The email came this morning while I was making coffee.
I know it came this morning because I have been checking the account on a schedule I would find embarrassing to describe. Not every hour. Often enough. At five days I had started to let myself believe that a non-response was information, and I was, honestly, okay with that. A reasonable explanation for nothing happening. I was filing it.
Then the coffee was dripping and my phone was on the counter and there it was.
I read it three times. Not because it was complicated, but because I had been anticipating this for five days and I needed a moment to let the actual version replace the version I had been imagining.
It was brief. Warm. “Leigh, I’ve been thinking about some of these questions myself. Would love to hear more. Let me look for thirty minutes.”
That’s it. Thirty words, approximately. No commitment. Not even a calendar link. Just: I am still here and I am listening.
I put the phone down. Poured the coffee. Stood at the counter for maybe ninety seconds.
I thought: this is the post. I don’t always know which moment is going to be the post. This one I knew.
What I felt, and I want to be honest about this: it wasn’t what I expected. Relief, I thought. Vindication, maybe. Some version of I knew it would work.
What I actually felt was quieter than that. Something closer to: oh. Okay. This is real now.
The five days of waiting had given me a specific kind of distance from the idea. When nothing happened, I could think of it as still theoretical. An email I had sent to an idea I was having. The non-response was useful in a way I didn’t fully notice until it ended. It let me keep treating this as a practice run.
There are no practice runs. I think I knew that. I wasn’t fully ready for it to be true until this morning.
I have a note in my phone with six names on it. One has a response in my inbox. Three I haven’t contacted yet, which I have been calling calibration and which I now have no reason to call calibration. The other two I can’t approach until after I’ve resigned, which is a real constraint, not a convenient one.
Three names. No more things to calibrate. Whatever I was waiting for, I now have it.
I’m going to contact the next one today. I’m saying it here because I have learned that saying things here is how I stop talking myself out of them.
The call isn’t scheduled yet. He said he’d look for time. I did not reply with every open window I have over the next three weeks, though that is what I drafted and deleted. I wrote “Looking forward to it” and hit send and put the phone face-down on the counter.
What I haven’t worked out: what I’m going to say when we actually talk. In the email I was Leigh-who-is-thinking-about-consulting. In the call I will be Leigh-who-is-maybe-asking-for-something, which is a different version of myself that I have not yet had to inhabit outside the steering wheel and this blog.
I am good at calls. I have been good at calls for 24 years. I know how to listen and ask the right question at the right moment and stay out of my own way.
I also know that when it matters to me, that gets harder.
It matters to me. I noticed that this morning, standing at the counter, looking at thirty words from someone who does not know what they just confirmed.