Wednesday.
There are two sentences in the unnamed document I have not been able to finish. I have been trying for about two months now, not every day, but regularly enough that I know the shape of the problem.
The first sentence is about what the noticing is for. I can describe the noticing. Seven pages in, I have done this repeatedly, from different angles. But “what it’s for” is a different question, and every time I walk up to it directly it moves. The sentence has no ending.
The second sentence starts with “Which is why.” I wrote those two words in June and walked away. I have been back four times since, maybe five, I am losing count. Today was four or five. Either way, “Which is why” is still followed by a blank line and then the next paragraph, which assumes the sentence is finished even though it isn’t.
I am getting better at diagnosing the problem even when I cannot solve it. Progress of a kind, I think.
The issue is not that I don’t know what comes after “Which is why.” The issue is that the thing that comes after it commits me to a version of what the document is for, and I don’t know that yet. Writing the ending of the sentence honestly requires having an answer I’m still circling. I keep thinking I almost have it, then looking at it directly, then finding I don’t quite.
This is not avoidance. Not entirely. There is avoidance in it, I want to be honest about that. But underneath the avoidance is something real: I don’t want to write a false ending to a sentence that might be important. So I leave it open and keep returning to it, the way you keep reopening a document you’re waiting to know more before you edit.
Something else happened today. I accepted a Slack calendar invite for a training webinar scheduled for December 2. This took about forty-five seconds. I didn’t think about it.
Two hours later I noticed.
December 2 is fifty-three days after September 19. My last day at this company is November 14. I will not be at the December 2 webinar. I accepted it anyway. The calendar didn’t raise any objection, because the calendar doesn’t know anything.
I keep doing this. Not dishonestly. It is a habit that is twenty-four years old, and I am the only person around me who knows the clock is running. The meetings don’t know. The Slack invitations don’t know. The people scheduling things into December and January are scheduling in good faith and so am I, up until the moment I’m not.
Thirty-one days from today I will send the email that changes that. Until then I am still Senior Director of Strategic Accounts at a software company, and the December webinar is on my calendar, and neither of those things is a lie exactly. They are just not the whole picture. Most things aren’t the whole picture.
After dinner I opened the document again. I didn’t try to finish the sentences. I just read what was there.
Seven stories. The 2017 meeting note. The two unfinished sentences and the paragraphs that follow them, pretending they’re done.
Something I hadn’t articulated before, or hadn’t named directly: in all seven stories, I am not the main character. The main characters are the people I was watching. I am the one in the room who understood something about them before they did, or before it showed up in the data. I am present in all seven stories as a function, not a subject. The noticing is the through-line. I am the instrument.
I don’t know if that’s what the document is about. I think it might be the beginning of knowing what it’s for.
The sentences are still unfinished. But tonight the gap between “Which is why” and what follows it looks different than it did this morning. Whether that’s because the answer is closer or because I’m tired and can’t see clearly, I genuinely cannot tell.
Thirty-one days. December 2 is on my calendar. The document is open in another window, the cursor still sitting at the end of “Which is why.”