Tuesday, October 13. Thirty-two days.
Yesterday a stranger emailed to say she was printing the health insurance post for her sister. Her sister leaves a job in November. She asked one question before she signed off: had I written anything about the fear of the first month?
I said I hadn’t yet, but I’d been thinking about it. She said no rush.
I have been thinking about why I haven’t written it, and the answer is that I am still in it. My notice went in September 19. Twenty-four days ago. I cannot write the post about the fear of the first month from the other side because there is no other side yet. There is just this: a Tuesday in October, the contact log open in another tab, tomorrow being something I set a reminder for a while back and decided I would just find out about when I got there.
But I think “no rush” was her being polite. Her sister leaves in November. If I wait until I have the complete picture it will be December and she will not have needed it anymore. So I am going to write what I can.
Here is what the first month actually looks like, from inside it, with the caveat that I am not done with it.
It is quieter than I expected. I thought there would be a hard line, a before and after I could point to. What happened instead was gradual. The first week I kept picking up my work laptop out of habit, then putting it down, then noticing I had put it down. By day ten that reflex had mostly stopped. By day twenty it was gone. That adjustment was faster than I anticipated. I am genuinely not sure whether to take that as a sign of adaptability or something I should examine more carefully. Both seem possible.
The fear is not what I thought it would be. I braced for financial anxiety, which has stayed manageable because I have the spreadsheet and I know the runway. I expected isolation, which has been real but less acute than the version I feared at 1am in August. What I did not expect was the specific texture of a day with no external shape on it. Tuesday just is. It does not mean anything until I decide what it means. I have had to learn to structure time from the inside rather than fit myself into a structure someone else built. That sounds like the thing people say they want. From inside it, it feels more like a muscle I did not know I hadn’t been using.
The first month is also, it turns out, a waiting period. Not in the way I thought, where you leave and the next thing begins. In the way where you have set things in motion and now you are sitting with the motion. Marcus has my follow-up from yesterday, no response yet. I open the contact log and nothing has changed since I last opened it. The log has four entries. I built the log. I am the only person who maintains it and the only person who reads it. That is the part I am still getting used to.
I was going to write that I am not afraid. I don’t think that’s accurate.
I am not afraid in the way I expected. I am afraid in a way I could not have predicted: that I will be very methodical about all of this, that I will do the specific things I said I would do on the days I said I would do them, and still not know for another three months whether it is working. That is not a fear you can spreadsheet your way out of. It is just the shape of the thing I chose.
Tomorrow is October 14. I set a reminder at some point in the past year, for reasons that seemed clear at the time, and I decided in September that I would open it on the day rather than try to prepare for it. I have been thinking about October 14 more than I have been thinking about whether Marcus will respond, which is interesting to notice.
I will write to the stranger and say I’m working on it. That’s the honest answer. The post about the fear of the first month is not finished because the first month is not finished. But here is what I can say now: the fear is real. It is not the fear I named. And it does not go away when you do the math. The math just tells you what is true. What to do with the true thing is a different problem, and that problem is mine.
The month ends in six days. October 14 is tomorrow.