The thing about ending a post with an open question is that you have to live inside it until the next one.
Yesterday I wrote that I didn’t know what my own unanswered question was. I meant it. I usually write toward the edge of something and stop when I can’t see past it. But I woke up this morning still inside the same one, still turning over “is there anything you haven’t told me yet?” – the question I used to ask clients in the final stretch of a renewal, the one that worked, the one I cannot seem to turn on myself without the answer going sideways.
So I tried it. Over coffee, before Doug was up, the dog asleep against the kitchen baseboard.
Is there anything you haven’t told me yet, Leigh?
What came up first was the consulting. The 60-Day Save. The pitch I can now say in one sentence, the two conversations I’m waiting on, the follow-ups that have been out for ten days and nine days respectively. The plan has a shape. It has a rate, a scope, a target client. By any reasonable definition, it is a real thing I am building.
Then a word came up.
But.
I think the consulting is the floor. I’ve been calling it the plan because calling it the plan is defensible. If someone asks what I’m doing, “consulting, enterprise account strategy, I’m building a client base” lands cleanly. It maps to something people understand. Real work, real income, twenty-four years of expertise applied correctly. That is a real answer.
The document on my laptop, the one I still refuse to name, the three pages of stories I keep going back to – that doesn’t have a clean answer yet. I’ve been saying it might not go anywhere in the back of my head for six weeks now, and I’ve been using that possibility as permission not to look at it directly.
Here is what I might not have told myself yet: the consulting is the exit that makes sense. The document might be the reason I need the exit. Not the plan. The reason. I have not said that plainly before this sentence.
I don’t know what to do with that. That’s the honest answer.
Two blog readers emailed in the last few days. Not the contacts I’m waiting on – different people, people I’ve never met. One of them said something about yesterday’s post that I’ve been turning over since: “I didn’t expect it to be so specific.”
I’ve been trying to figure out what she meant. Maybe she meant the numbers. Maybe the case studies. Maybe just that it read like someone who was actually in it, which is the only thing I’ve ever been trying to do here.
When I read her email I didn’t feel proud, exactly. Something more uncertain. Like I had described something I hadn’t quite finished deciding about, and now a stranger had written it down.
I check the analytics less than I did a week ago. I can’t tell if that’s maturity or self-protection. Probably both.
The practical post I committed to writing is still not written. The one about health insurance math, the numbers I ran on a Saturday morning last winter, the information a stranger found through search that shifted how I was thinking about what this blog might actually be for. I have the numbers. I have the structure. There is no good reason it doesn’t exist yet.
I think what’s slowing me down is that writing it makes the departure concrete in a different way than the journal does. The journal is about what I’m thinking. The practical post is about what I’m doing, specifically enough that someone else could follow the same steps. There’s no processing in that. There’s no edge to write toward. It’s just the information, in order, for the next person.
I’ll write it. I am going to stop using the journal to explain why I haven’t.
I don’t know if that sentence will hold by morning.