Nobody Announces the Things You've Stopped Doing

There's something you used to do that you haven't done for about two years.

You know what it is. It came to mind while you were reading that sentence. And if I asked you when you stopped, you couldn't tell me.

That's what I want to look at today.

Because there was no last time. Or there was, but it didn't feel like one. You went, you came home, you put the kettle on, and nothing about that evening told you it was the last one. Nobody said anything. There was no do, no card, no moment where somebody said we'll miss you.

You just didn't go again.

It never looked like a decision

What happened instead was much smaller than a decision.

The first time you didn't go, you had something else on. A real thing, in the diary, and you couldn't be in two places at once. Some weeks later you were tired, properly tired, end of a long week, and getting changed and going back out was more than you had in you. Then there was one you can't account for at all. Something came up. It was fine.

And then it stopped being a thing you did, and nobody noticed, including you.

Every single no was a good one

That's what makes this so hard to see from where you're sitting.

If you'd turned things down for bad reasons you'd have caught it years ago. You'd have felt it. But you didn't, because every no you gave had something true behind it. You were tired. It was expensive. The parking there is impossible. You had an early start. You weren't sure how you'd be on the day.

All true. Every one would stand up in court.

And a reason is the thing that closes the file. Once you've got one, you don't look at that decision again. You made it, it was fair enough, and it's finished. So you never go back and count them.

It's the same move whichever door you came in through

Maybe it was your body, and the honest reason was that you didn't know how the day would go. So you said no to the things that were far from home, or long, or awkward to leave. Sensible, every time.

Maybe it was the room. You stopped going to the one where you didn't know anybody, and then to the one where you only knew one person, and the list of places you'll walk into on your own got shorter by about one a year.

Or maybe it was being seen. You stopped putting your hand up, and then you weren't in the photograph, and after a while you'd stopped saying the thing you'd thought in the meeting as well.

Different reasons. Same result, which is a life with fewer things in it than it had.

Obvious from a distance

Somebody who hasn't seen you for five years would spot this in an afternoon.

They'd notice you don't drive that far now. They'd ask about the thing you used to do and watch your face while you answered. They'd see the whole of it at once, as one picture, because they weren't there for any of the individual Tuesdays.

You were there for all of them. That's exactly why you can't see it. You've only ever looked at this one week at a time, and one week at a time it looks like an ordinary life with an ordinary amount of no in it.

The one that came to mind

It's worth noticing which one arrived first, while you were reading that opening line. Out of everything you've let go of over the last few years, your head produced one of them in about a second.

There's a reason for that. The ones you've properly finished with don't come up at all. You gave something up in 2019 and you've not thought about it since, because you don't want it back. It's gone and you're fine about it.

The one that turned up is the one you haven't finished with. Some part of you has been keeping it on a list all this time, waiting for somebody to ask you about it.

This isn't a telling off

I want to say that plainly, because the temptation right now is to feel bad about yourself, and feeling bad won't take you anywhere useful.

You didn't do anything wrong. You made a lot of reasonable decisions, mostly while tired, and nobody gets to be cross with you about any single one of them. I'm certainly not.

They add up, though. That's the only thing I'm saying today.

What I'd like you to do this week

Nothing. I mean it.

Don't fix anything. Don't book anything. Don't set yourself a challenge on the back of this. This week is for looking.

Name one. One thing you used to do and don't now. Write it down, and next to it write the year you last did it, or your best guess at the year.

That's all. One line, on paper.

Two things will happen. The date will be further back than you thought - almost everybody's is. And writing it down will do something that thinking about it doesn't, which is that it stops being a vague feeling and becomes a fact with a year attached to it.

Last week we counted conversations, and the number was the whole point. Two, and then you can go. This week you're counting in the other direction, at something you've been keeping a tally of for years without ever reading it back.

One line. Then put the pen down.

Next Sunday I'll take you to the other half of this, which is what's been happening on the other side of it. The invitations don't stop because anybody fell out with you. They slow down on their own, and nobody mentions that either.

If you want something to listen to before the next hard thing you've got coming, Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In is free when you subscribe. Twelve minutes, for the bit in the car before you go in.