Monday morning. The post-it is still on my desk. I have looked at it three times since I sat down and it still says the same thing: “I’ll think about whether I know anyone.” I have a one-on-one tomorrow that I need to prep for. I have not started.
What I am doing instead, which I suspect you will recognize by now, is sitting with a question I started working on yesterday and could not finish.
I said that I keep thinking I will know when I am ready, and that I am starting to wonder if ready is not a thing that happens first. I wrote that sentence and went to bed, and woke up this morning and it was still there. Not the sentence. The question underneath it.
The pattern I have been watching myself do: almost every hard thing in the last four months, I have named here before I did it. I named the Doug conversation for twenty-three days in this space before I actually had it. I wrote about my mother for eleven Sundays while telling her work was fine. I drafted the outreach emails into these posts before I sent them, sometimes in the same week.
I had always thought of this as the commitment device working as intended. If I write it here, I cannot pretend I never said it. The public declaration closes the exit.
What I am not sure about, sitting here with coffee going cold on my desk, is whether the blog-version-first is preparation for the real version, or whether it sometimes lets me feel like the thing is done when it is not.
I should be careful here, because I am about to say something unkind to myself and I want to make sure it is accurate before I commit it to type.
I do not think writing it here lets me avoid. Every hard thing I named here did eventually happen. The call with my mother happened. The emails went. Doug knows. The attorney is done. What the blog appears to do is give me a place to understand what I actually think before I say it to someone who will react to it. That is useful. I am not criticizing it. I am trying to see it clearly.
The Zoe conversation has not happened.
I have named it here four times in the past three weeks. I have said I know she is reading. I have said she sent me three words at the bottom of the stairs on Sunday and I did not know what to do with them. I have said I am aware I am the adult and I am the one who has to open it.
I wrote that on Sunday night, read it back, thought: yes, that is accurate.
The conversation has still not happened.
So I am sitting with a version of the question I have not wanted to hold directly: the blog-version-first has always been preparation, and eventually something reaches a threshold and I act. With Doug, three weeks. With my mother, four months. With the outreach emails, the gap got shorter each time: three weeks, then 45 minutes, then twenty minutes. The pattern suggests things converge.
And the Zoe conversation: four times named. I do not feel closer to opening it.
Which might mean something specific about that conversation, about Zoe, about what I am afraid she is going to say or ask or feel. Or it might mean I am still working out what ready feels like for that particular thing.
I genuinely cannot tell from the inside which is true.
Here is what I know from twenty-four years of account management. The accounts I saved were not the ones I waited to feel ready for. They were the ones I called anyway. I called and something happened that could not have happened before the call. The readiness came from inside the call, not before it. I knew this. I told junior colleagues this.
I wrote that down this morning and then sat with it for longer than I expected.
Zoe will probably come downstairs at some point today. She usually does, at some point, for tea or to ask about dinner or to say three words about something she read. I do not know yet if today is the day I say something first, or whether I am going to wait again.
I keep calling it waiting. I am starting to think that might not be the right word for what this is.
The one-on-one prep is not going to do itself, so I should probably get to it. The work calendar has structure and tomorrow is on it and that part I know how to do. The other calendar does not come with a prep document, which I am still figuring out how to manage.