I caught myself doing it on Tuesday, then again on Thursday, and by Friday I stopped pretending my hand had slipped on the trackpad.
I keep blocking gray rectangles on the fall calendar for things that do not exist. No agenda, no title, just a hard border drawn against October. A placeholder for a breath I have not figured out how to take yet.
For longer than I want to admit, I measured my life by how much I could carry without visibly shaking. A good week was a heavy week where nothing dropped. Stack the boxes high enough and exhaustion starts to feel like purpose. It is a seductive trap because people praise you for it. They watch you hold the roof up with one hand and they say, I don’t know how you do it. And I would smile, and my shoulder would keep giving out where nobody could see it.
The tally I keep now is different, and a lot less flattering.
I count how many decisions had to come through me. Not the visionary work that goes in slide decks. The low-grade friction of everyone waiting on a nod, a sign-off, a “Did I do good, boss?” When that number spikes, I have stopped calling it a busy season. A busy season implies weather. Something that blew in off the coast that I just have to wait out under an umbrella (which doesn’t happen to often in So Cal).
It is not weather. It is architecture. I built it, usually out of an unexamined instinct that if I let go of the wheel for twelve seconds the whole thing ends up in the ditch.
Looking at that number honestly the first time was like catching my reflection in a dark window before I was ready for it. The impulse is to fix it fast. Write a few brisk emails, hand off three projects, call it delegation. Real handoffs do not work like that. It’s taking a lot of time. Some things are becoming clumsier in the process while they find new definition because they missed nuance I spent ten years learning the hard way.
That middle stretch, where the work is worse than what I would have done and I am not allowed to reach in and take it back, is close to unbearable. It takes everything I have not to grab it out of their hands. But if I sit still long enough, something else happens. It comes back better. Different, sharper, not mine anymore. And in the process, they get to develop their own nuance and experienced ways.
Most of what I want from my work right now is not an addition. Not a bigger stage, a larger team, another project with my name on it. It is an absence.
I want a list of things that stop happening.
Fewer calls I replay at two in the morning, dissecting my own tone. Fewer moments where I hold whatever I am actually feeling so I can be the steadiest nervous system in the room, because the room is brittle and needs an anchor. There is a specific kind of tired that comes from being everyone’s shock absorber. I did not notice how much of the road I had taken into my own bones until I tried to sit still.
I don’t have a clean lesson here to give you. No three-step framework for reclaiming my time, or whatever we are calling it now.
I just have gray blocks sitting on the screen for mid-October, and a question I have not answered:
Am I worn out by the terrain of this particular year, or have I outgrown the shape of the container I built?
I don’t know yet.
Where does that land for you?
It's difficult for high achievers to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony. It's still difficult for me. My reward now, though, is achieving through that sometimes painfully slow development of others.