The dog and I do the same loop every morning. Thirty-five minutes, the same streets, the same three houses where the landscaping is competitive and the fourth house with the dead hydrangeas that have been there two years now and I keep expecting someone to deal with. The loop is useful. I do some of my clearest thinking between the second block and the turnaround.
This morning I was rehearsing the email again.
Not deliberately. I was halfway through the loop before I noticed I was doing it. Running the opener, the line about the 60-day window, the specific question I am going to ask instead of the pitch I was trying to write before I understood the difference. I have been running through it since Thursday. I have not opened a compose window since Saturday. I have been doing the preparatory work in my head, which is either responsible or another form of avoidance, and I am trying to be honest about not being able to tell which.
I came inside and made coffee and sat down at the laptop. Not to write anything. Just to look.
I started this blog 42 days ago because I needed a commitment device. That is the honest reason. I needed to say something in public so I could not quietly unsay it in private. I have a talent for absorbing things I should walk away from, and I wanted the internet to make that harder. The plan was: write it here, and then you cannot pretend you never thought it.
That is still true. I have not unsaid anything.
But I was reading through some of the early posts this morning. The Day 1 post. The Day 3 post where I talked about the spreadsheet. They sound like someone writing to herself. The grammar is intact, the sentences are shaped, but the voice is – I want to say tentative, except that is not right. The voice is private. The register you use when you are writing for no audience but the one you hope, distantly, might exist someday.
There are 412 sessions. More now. I know this because I checked again, which I told myself I would not do, and then did, which is its own information.
At some point between Day 10 and now, the blog stopped being a commitment device and started being the practice of paying attention. I am not sure when. I know that the badge-versus-authority question, the one I have been sitting with since the attorney meeting, would have stayed vague and uncomfortable if I had just carried it around. I would have filed it somewhere internal and eventually lost it. Instead I wrote about it, and the shape of it became visible to me in the writing. That is not something I planned. I thought I was keeping a record.
The difference between a record and a practice: a record is what happened. A practice is what you do with what happened. The early posts are more record than practice. The recent ones are different. I think.
Doug asked over dinner last week whether the blog was helping. He was genuinely asking, not testing. I said I thought it was. He asked how. I said I didn’t have a good answer yet.
I still don’t, exactly. But I think the answer has something to do with the fact that there is now a version of me that exists in 42 posts, making sense of this out loud. The me who wrote Day 1 could not have written Day 40. Not because Day 40 is better, though maybe it is. Because the person writing Day 40 has been doing this long enough to know what she is actually asking. The me who writes Day 80 will be someone I cannot fully see from here.
That is a different answer than “accountability.” It is, I think, a better one.
I picked a photo before I started writing this morning. A habit now. I am looking for the feeling of the post, not the content of it. Choosing the image is a small act of attention, and I credit the photographers because I would want the credit if it were mine. These are not complicated choices, but they are choices I am making, which is different from the year I spent being moved along by other people’s decisions.
Tomorrow the email goes. That is what I said Saturday, and Saturday became Sunday, and Sunday is today. I have now said Monday three times. The first two Mondays were rhetorical. I think this one is real. I am aware that I have thought that before.
What I know: I am better prepared for things I actually want than for things I am supposed to want. I have given dozens of client presentations I practiced once and I was fine. The preparation I have done for this email, which has not produced a sent email, is the most I have brought to anything in four years. I am trying to count that for something.
I am going to walk the loop again this afternoon. I will probably rehearse the opener the whole time. I have been doing this for five days. At some point I will have to call that what it is.