Sundays have a particular texture when you are waiting.
I called my mother at ten, out of something that was mostly muscle memory. For nineteen weeks, that call was the one I braced for. Fine. Work is fine. Everything is fine. I was very good at the fine call. What I discovered this morning is that when you do not need to be fine anymore, the call becomes just a call. She asked about Zoe’s roommate situation, because Zoe has been looking at apartments for next year. I told her what I knew, which was not much. We talked for eleven minutes.
It is a small thing. I am noting it anyway.
Yesterday I counted twenty-three names and named the problem: my professional network is almost entirely tied to the institution. The context that travels with my name is the company’s. In six weeks I give notice. On November 14, it is gone.
I sat with that again this morning and found a version of the question I had not considered yet.
What does travel?
I have spent so much time accounting for what I will lose when the institutional attachment drops, that I have not fully thought about what is there underneath it. Not what the company provided. What I actually built, on my own.
Here is one answer I keep coming back to: this blog.
Four months, 106 posts, from just Leigh. No company name attached, no title traveling with the byline, no institutional shorthand telling the reader what to make of me before I have said anything. The people who found this found it through search and word of mouth and a stranger named Sandra who emailed in June, and not one of them followed a link from the company intranet. What they know about me is what I have actually said, in my own name, without anyone else’s infrastructure in the sentence.
I did not plan it that way. I planned it as a commitment device. It became this other thing. What I am noticing this morning, which I had not quite seen before, is that the blog is already the answer to the question I was scared I could not answer: who is Leigh without the badge. She has been here the whole time, writing, getting a photo credit right because she would want the credit if it were hers. Making a thing.
I should be careful here, because I can feel myself overstating. The blog does not solve the twenty-three-names problem or the referral problem or the six-months-of-runway problem. It does not produce a client. What I am claiming is considerably smaller than that: I already know what it feels like to be just Leigh, because I have been just Leigh in this one place for four months. Which is not nothing. I think it is something. I am not yet sure what size of something it is.
What I know is that I did not have it a year ago. I had a title, a salary grade, and an org chart position. Those are not the same thing, and I spent a long time treating them as if they were.
Zoe came downstairs around eleven. She made her tea, the full deliberate process: loud bag, oat milk from the back of the fridge, standing at the counter while it steeped. She does this the same way every time and I find it very Zoe, though I cannot explain exactly why.
She stood there for a minute without saying anything, which usually means she is deciding whether to say something.
“Did you write yet today?” she asked.
I had not. I told her that.
“The list post was good,” she said. “The number thing.” She meant yesterday, the twenty-three names. Then she took her tea upstairs.
That is the whole conversation. I am writing it down because it happened and because I am still not sure what to do with it.
The conversation my mother meant when she told me to talk to Zoe has still not happened. What is accumulating instead is a series of exchanges at the bottom of the stairs, my kid checking in on a thing I am doing, each one three words or fewer. She knows what I am building. She has been reading since June without me in the room. At some point one of these exchanges is going to have to become the actual conversation, and I am aware that I am the adult in this situation and I am the one who has to open it.
I do not yet know when. I keep thinking I will know when I am ready, and I am starting to wonder if ready is not a thing that happens first, or if I have been misunderstanding the sequence this whole time.
The coffee is gone. The house is quiet. August is doing what August does, which is moving forward without consulting anyone.