It is Friday. The contact log has three entries.
I opened it this morning because the alternative was not opening it, and not opening it had started to feel like avoidance. So I opened it. Three rows. Same as when I built it on Wednesday. Nothing has changed because nothing was supposed to change – two weeks means October 14, and October 14 is twelve days from now.
I read the three entries again. As though something in them might be different on the fourth read than it was on the first. It was not.
There is a thing that happens when you are waiting on someone else’s timeline. You look for something to do. Not something useful. Just something to move through. I have done this with inboxes for my entire career – the reflexive check, the scan for what might have arrived in the last forty-five seconds. It is not productive. It is just what the body does when it has been trained to move and is suddenly being asked to hold still.
I checked the contact log four times today. I say four. Three times, and then I refreshed an email tab that does not have any new messages from any of the three people in the log, which I am counting as checking even though it is technically a different document. The entries have not changed because I have not added anything to them, because there is nothing to add. Two of the three people I emailed have not responded, which is normal at this stage. One is on an October 14 follow-up that I set myself.
I know this. The date was my idea.
I am reading my own document like I am waiting for someone else to update it.
I keep thinking about the difference between the contact log and the blog.
The blog has 153 posts. I did not build it the way I am trying to build this. I wrote one post and then another and I never once thought “I am building something that will reach 153 entries.” I just kept going back to it. Some days it felt like nothing was happening. I was just writing down what I noticed. Then it became a thing I can look at from the outside and see the shape of, if I give myself enough distance.
The contact log feels like a project with a number it is supposed to reach. Three entries registers as a deficit rather than a start. I don’t know if that is because the blog is mine in some way the contact log is not, or because 153 is proof that slow accumulation turns into a real thing and three rows is not there yet. Probably both. Almost certainly both, which is less useful than picking one.
What I am trying to hold on to, without being certain I believe it yet: the blog had three entries once too.
What I told myself on Wednesday was that I would figure out what to say to myself on October 14. I have twelve days to figure it out. I have not started figuring it out, which means I am twelve days into the problem and not yet one day closer to the answer.
The follow-through question – when waiting becomes passive, when the vendor emails too soon versus too late – I know this material. I have been on the other side of this cycle more times than I can count. I know exactly what I would tell a client in this situation. What I don’t know is how to apply that advice when the account is me, when there is no manager to run the call notes past, and when I am not trying to save a contract but figure out whether anything I am building will eventually turn into work.
I’ve closed the tab twice. Both times I opened it again.
Forty-three days.