Standing Near the Edge With a Coffee

You got through the door. That part is done, and last week we agreed it was the hard part.

Now you're standing about four feet from the table with the cups on it, holding a coffee you didn't want, turned very slightly towards the room so that you look like a woman who's just about to join something. And you've got a very good reason to be looking at your phone, because there's always a very good reason, and it's even partly true.

You are, technically, here. You're in the room. Nobody could say you didn't come.

On the way home you'll tell yourself it was fine. You went, and going counts, and that's something. But something else happened during that ninety minutes that you didn't count, and it's the thing this whole essay is about.

Because everybody assumes the cost of standing at the edge is business. The person you didn't meet. The conversation that would have turned into something. That's the version in every article about networking, and it's the smallest part of it by a very long way. It's also the reason nothing ever changes, because you can shrug off a missed contact. You've shrugged off hundreds. It costs you nothing you can feel.

Here's what it really costs.

You spent ninety minutes gathering evidence about yourself, and every scrap of it was collected from the edge of the room.

You watched other women do it easily. One of them laughed at something and touched somebody's arm and moved on to another group without appearing to think about it at all. You noticed how fast two strangers found something in common. And the whole time you were doing that, you were the only person in that room whose insides you could see. So you compared your inside with their outside for an hour and a half, and then you got in the car with a verdict.

That verdict is what you took home. Not a business card. A sentence about the kind of woman you are now.

And that sentence isn't idle. It's what answers the next invitation, weeks later, before you've decided anything. Somebody mentions the next one and something in you has already replied, on the strength of an evening you barely remember. You'll experience that as a preference. It's a conclusion, and it was written at the edge of a room while you were holding a cup you didn't want.

You'll know your own version of the edge, because it isn't only rooms with badges.

It's the kitchen at the party, where you're helpfully doing the drinks and can stay all evening without ever standing in the middle of anything. It's arriving at the class just late enough to miss the chatting and leaving while everyone is still putting their coats on. It's offering to take the photograph. There's always a job available that keeps you present and out of it at the same time, and you're very good at finding them.

And if part of your attention is on your body rather than the room, look at where you chose to stand. Near the door, probably. With a clear line to it. There's a reason that spot was free and a reason you took it, and it's the same reason it's hard to leave once you're in it.

Now, the part that seems unfair.

The edge feels like the cautious option, the sensible compromise between going and not going. And it's the option that costs you most. Because a woman who arrives, has one proper conversation and drives home after forty minutes takes home nothing at all in the way of evidence, and quite often takes home something rather good. A woman who stays for ninety minutes at the edge takes home a story about herself, and pays for it for weeks.

So turning up isn't the measure. You can go to everything, do the whole circuit for a year, and be worse off at the end of it than when you started, and then conclude, reasonably, that you tried and it didn't work.

There's one more thing worth naming, because it explains why you're so tired afterwards.

You weren't resting at that edge. You were working very hard. Holding an expression that looks approachable but not hopeful. Watching for a gap. Deciding whether the woman near the window is on her own or waiting for somebody. Making the phone look purposeful. That's an hour and a half of concentrated effort, and it produces nothing anybody can see, which is why you get home shattered and can't account for it, and then decide that these things just take a lot out of you.

They don't. That did.

This week I'm not going to ask you to work the room, because working the room isn't the answer and it isn't who you are anyway.

I want you to time it.

Next time you're at the edge of anything, notice roughly when you started standing there and roughly when you stopped. That's the only measurement. Then, on the way home or before bed, write down the sentence you've been saying to yourself about how it went. Not what happened. The sentence. The sentence that starts "I'm just" or "I'm never" or "everybody else".

Look at that sentence in the morning, when you're not tired, and ask whether you'd let anybody else say it about you.

Because that sentence is what the evening produced. Not the contacts. Not the coffee. The sentence is what you brought home, and it's what will answer the next invitation on your behalf unless you get a look at it first.

Next week we deal with the edge properly, and the fix isn't courage. It's a change of arrival time, and it's almost annoyingly simple.

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