I found it while clearing out my desk, which I was clearing out because I had resigned, which is already most of the story. A five-year plan I wrote in early 2013. I had laminated it. I want you to sit with that the way I had to. At forty-one I believed in this document enough to protect it from coffee.
The plan was good. That is the part that is hard to say cleanly. I was not a fool and it was not a foolish plan. Managing director by a certain year, which I hit early. A board seat, which came. A number in a retirement account that I will not write down but did reach. If you had shown the laminated card to the woman who wrote it and told her she would get all of it, she would have been pleased and gone straight back to work.
What the card had no line for was the cost side, and I was a finance person, so the omission is almost funny. Nowhere did it say: your marriage will end in the third year, quietly, more from absence than from anything you could name in a court. Nowhere did it list which friendships would not survive your schedule. The plan tracked only the things that could be achieved, so those were the only things I achieved.
I kept re-reading it long after it had stopped describing anyone I recognised. This is the embarrassing part and the true one. I would come across it in the drawer and read it the way you reread a ticket stub from a trip that is long over, not because you are going anywhere but because the person who bought the ticket was so certain, and you find you miss the certainty even knowing where it led.
The plan tracked only the things that could be achieved. So those were the only things I achieved.
People here keep congratulating me on my courage for leaving. It was not courage. Courage would have been leaving in year three, when the marriage was going and I could see it going and I chose the quarterly numbers instead, because the numbers were legible and he was not. Leaving now, at fifty-three, with the account full and the title secured, is not brave. It is just late. I am trying to hold on to the difference, because the brave version is the nicer story and I have told enough nice stories.
So the thing I am letting go of is not the job. I let the job go already, that was the easy afternoon. It is the plan I am letting go of, the whole idea that a life can be written down at forty-one and then executed, that the executing is the living. I put the card through the shredder last week and it jammed on the lamination, and I had to pull the strips out by hand. That felt about right. Nothing I have believed that hard comes out clean on the first pass.