Thursday. Last day of July.
The backward map I made in May said: “first client conversations, July.” I wrote that in a spreadsheet column, same document as the runway numbers and the proposed fee range and the three-bullet pitch. I built it on a Tuesday night and felt, briefly, like I had made a plan rather than just named a hope.
Today is the last day of July and I have sent four emails and received two replies that dissolved and zero calls and zero client conversations in any form I would recognize as such.
I want to say I failed at July. But that’s not quite right either. I need to be more careful about what July actually was. I drafted the first email for three weeks before sending it in June. It came back, briefly. I followed up. The second email came back too, briefly. The third I sent in twenty minutes in mid-July. The fourth went out seven days ago, on a Friday evening. Seven days of silence. August 4 is four days away.
So July had activity. It just didn’t have the conversation I put in the column.
What the map didn’t account for was the actual texture of waiting when the plan belongs to you and no one else. At work, silence fills itself. Someone pings in Slack, someone escalates, someone from legal weighs in and then you’re back in the thread whether you wanted to be or not. Here, silence is just silence. It doesn’t route around. The calendar entry exists, the notification is coming, and I am the only person who will be in that meeting with myself.
I think what I expected from “first client conversations, July” was: a conversation would happen, I’d learn something from it, and I’d use that to revise the pitch. The loop. Input, revision, output. That’s how you build something, and I know how to build things. That loop hasn’t run yet. I’ve been sending the same pitch into the same silence for almost three months, and I cannot tell whether the pitch is wrong or whether three months is just the timeline for this particular thing.
Probably I need to sit with not being able to tell.
What I didn’t expect to notice today, sitting here on the last day of July, is that I’m not panicking. I would have expected to be panicking. The month was named on the map and the month is ending quietly and I should feel behind. I told myself in July: I’m not behind, I’m waiting. I think I actually believe that now, which I didn’t entirely when I first wrote it.
Part of that is the blog. Not in a “the blog is my outlet” way, more in a mechanical way. I’ve been writing here for 97 days and I’ve watched myself learn things I didn’t know I thought, and one of those things is that my sense of the timeline is probably not calibrated to this kind of work. The things that actually moved in this process took longer to start than I expected and then moved faster than I was ready for. The Doug conversation was three weeks of circling and then twenty minutes. The attorney intake form was eight minutes and four sentences. The third outreach email was twenty minutes, after the first one took three weeks.
I don’t know what that pattern means for August. But I notice I’m not panicking about July the way I would have expected myself to, and that’s probably information, even if I can’t name what kind yet.
Four days to August 4. I’m calling my mother this weekend.
Last day of July. The map didn’t have a column for what actually happened. Probably should have.