The Projects I Don't Remember

I have been trying to remember the name of the project.

Not a specific project. The category of project. The ones that took the evenings — the 7 p.m. calls, the weekend briefings, the deliverables that were urgent and then, after the deadline passed, were never mentioned again. I can remember the general shape of them. I can remember the particular feeling of being indispensable to them, which was real, and which I clung to, and which turned out to be a different thing from being necessary.

I spent years on projects I cannot now precisely name.

This is not a complaint. I want to be clear about that before I go further. The work was real and it mattered and the salary was what it was and it did things that needed doing. I am not pretending otherwise. But there is a particular moment — I want to describe it accurately — when you look at the span of years you have given to something and try to identify what specifically you contributed that could not have been handled by someone roughly competent in the same role, and you find the list is shorter than you'd expected.

I expected the list to be longer.

I was thirty-four when I understood this for the first time.

I was in a meeting — one of the meetings that defines the period, the ones you are always in, the ones that happen every Tuesday and produce actions that become the basis for next Tuesday's meeting — and I had the distinct, very clear thought: this could be anyone.

Not the people in the room. The role. My function in the room. The things I was about to say could be said by someone with the same training and a different face, and the meeting would proceed exactly as it would proceed, and the actions would be the same, and next Tuesday would come.

I did not leave because of this thought. I had a mortgage. I had, by then, children. I had colleagues I respected and work I was good at and a career that was moving correctly. The thought was true and I put it away and the meeting continued and I said the things and the actions were recorded.

But I knew.

I had looked at it directly for a moment and then looked away, but knowing does not go away just because you look away from it. It just waits.

The years between the thought and the change were not wasted.

I want to be honest about that because the narrative of awakening usually requires a villain and I do not want to assign one where there wasn't one. The company was not the villain. The system was not the villain. The mortgage was real. The children's school fees were real. The choices were mine and they were reasonable at the time they were made, and reasonable is not the same as wrong.

But I look at those years now and I see the pattern of a person who had a talent they did not trust enough to stake anything on, and so they staked their time on something safe and called it prudent, and prudent is not the same as alive.

The thing I was made for — I knew what it was. I had known at twenty-two. It required a version of courage I did not yet have, or did not locate in myself, or postponed locating until the mortgage was finished, which became until the children were in secondary, which became until the promotion, which became until the next one.

I wrote the first chapter of what I was actually building, not at a desk in a corporate office, not in a meeting that could have been anyone's — at a kitchen table, at six in the morning, before the house woke up. It took me four years to build what I had spent twelve years saying I would build.

I am still inside that process. The balance is imperfect. But I am doing something I cannot delegate to a roughly competent version of myself, which turns out to make an enormous difference to how a day feels.

The thing I want to tell you is simple.

Not all your years have to be yours. Not every hour needs to contain your deepest gift. The mortgage is real. The school fees are real. I know this because I have had them and they required what they required.

But some of your years have to be yours.

Not next year. This year. An hour before the house wakes. A Sunday afternoon you protect. A project so small it fits between the things that have to happen — but one that is specifically yours, that requires what only you can do, that would not exist if you were replaced by someone roughly competent in your role.

I spent years on projects I cannot precisely name.

I am trying now to spend some of them on things I will remember.

You already know what those things are.

You have been meaning to start.