NEWSLETTER - vol. 7
Home by seven thirty Sunday night after thirty hours on the road, the last stretch spent waiting out a thunderstorm outside Toledo. Wednesday morning I was back at the rink by six thirty. No space between the two.
Wednesday I went somewhere dark, the kind of dark that doesn't come with one clean reason attached to it. The kind of dark that comes with several reasons, all of them true at once. A darkness that suffocates and comforts at the same time, quietly, and it keeps you from reaching out and talking about it. So we’re all on the same page, I was not in harms way. It did, however, last the whole day and a decent portion of Thursday. Some of it was plain exhaustion, thirty hours of driving stacked on a weekend of crewing Nora, dropped straight into a job that asks a lot of the body before the sun is all the way up. Some of it was the number that sits under everything right now. I am forty eight years old, making less than fifty thousand dollars a year, without insurance, at a time when nothing costs what it used to. I left real money at Trek for this. I knew that going in. Knowing a thing and living inside it are different exercises.
It finally broke Thursday afternoon, in a video call with two strangers named Sean and Michael. I was a guest on their podcast built around performance and the discipline it takes to stay happy inside it. I told them the conversation would have gone differently on Wednesday. They laughed. I meant it. The version of me that gets asked to talk about consistency is the same version that couldn't leave the proverbial house the day before, and pretending otherwise would have made the whole conversation a performance about performance, which felt like exactly the wrong thing to hand two strangers who'd asked me something honest.
I am human, the same as anyone reading this. I have feelings, and I'm not always good at naming them while they're happening, but they are there whether I name them or not. I struggle. I hurt. I get excited. I cry (less than I probably should). All of it happens and I tell the truth about it here, mostly because the curated week, the one that would look fine from the outside, isn't why anyone signed up for this letter.
The money worry is real. It's also not the whole picture. There's a version of that worry that comes from having no other option, and I don't have that version. I likely have plenty of choices for employment. That said, I don't currently answer to anyone who got promoted for sticking around long enough instead of being qualified to lead. Today, I work with my hands and see exactly what gets done every day, which is its own kind of wage. Twenty eight jobs in thirty three years by my count. Well north of a hundred managers and bosses and owners if I add them up, past two hundred once I throw in coaches, teachers, professors. I've been standing in front of leadership my whole life, watching how it's done and taking incredible notes. Most of it was bad. A little of it was truly great. I know which one I'm building toward now.
By Friday I'd stopped looking for something else. I'm not chasing a higher paying job anymore. I'm leaning into the rink, learning the plant and how the building functions mechanically, working my way up the chain there instead, and it feels exhausting in the way real commitment always does before it feels good. To the new guys at work who think I do this because it's fun and I don't need the money, you're wrong, and I'm fine carrying that misunderstanding. I've determined my craft. I work at it every day. I am a leader and a damn good one. I can't not do it.
Music this week: Jeff Tweedy, "Twilight Override" - an unhurried record about staying steady when the day tries to pull you somewhere else, which is close to the exact shape of this week.
Thanks for reading. See you next Monday.