The questions still haven’t come.
I don’t know if Doug is being generous or strategic, but it’s Tuesday and he has not asked any of them. He made dinner last night. We talked about Max’s lacrosse tournament and whether Zoe’s college counselor is actually helpful or just expensive, and we watched forty minutes of television and went to bed. Normal in every direction.
I keep waiting for the conversation to resume and it keeps not resuming. This is starting to feel like its own kind of pressure. Like a held note.
At work today I had two back-to-back calls, a contract review that was technically someone else’s problem but I got looped in anyway, and a Slack message from my manager with an action item that no one had assigned at the meeting where it was supposedly assigned, which is a kind of corporate magic I have watched happen for 24 years and still find mildly astonishing. I handled all of it. Fine.
On my lunch break I opened a blank document and did something I’ve been avoiding. I worked backwards from November 14.
Not the emotional version of November 14. The logistical one.
If I’m leaving November 14, I have to give notice sometime. My company requires four weeks. Four weeks before November 14 is October 17. Except I have a major renewal cycle closing October 31, which I would not leave someone in the middle of, so realistically notice would go in closer to September 19. Which is about eight weeks from now. Except September is when Zoe starts her college applications in earnest, and that is already scheduled to consume whatever bandwidth I have left after work.
So if I give notice September 19, I need to have signed my first client by then. I need to have the LLC formed, a bank account, a contract template, something resembling a website. I need to have told at least two people in my industry that I exist as an option, which means I need to start those conversations probably in July. Which is seven weeks from now.
This is all completely achievable. None of it is hard. Seven weeks is plenty of time to form an LLC and have two conversations with people I already know.
I stared at this list for probably ten minutes.
The logic holds. The timeline works. The problem is that I’ve now done the thing I should have done in January, and I cannot un-know it. I have a spreadsheet with four years of runway and a competitive landscape document and four case studies and a problem statement I’ve said out loud in a moving vehicle. None of that prepared me for a list of calendar dates with actual things on them.
November felt like a long time until I started from November and worked the other way.
I had a manager early in my career, second company, who said the only real difference between planning and deciding is whether you’re willing to put a date on it. I thought that was a little precious at the time. I’ve thought about it a lot in the last hour.
Here’s what I still can’t untangle: whether what I felt staring at that list was clarity or panic. They feel the same from the inside. Both involve a cold recognition that the thing is actually going to happen. That it has a shape. That there are calendar weeks with deliverables on them.
Doug’s questions are going to arrive. When they do, I’m going to have more than November 14. I’m going to have August and September, too.
I don’t know yet if that’s better or worse. Maybe it’s just more real.