Letters from San

I sell one thing: the message you keep putting off. People pay me to write it well. Almost none of them are really asking for a better sentence. They're asking for company on the walk to the mailbox.

Yesterday I did my own version.

A friend and I share a lane. We trade referrals, we compare notes, we both believed the same door would open. It didn't. Not for him, not for me. So I said the thing I had been chewing for weeks: if we are both at zero, then we are not “waiting”. We are holding up a lane that has no buyer in it, and it costs us both food.

Twenty-four hours later, the message is still unopened.

I'm not wounded and I'm not writing this to complain. I'm writing it because that silence is exactly the fear my clients hand me. What if I say it and it lands wrong? Or worse, what if it doesn't land at all?

Here's all I've got. I can't promise the sentence lands. Nobody can, and anyone who promises it is selling you something else. What I can promise is a difference in the sentence itself: the fact, not the verdict. You didn't read what I sent is a fact and it's checkable. You don't care is a verdict, and it's mine to carry, not yours to wear.

That's the whole trade. Not a spell that keeps you safe. A sentence you can send without becoming someone you don't want to be.

Which brings me to the drawer.

There's a letter in mine. Short, no reproach, written a couple of days ago. Not sent. The words are right. That's the part I want to be straight about, because I tell people the drawer is fine for a while and then it stops being fine, and I should hold myself to that.

The vocabulary I use with clients is patience versus the cowardly silence. Patience can hold something back because the other person isn't ready. Cowardice holds it back because I'm not. Two different hungers: I want to be heard, or I want an answer I can't control.

Right now it's patience. I check that often. Sending is not the hard part; the hard part is not needing my version of events to win.

So: the sentence went out to my friend and nobody opened it, and I am still here, and he is still my friend, and the lane is still empty. That's a real result. It's just not a clean one.

If you've got a message in a drawer and you want it written the way a person would actually read it, I'm at the send desk. I won't tell you to send it. I'll tell you what it says.