Doug asked me what I was working on last night.
We were on the couch. He was watching something about World War II, which is his version of meditation. I had my laptop open to a Google Doc that was very clearly not email. He glanced over, not suspicious, just making conversation the way you do when you’ve been married for 21 years and the other person is typing and you want them to know you noticed them.
“Just email,” I said.
It wasn’t email. It was this. Or the version of this that existed before I edited it, which was worse. More earnest. I toned it down.
I want to explain why I lied, but first I need to tell you something about Doug. He would be fine with this. That’s what makes it complicated. If I turned the laptop around right now and said “I started a blog about leaving my job and also I have a spreadsheet with four years of runway and also I found a business idea in my phone notes,” he would nod. He would ask a couple of questions. He would say something like “okay, so what’s the plan?” And he would mean it.
Doug is not the obstacle. I need to say that clearly because I can already hear how this sounds, and I don’t want to be the woman who writes about her unsupportive husband on the internet. He’s not unsupportive. He’s practical in a way that I find both reassuring and slightly maddening, which is probably why we work.
The reason I haven’t told him is simpler and less flattering than “he won’t understand.”
Telling Doug makes it a thing.
Right now this is mine. It exists in the space between when the kids go upstairs and when I close the laptop. Nobody in my actual life knows about it. My manager doesn’t know. My colleagues don’t know. My mother, who calls every Sunday and asks how work is going, does not know. I have told the internet before I told the person sleeping six inches from me, and that is a sentence I did not expect to write today.
But here’s why. When you tell someone you live with, you start a clock. Not a deadline, exactly. More like an awareness. Doug would never say “so how’s the blog going?” in a way that felt like pressure, but he’d think it. Or I’d think he was thinking it. Same result. Right now the only person tracking whether I follow through is me, and approximately however many people are reading this, who I cannot see and whose faces I do not have to sit across from at breakfast.
There’s something about writing to strangers that is easier than talking to someone who knows you. A stranger reads what you meant. A person who’s been married to you for two decades reads what you meant plus everything you’ve ever said that sounded like this before. Doug remembers the photography phase. 2019. I bought a camera I was going to use to start a side business. It’s in the hall closet. He remembers the freelance writing inquiry I sent in 2016 and never followed up on. He doesn’t bring these things up. He doesn’t have to. They’re in the room.
I’m not saying this is different from those. It might not be. That is the specific thing I cannot see yet and that telling Doug would force me to confront. Because the moment I say it out loud, he’s going to look at me with that expression, the one that is trying very hard not to be evaluating, and I’m going to have to decide whether what I see in his face is doubt or just the reasonable caution of a person who pays half the mortgage.
I almost told him tonight. He turned off the TV and said “coming up?” and I said “in a minute” and he went upstairs and I sat there with my laptop and thought about the three bullet points in my spreadsheet and the four years of runway and the fact that I have more documented evidence that I can do this than most people have when they actually do it. And I still couldn’t say it.
I know I’m going to have to tell him. That’s not the question. The question is whether I tell him before I believe it myself, or after. And I don’t know which one is braver.