Sunday.
Yesterday I spent two hours building a competitive landscape and called it research. Then I wrote about how I’d called it research and it was actually avoidance. I felt very perceptive. Very honest with myself.
Then I woke up this morning and couldn’t stop thinking about what I would actually say to Doug.
Not whether to say it. I’ve settled that question. I know I’m going to say it, and I’ve known since at least Tuesday if I’m being honest, probably longer. The when is close enough now that I can almost feel it. But this morning, in that particular hour before the house wakes up, I was trying to put words to it and I kept running into the same problem.
I don’t know what I’m asking for.
That sounds small. It isn’t. Twenty-four years in account management, and the thing that separates the conversations that work from the ones that go sideways is almost always whether you know your actual ask going in. I have watched VP-level people blow up renewal calls because they showed up without an answer to that question. They had everything else: the data, the deck, the relationship history, the case studies. But they hadn’t decided what outcome they were seeking. So they let the meeting decide for them.
I have been preparing this conversation the same way those people prepare meetings. Lots of information. No clarity on what I need.
Let me try. Here is what I’ve been collecting to tell him: I want to leave my job before November. I have a consulting idea. I have a problem statement and four case studies and a competitive landscape and a pricing structure and a woman in Texas who does adjacent work and charges $275 an hour. I have numbers that say we don’t need my income to survive the transition, not that I’m planning to earn nothing, I am planning to earn something specific, three or four retainer clients, but even if year one is slow we have the runway. I also want to write. I don’t know exactly what that means yet, but I want to say it out loud to him.
That is everything I know. It is also, I notice, the shape of a presentation. An argument. A case.
Which makes me wonder if what I think I need is his approval. And whether I should need that. And whether not needing it means I don’t have to have the conversation at all, which I can see is just another slide in the avoidance deck.
Here is what I actually think is true. I don’t need Doug’s permission. The plan is financially viable without his blessing. I did the math. I could file the LLC on Monday and he would never know until I handed him a business card. I am not doing that. I needed to understand why.
Not because the permission matters. Because the partnership does.
We have been in this house and in this marriage making decisions about where to live and when to have children and whether to refinance and what to do about Zoe’s SAT tutor. In all of those decisions we were both in the room. I am about to make the biggest professional decision of my life and I have been treating it like something that happens in the car, in an hour before he gets home, on a laptop I close when I hear the door.
That is not how we operate. Or it is not how we are supposed to operate. I am genuinely not sure which sentence is true right now.
What I think I need from the conversation is not a yes or a no. What I think I need is to stop carrying this alone. That is different from needing permission. It is also harder to ask for, because “I need you in this with me” is a different kind of vulnerable than “here is my business plan, please evaluate it.”
I have a better deck than I have a sentence. That gap has been the whole problem.
I am working on the sentence.
Doug is making coffee downstairs. I can hear the machine. I wrote this in forty minutes and I didn’t build a single spreadsheet.
That’s something.