I did not intend to spend part of yesterday reading old posts.
Someone had left a comment on Day 3, and I went back to see what I had actually written, because I couldn’t remember exactly, and then I kept going. Day 2. Day 1. Then forward again from the beginning. I lost forty-five minutes and the dog was staring at me with the flat expression of a creature who had expected a walk twenty minutes ago and was prepared to wait indefinitely, but not quietly.
I’m not sure what I expected to find. Maybe the predictable mild embarrassment that comes with reading anything you wrote when you were slightly less certain about things.
What I found: the fear sounds the same. The voice is mine. But the person who wrote Day 1 did not know she’d build a spreadsheet with a tab called “The 60-Day Save,” or sit across from an employment attorney, or send an email at 6:47am that she’d rehearsed for five days straight. She was still mostly in the parking lot. Naming the thing for the first time, in public, because she’d decided that was the only way to make it feel real.
She put in numbers. $161,000. 24 years. 27 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon. She wasn’t being particularly deliberate about it, I don’t think. She just didn’t know how else to write something she didn’t have a vocabulary for yet. Specificity as the only available tool.
The email has been out for 48 hours. No response. That is well within normal, and I keep telling myself that in the slightly effortful way that suggests I’m still working on actually believing it.
I have three more names. I told myself I was waiting until I’d seen how the first one landed before I adjusted the approach. That’s still my reason. I am still trying to figure out how much of it is real and how much of it is one of those reasons that sounds exactly like a reason but is doing different work underneath.
I am not in a hurry to answer that question before I have to.
I’ve been thinking about what the person who writes Day 90 will think of Day 45. Not anxiously. Just the way you look at an old photograph and notice what you couldn’t see at the time because you were standing in it.
She’ll understand the waiting. I think she’ll be sympathetic about not sending the second email yet, because that is a real thing to navigate and not a simple one. Whether she finds Day 45 admirable is another question. I’m guessing not, exactly. But maybe comprehensible. I have decided that comprehensible is the right bar for right now.
What I wasn’t expecting, reading back through those early posts: the thing I was most embarrassed by wasn’t the fear. Fear is just the condition. What I cringed at was the hedging. “I think maybe I could possibly be doing this differently.” Nine qualifying words doing the work of one clause. I edit myself mid-sentence and I have made peace with that, but the mid-sentence correction and the hedge before the sentence are different things. One is honesty. The other is preemptive apology.
I am going to try to write fewer preemptive apologies.
I chose the photo for this post this morning. I do that now, which is a new fact about me. I look for something that fits the mood rather than the literal events, and I spend longer on it than I probably should. Today’s photo is by someone named Markus Spiske, a stranger who made something and put it somewhere it could be found. I credited him by name. I would want the credit, so I credit other people. This is a simple policy and one of the few I have never had to think twice about.
Day 1 Leigh did not include a photo. She didn’t know she’d care about that yet. She thought she was keeping a ledger.
I’m still keeping a ledger. I think. I’m just less certain than I was at Day 1 about what the ledger is of.
The email is still sitting in my Sent folder. I check it in roughly the same motion I use to check the analytics: phone, then the tab, then phone again. Both are the same question underneath. Is this real. Is there something on the other side.
For the analytics, yes. There is something on the other side. The number went up again this morning. There are now more people reading about whether I’m going to do this than there are people in my actual life who know I’m thinking about it. I am not sure how I feel about that. I have been not sure how I feel about it for two weeks and that uncertainty has not resolved itself, which I am starting to think means it is not going to.
For the email, I don’t know yet. No response is not a no. Not knowing yet is still the condition I’m in.
Day 1 Leigh would have ended there. So will I.