Wednesday. Ten days.
I keep starting these November posts with the number, as if counting down is a way of making the destination more real. I am not sure what I think will happen on the fourteenth. I will be 50. That will be true regardless of whether I have a client or a service name or a sentence to put in an email. The birthday is not conditional. The rest of it is.
Yesterday I read the two paragraphs at the end of the document. I wrote about that here yesterday morning. What I did not write about, because I was still sitting with it, is what happened when I reread the first paragraph later that afternoon.
It says: the document isn’t for clients. It’s for the person who knows what they’re good at but cannot name it yet.
I wrote that sentence. Probably late at night, probably tired, probably not thinking about how I would feel reading it back. The sentence was about an audience. A future client, maybe, or a future reader, someone I was writing toward. I wrote that description down and closed the document and three weeks later I read it and thought: that is me right now.
Not the me of two years ago, though that version also fits. The me of Wednesday, November 4, ten days out, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee that has gone cold because I keep stopping to look at a document instead of drinking it. I know what I am good at. I have written seven stories about it. I have been trying to put it in a subject line and an email signature and a one-pager for eight months. I still cannot name it in a way that satisfies me.
The irony is not lost on me. I wrote the reader and then became her.
What I do not know is whether that is useful information.
It could mean the document is pointing somewhere, and the somewhere is a service for people who are standing where I am standing, trying to get the naming done before they can move. That is a real problem. I have watched senior people leave institutions and get completely stuck on this exact thing, not on the idea and not on the courage, but on the naming. The problem has no clean solution because the naming has to come from inside the person doing the work, not from a framework handed to them. I have been living this from the inside for eight months.
Or it could mean I am still the person who cannot name the thing, and the document is a symptom of the problem rather than a response to it.
I genuinely cannot tell which is true. Some days both feel accurate depending on which paragraph I am reading. That is not a satisfying place to end a paragraph but it is the honest one.
This morning I spent longer than necessary choosing a photograph for this post.
There is a photographer, Bedia, who took a photo of an open notebook and a cup of coffee on a desk near a window, morning light coming in from the side. I found it at 7:15 and kept coming back to it. The light is the right kind, the kind that is early enough to still be useful. I credited the photographer before I added any other text to the draft. It is a small thing. I would want the credit if it were mine, and that impulse costs nothing to extend to a stranger.
I am getting particular about this. The blog is 186 days old and I have put a photo in most of them, and somewhere around post forty I stopped picking the first image that worked and started picking the one that felt like the post. I am not sure when that happened exactly. I just noticed it was already true.
Ten days.
I do not think I am going to have the naming done by then. I am starting to accept that “not in the job on my 50th birthday” and “has figured out what comes next” are different conditions, and I set only the first one. I hit it in September. The second condition is on its own schedule.
What I have today is a document that pointed at a reader and I recognized her in the description. That is not the same as knowing what to do next. But it is different from not knowing what I am pointing at, which is where I was in August.
I still cannot finish the sentence in the middle of the document. The one that starts “which is why” and stops.
I am starting to think that finishing that sentence might be the actual work. Not the outreach email, not the consulting pitch, not the service page. The sentence. When I can write what comes after “which is why,” I think I will know what I am building.
I do not know what comes after it yet. But I am starting to know what the sentence is about.