The handoff brief covers five accounts. The exit form covers benefits, the laptop, and a forwarding address for W-2 forms. The Monday call covered the November executive summary (being delegated) and which accounts go to whom and when.
That is, apparently, all of it. That is the transition logistics.
What the transition logistics do not cover: the reflex.
Yesterday morning, a colleague I have worked with for six years emailed me a renewal timing question on one of the accounts formally transferred to her in the brief. I have answered this exact question a dozen times. I wrote four sentences of analysis before I caught myself and deleted them.
The question was hers to answer now. I knew that. My fingers did not know that.
I wrote two sentences instead: here is where I would start, the rest is in the brief. I sent it and it was right. But the four deleted sentences were there first, already drafted, already confident, and I keep noticing that. Not as a complaint. As data about where 24 years actually live.
The transition is going fine, in the ways transitions go fine. I am showing up to my calendar. The handoffs are progressing. My manager has started CC’ing me on threads with a note that says “for Leigh’s awareness during transition,” which is the professional way of saying: she does not need to act on this anymore.
I have received three of those in three days.
I did not expect that formulation to feel like anything. It felt like something. Small. A little like watching someone move the furniture while you are still in the house.
The December 2 webinar is still on my calendar. I accepted it in late August, before I’d told my manager, before the notice, before the Monday call. It is an internal presentation on Q4 account strategy. I will not be employed on December 2.
I have been meaning to send the organizer a note and have, until today, just looked at the calendar entry and thought: that is a problem for slightly-later Leigh.
I sent the note this morning. Three lines: I accepted before my timeline was clear, I will be out of the company by then, I’m sorry for the late notice. That is the first concrete message I have sent with the phrase “out of the company” in it. Not “in transition.” Not “stepping away.” Out of.
Those three lines took eleven minutes to write and I do not completely understand why.
The document sentence is still not there. What I have now, which is more than I had a week ago: in all seven stories in the document, I was the one reading the room. Not the room reading me. The question underneath the sentence is whether the room-reading functions if the room doesn’t know who I work for.
I don’t know yet. The mechanism feels like mine. That is what my manager said on Monday, sideways, when he said the clients would be lucky. He was describing the mechanism. Not the badge.
So the sentence is something like: it is attention, and the attention does not require the institution to function. But that is not a sentence. That is a thesis statement. I keep finding the thesis and losing the sentence and I am starting to think they are actually different problems, which is annoying, because it means there are two problems and I have been treating them as one.
The widening. That was the word I had on September 19 for what I found instead of relief. I said I would tell you when I found a better one.
Here is what I have so far: it is not the opposite of a closing. It is not freedom, at least not the way that word usually shows up. It is more like the moment when you have been watching a small fire and then you look up and realize the fire is in a much larger room than you thought.
Not more dangerous. Just roomier.
I am still working out what to do with that much room.