There was a planning cycle meeting this morning.
I accepted the invite last week knowing what I was accepting. Twenty-two people in a virtual room, fifteen of whom I’ve worked with for years, building a roadmap for the next eighteen months. Standard stuff. The kind of meeting I have run and attended and occasionally dreaded for most of my adult life.
I went. I contributed. It was fine.
Better than fine, actually. I had something real to say about the mid-market renewal cycle. Someone cited a framework I built in 2023, something I can’t remember officially naming but that apparently everyone calls “the Leigh matrix,” which made me laugh out loud with my microphone on, which was a small embarrassment. The session ran long in the way sessions do when the people in them are actually engaged. I took two pages of notes.
At the end, the project lead asked if I could own the executive summary deliverable. Due in November.
I said yes.
I’ve been sitting with that yes since I closed the laptop.
Not with regret. I’m qualified for it and I can do it well. The yes was not a lie. But it had an asterisk I did not read aloud, and I’m not sure what to do with the asterisk.
Here’s what I keep landing on: if I give notice in September, I can still deliver that summary as a handoff in early November. It will be good work for a place I’m already leaving. I’ve been trying to decide what that makes it.
The answer I keep not quite letting myself say: probably the same thing it’s always been. Work I do well, I do because I know how to do it. I didn’t stop caring about the job because the job stopped seeing me clearly. Those two things are on different tracks, and they’ve always been on different tracks. I thought that was sad for a long time. I’m starting to think it might actually be the thing that’s gotten me through.
But I notice I’m examining the yes more carefully than I used to examine anything. Like there’s a deposition running in the back of my brain and the opposing counsel has asked me to define my terms. What does doing the job mean when you’re already counting the months out? Am I saying yes because it’s the right thing to do, or because I don’t know how not to?
I think it’s the first one. I’m not sure I can prove it.
There are two names in the note I still haven’t contacted.
I haven’t opened the note since yesterday. Not because I’ve forgotten it’s there. I know exactly where it is. I’m holding off because the next actual move belongs to the two conversations already in motion, and adding a third email right now feels like busyness more than progress. That might be a rationalization. It might also be right. Both can be true.
What I’m noticing: there’s a version of myself that operates from clarity and a version that operates from displacement, and they produce nearly identical behavior. The same kind of yes in a meeting. The same email opened and closed without sending. The distinction lives in the interior, not the output. I don’t always have reliable access to the interior.
What I do have: two pages of notes from a meeting I attended in good faith. A deliverable I agreed to write. An exit I am still planning.
November is also my personal deadline. Same month, two different endings.
I thought when I noticed that it would feel ironic. Instead it just feels like timing.