finish by Monday.
I am going to write the fear-of-the-first-month post today.
I have been saying this for four days. I have had three false starts, one sentence that is closer than I want it to be but still not right, and one explanation I have been giving myself for why I haven’t finished it: I am still inside the first month. I don’t know how it ends. Writing about it feels like describing a movie you’ve walked out of before the last twenty minutes.
That is not right. I know it’s not right because I have given myself that exact same framing about the referral email, the Marcus follow-up, the attorney intake form, and in every case the not-quite-rightness was the thing I do when I am avoiding. The real thing takes less time than I tell myself it will.
I kept opening the draft and writing to a general reader. Someone leaving corporate. A person looking for a list of things to expect. I have those things. That is not why the draft kept closing without finishing.
I thought about the stranger who emailed about her sister. Her sister is leaving a job in November. Not at the end of the year, not when she feels ready, not when she has mapped everything out. November. I don’t know anything else about her. I don’t know what the job is, or what she is going toward, or whether she has a spreadsheet she built at 11pm. I know she is leaving in November and that her sister found this blog and thought the post I was still not writing was something she needed to read before she went.
When I sat down this morning and wrote to her specifically, the draft moved.
Not because I lowered the standard. Because I stopped writing for the idea of a reader and started writing for a person with a particular date, who is going to have a particular morning in November when the thing she used to do every weekday is no longer on the calendar. She is going to be in it before she has any way to know what it is supposed to feel like.
I know what I would want somebody to say to her. I know because I am four weeks into being her.
Here is what I want to say, as far as I have gotten:
The fear is not what you think it is. Or it is not only what you think it is.
I thought the fear was failure. A client who doesn’t sign. A number that doesn’t add up. An explanation I would have to give at 52 for why the thing I said I was going to do didn’t work. Those are real fears. I have named them. They still show up at 3am.
But the specific fear of the first month is something smaller and more interior than that. It is the fear of a morning when there is nothing on the calendar and you realize that is exactly what you asked for, and it does not feel like freedom yet. It feels like sitting in a room waiting for a signal that is not coming, because you are the one who has to generate it, and you do not yet know how to do that. The fear is your own competence: that you knew how to be good at a job you were given, and you do not yet know if you know how to build one from the beginning.
I am four weeks in. I have an email that is not yet answered and a follow-up that is also not answered and a referral I sent yesterday at 8:47am that I have not checked since this morning. I have four entries in a contact log. I have a sentence I have been trying to write for three months that is still not right.
I do not know if this is what it is supposed to look like. I genuinely do not know. And that is what I want the stranger’s sister to understand, not as comfort, but as accurate information: you are going to be in the not-knowing for longer than feels okay, and the not-knowing is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. The not-knowing is the material.
I wrote three paragraphs that might be the post. Not this post, the other one, the one I promised.
I am going to let them sit until tomorrow. Not because I am still not ready, but because I want to read them as the person who has not lived the last four weeks, and that takes a night.
Two days.