I Nearly Didn't Go, Two Years Running

Altitude: personal

There's a festival I go to every year with the same friends. It's the fixed point in my calendar, the one thing that doesn't move for work, and twice now I've come close to not going.

Both times for reasons I only understood afterwards, and the two reasons turn out to be opposites.

Last year

I got there, and shortly after arriving I had some sort of panic or breathing thing. I'm not going to dress it up as more than that, because I don't know what it was. It happened, it passed, and I put it down to the drive, or the heat, or not having slept properly.

At the time I didn't connect it to anything, and I want to be precise about what that means, because it isn't that I thought everything was fine.

I was in the middle of a contract that was getting tough. Really tough. If you'd asked me that weekend how work was, I'd have told you honestly and at some length. I knew exactly what state it was in.

So the thing I missed wasn't the job. I had that one covered. What I didn't have was any story in which the job and the arrival belonged in the same sentence. Work was a thing I was handling, and handling it was going fine in the sense that I was still standing. The difficulty lived in the working day, where I'd put it, and it stayed there, because that was the arrangement.

A year later I can see that the arrangement was one-sided. Something had already found a way out that didn't go through my opinion of it. Not in a document, not in a risk log. In a field, on the first evening, sitting down.

This year

I nearly didn't go again, and this time I could have told you exactly why.

I've spent this year head down. The app, the writing, the whole apparatus around it. There's a particular momentum you get into building something of your own where stopping feels expensive, and the week before, I was doing the arithmetic about whether I could afford the days.

That's a completely different reason not to go. Last year I was carrying something I hadn't looked at. This year I was carrying something I couldn't stop looking at.

I went anyway. And it was completely different.

Not in a dramatic way. No moment of clarity, nobody handed me anything. Just an ordinary good weekend with people I've known a long time, in which nothing happened to me on arrival, and I noticed the nothing.

The thing I couldn't see from inside

That's the whole of it, really. Two arrivals, same field, same friends, same drive up. One year my body did something I couldn't explain. The next year it didn't. And the most obviously changed variable in between was the work I was in the middle of the first time and long out of by the second.

I want to be careful here, because there's a tidier version of this available and it isn't true. A year, one difference, and a hundred other variables. I'm older, calmer, self-employed, sleeping better, and the weather was probably nicer. This isn't proof of anything and I'm not diagnosing myself a year late.

What I'll say is narrower. I knew the work was hard and I did not know it was costing me anything outside working hours, and those turn out to be two separate pieces of knowledge. I needed a second arrival, a year later, before the first one meant anything at all.

Which is a slightly uncomfortable thing to notice about yourself when you spend your working life telling other people that one bad project can always be explained away, and that a pattern only becomes visible when the same shape turns up twice. I've written that sentence into other people's documents more than once. It didn't occur to me it applied to a weekend in a field.

And the reflecting happened because I stopped

The other thing worth saying, since I'd talked myself halfway out of going: the reason the comparison exists at all is that I went.

You can't take a reading on yourself from inside the thing you're reading. I'd been so far inside the build that the only available view was the one from within it, which always looks like: keep going, this is fine, stopping is expensive. Three days out of it and I could see the year properly, including the bit of it that had happened twelve months earlier and had been sitting there unread.

I don't have a neat lesson. I'm not going to tell you to take breaks, which is advice you've already had from better-rested people than me.

Only this: the fixed point in the calendar earned its place this year by being the one thing I didn't move, and it gave me back something the work couldn't have. I'll be doing that again next year, and probably nearly not going then too.