Saturday.
I went back today and read some of my posts from March. Not on purpose, exactly. I was looking for a specific number I’d used when I wrote about health insurance, trying to remember whether I’d quoted the COBRA figure or the ACA estimate, and while I was in the March archive I just kept reading. Probably forty-five minutes, which is more time than I planned to spend.
Reading your own writing from five months ago is a specific kind of strange. You recognize it immediately, the same way you recognize your voice in a recording, and also want to find something else to do.
What I noticed: I apologized a lot.
Not in direct language. More in hedges. “I know this might sound dramatic,” I wrote around Day 4. “I might be getting ahead of myself,” somewhere in the first week. “I’m not trying to be one of those people,” though I cannot now remember who “those people” were or why I was worried about resembling them.
I read those lines and felt something that was not quite embarrassment. Closer to recognition. The person who wrote them was trying to take up space while constantly signaling that she knew she might not deserve the space.
I don’t write like that as much anymore. I noticed that today and then spent a while trying to figure out what it means.
My first instinct was: I sound more confident now. Which is probably true. Partly.
What’s actually changed, I think, is that I stopped expecting someone to argue with me. In March, I was braced. Someone was going to read this and say: but you have a mortgage. But your daughter is a year out from college. But you have a good job. I was writing into the gap before the objection, pre-emptively softening the landing. The hedges were escape hatches. A way of saying: if you disagree, I already knew you might be right.
What stopped it wasn’t a decision. It was just that nobody said those things. Four months of that. Twenty-eight days from notice. The bracing got expensive to maintain and at some point I put it down.
Whether that is growth or just relaxation into something I haven’t earned yet, I genuinely cannot tell from here. Those are different things, and I don’t have a clean way to distinguish them from the inside.
The comments and emails I get tend to come from people who are also bracing. The person in January who found the post about the spreadsheet and wrote that they’d built their own version instead of having the conversation they needed to have. The person in the spring who said they’d been in the same role for eighteen years and couldn’t figure out if the numbness was the job or just them. I read those and think: yes, that is the exact thing I was trying to name.
I used to hedge because I wasn’t sure I was right about my own experience. The escape hatches were for me as much as for whoever might be reading. Maybe this is just a bad month. Maybe the review was fair and I’m overreacting. Maybe the spreadsheet is the hobby project of a person who will ultimately stay put.
The people who write to me have already closed the escape hatches. That seems to be what we have in common. They didn’t find this because they were curious. They found it because they were looking for someone who sounded like they were in the same situation, and I was apparently that person.
I keep thinking about that young woman in the March posts, apologizing before anyone asked her to apologize. I was not performing humility. I think I was genuinely unsure whether this was real. Whether I was real, in this particular context.
I’m still not fully sure. But the uncertainty sounds different now. Less apology, more just: I don’t know yet, and I’m still here.
Twenty-eight days. The practical pieces are in motion and mostly waiting on other people, which means I have the weekend. I read old posts. I did not resolve anything. I ate half a sleeve of crackers standing over the kitchen sink, which I do not think is thematically significant but felt worth noting.
I don’t know if the person who wrote those March posts would recognize where she’s ended up. I think she’d be relieved the hedges went somewhere. I’m not sure she’d believe the rest yet.