You Can't Make a Plan With a Maybe

You said yes to something three weeks ago, back when Saturday was safely in the distance, and now it's nearly here.

So you've started checking. Not the arrangements, you sorted those out weeks ago. You're checking yourself. How you feel today, and what that might mean about Saturday. Whether this counts as a good week or the other kind. You're running a little forecast every few hours on a subject nobody else has to think about at all, and the answer keeps coming back the same.

Maybe.

Here's what's worth understanding about that, because it explains a great deal that you've probably been putting down to character. You're not worn out by difficulty. You've done difficult. You've got through things that would flatten most people and you did it without much fuss and without telling anybody how bad it was. Difficulty isn't your problem.

What you can't do is a maybe.

Difficulty has an edge to it. You can see the shape of it, you can get ready, and once it's done it's done. A maybe has no edge anywhere. It doesn't resolve, it doesn't conclude, and you can't prepare for it, because preparing for a maybe means preparing for all the versions at once. So that's what you do. In the background, from Thursday onwards, you make a plan for the version where it goes well and a plan for the version where it doesn't, and a plan for the exit, and a plan for what you'd say if you had to use the exit. Three days of admin for an event that lasts two hours.

And it happens before anything has gone wrong. That's the part nobody sees. Most of what this takes out of you is taken on the days when everything is fine.

Think about what you'd do if it were somebody else. If you had a colleague who was very good at her job, but who answered "possibly" every time you asked whether she could take something on, you wouldn't think badly of her. You'd like her. You'd just stop giving her the things that mattered, and you'd do it without ever making a decision about it, because the important jobs have to go to someone who can say yes.

That's what you've done to yourself. You didn't lose confidence in your ability. You lost confidence in your availability, which is a different thing and much harder to notice, and the result looks the same from the outside.

It doesn't matter which door the uncertainty comes through, either, because it behaves the same way through all of them.

Sometimes it's your body, and whether it will co-operate on a particular afternoon in a particular place. Sometimes it's your nerve, because you've been fine in a room full of strangers before, properly fine, chatty and warm and glad you went, and you've also stood in a room and heard your own voice arriving from a long way off while your mind went white, and you've no idea in advance which of those two women is going to turn up. Sometimes it's how you'll feel when you catch yourself in a photograph afterwards, which some weeks doesn't touch you at all and other weeks takes the whole thing away from you after the event.

Different uncertainties, and one thing running through all of them, which is you. That's why it feels like a question about who you are rather than a question about logistics. You're the unpredictable part, so it feels like a verdict.

Now, the cost, because this is the bit that gets missed.

You could stand losing the odd Saturday. What it costs you is the planning itself. You stop putting things in the diary very far ahead, because what's the point of committing to something you might have to undo. Then you stop being the person who suggests things, because suggesting means being responsible for the arrangement. Then, without ever noticing the moment it happened, you become someone who waits to see how she feels, and the waiting has replaced the deciding.

Which means you're no longer turning down events. You're turning them down at the level of the diary, weeks earlier, where nobody can see it happening, including you. Last week I asked you to count how often you say "I'd better not". This is where a good many of those come from. Not from the day itself. From the forecast made about the day, in advance, on the evidence of nothing at all.

And here's the thing about running on maybes. Your good days get spent bracing for the bad ones, so you don't fully have the good days either. That's the real bill. The afternoons you were fine and spent monitoring yourself anyway.

So this week, one thing only, and it's a noticing, not a task.

When you catch that familiar bracing, stop for a second and ask yourself which one it is. Is this thing hard, or is it uncertain? They feel the same from the inside and they're nothing alike. Hard wants preparation and gets better with it. Uncertain doesn't want preparation at all, because preparation is what turns a two hour lunch into three days of it, and no amount of it has ever once made the answer arrive any sooner.

You'll find that far more of it is uncertainty than difficulty. Most women are surprised by that. You've been treating a maybe as though it were a mountain, and it isn't a mountain. It's fog. You can't climb it, you can't prepare for it, and you've been trying to do both since Thursday.

When your body and your nerve have been making your decisions for you, that's the work I do. Book a Reset Session at HypnoGirl.

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