The Afternoon I Stopped

Part One

For thirty years I had been performing a version of my life that looked exactly right from the outside. Investment banking, Goldman Sachs, Citi, C-suite and board roles. The titles, the numbers, and the life the outside world would have designed for me if it had been asked. By every external measure I had arrived. I had also not known, for a long time, who I was underneath the performance.

The stop came on my fortieth birthday, when I was told in a doctor's office that I had type 2 diabetes. That is not the part of the story I want to dwell on, because the medical facts are straightforward and the arc that followed them is on the About page of this site. What I want to describe, because it is the part that matters for the people reading this, is what happened inside me at the moment of being told.

It was not shock. Shock would have been a cleaner response. What I felt, if I am honest with myself about it, was something quieter and harder to describe. It was the feeling of a story stopping. For twenty years I had been running on a particular narrative about who I was, what I was building, and what it was all for. That narrative had kept me moving through thirty years of very long weeks. Standing in that office, receiving a diagnosis that was going to require me to change almost everything about how I was living, the narrative did not break. It simply went quiet.

And in the quiet, for the first time in two decades, I could hear something else. I could not name it yet. It would take the seven years that followed, four of them rebuilding what the body actually needs and three of them doing a different kind of work underneath that, to even begin to be able to describe it. What I could hear, that day, was the part of me that had been waiting.

Part Two

Most senior people have never had a day like that. They have been running for a comparable length of time, sometimes longer, and the loudness of their performance has not been interrupted by anything big enough to quieten it. The noticing muscle has been offline for so long that even the reading of these words is being done at pace, in transit, between things.

Stopping is the work. Not the dramatic stop that a diagnosis produces. Something quieter and more ongoing. The slow, repeated act of noticing that you have been running, and coming back, over and over again, to whatever has been waiting for you underneath it.

The people I work with do not usually arrive with a medical stop or any equivalent event. They arrive because something has started to ask for their attention, and they have finally decided that ignoring it for another year is no longer a plan. The work we do together is not a repeat of my story. It is their version of it, which is almost always slower, more subtle, and less visible from the outside than mine was. It does not need to be dramatic to matter.

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