The Lie

By the start of 2021 I had a plea, a report recommending no jail time, and a sentencing date in January.

Everything pointed the same direction. Probation, pay the money back, move on.

So I did what any sane person would do. I pushed the date out and kept lying.

I needed to get the money together, so I had my attorney push sentencing further out. The new date landed on March fifteenth or sixteenth. A Monday.

On paper that's reasonable. People move sentencing for restitution all the time. Showing up with the money beats showing up without it.

But the paper version and the real version weren't the same.

Paper version: I need more time to gather restitution.

Real version: every time this date moves I get to be a guy without a felony sentence for a little longer.

Both true. Which is what makes it hard to explain, and why I think you'll recognize yourself here even if you've never been near a courtroom.

The best lies aren't fabrications. They're true statements doing a second job.

The test I use now, which I wish I'd had then: when something gets delayed, watch your body. Clean tired relief where you exhale and start planning is probably a real problem getting solved. A spike, something almost like getting away with it, is avoidance in a work shirt.

I got the spike. I ignored the spike.

The day before sentencing, a client called to say his whole office had COVID. I'd been in a room with them that week.

I called my attorney and asked what we should do. He said he'd take care of it. Go get tested.

I got tested. Negative.

The court said he still needed to come in. I didn't go.

The judge issued a bench warrant.

Up to that moment I was a defendant. A case, a plea, a report recommending probation. A guy inside a process working toward a survivable ending.

The second that warrant issued I stopped being a defendant and became a person the court was looking for.

Everything before it was something I had done. This was now something I was doing. Present tense, continuously. Every hour I didn't walk into that courthouse I chose it again.

And the offer never changed. Probation was still sitting there. I hadn't improved anything by staying away. I took a closed loop and opened it.

My attorney called back and told me to lay low. I asked if that was the best thing. He said yes. He said he'd keep the wolves at bay.

I've thought about that call more than almost any two minutes of my life. Not for what he said. For what I did with it.

I want credit for asking, and then I want to take the credit back, because asking isn't the same as caring about the answer.

I got the answer I wanted from somebody qualified to give it, put it in my pocket, and never took it back out. I didn't push. I didn't get a second opinion. I never sat down with anybody I trusted and said here's my situation, does this sound right.

That's not seeking counsel. That's shopping for permission.

And I know it was, because of how fast I accepted it. When somebody tells you something you don't want to hear, you argue. You push back. You go check. When somebody tells you what you desperately want to hear, you say thanks and get off the phone quick, before they can revise it.

I got off the phone quick.

I know this is what you're chewing on, so let me deal with it.

The instinct is to want somebody to blame who isn't me, and there's a version of this where the whole thing turns on bad legal advice. I could probably get most rooms to agree with it.

Two reasons I won't tell it that way.

One, I genuinely don't know what he was working with. I'm not a lawyer. There may have been a strategy I never understood. I only know what he said on the phone and how I heard it.

I'll say this much, because it's a fact and not an opinion. This is the second time in this story that I asked that man what to do and did exactly what he said. First he told me to take the plea. Now he's telling me to lay low. Both times I had a question I couldn't answer myself, and both times I bought one answer and stopped shopping.

Two, and this is the one that counts. Even if the advice was bad, I took it, and I took it for ten months.

Bad advice explains a day. It explains a week. It does not explain Phoenix and a summer cottage and Florida in August and Disney at Christmas. Somewhere in there were a hundred moments where I could have gone and gotten a second opinion. Not going was mine.

You're picturing curtains drawn and a phone turned off. None of that. Laying low meant I just lived my life.

Phoenix. A cottage in Pentwater for the summer, not a week this time, the summer. Florida for our anniversary in August. Disney when the kids got off for Christmas.

Read that list again. That's not a fugitive. That's a Christmas card.

And the whole time I was looking over my shoulder. Every cop car, and I mean every one, not just the ones behind me. Every unknown number, run through the whole calculation in about a second and a half.

Your body doesn't have a category for a threat that never arrives and never leaves. It's built for a bear. Bear shows up, everything floods, you run, and then the system stands down. There's no stand down for a warrant. So it just stays on, and you stop noticing it's on the way you stop hearing a fan, and you start thinking this is your personality now. You're just a guy who's tired all the time.

If you're exhausted and the work doesn't explain it and the sleep doesn't explain it, ask what you're managing. Not doing. Managing. Managing something costs more than doing something and it never shows up on any list of what you got done.

The anniversary is the one I'd take back first.

An anniversary isn't really a vacation. It's a thing two people do to mark something. Both of you show up and account for yourselves.

I couldn't do that. I was there, at the dinner, saying the things you say. But I was running a marriage with a redacted section in it, and I knew where the redaction was and she didn't.

She was fully present. That's what I can't get past. She was completely there, doing the actual thing.

I've never been lonelier than I was at a nice dinner with my wife on our anniversary.

That's the part that gets through to people when I tell this. Not the arrest. Not the warrant. This.

Because most of you will never have a bench warrant. But a lot of you are sitting across from somebody who thinks they've got all of you, and they don't, and you know exactly which part you're holding back.

That distance isn't free. And it shows up in the good moments, not the bad ones, which is the cruelest possible design. Bad moments you can blame on the bad moment. It's the good ones that tell you the truth, because a good moment is when you find out you can't fully get in.

I heard that line years later from Jessie Elder and it landed like a punch, because it named what I didn't have.

I thought those were two separate problems. They're one machine.

Every trip, every photo, every normal Tuesday I performed was me proving something. Proving I was still the guy. And the only reason I had to prove it was that I was hiding something. The proving is what keeps the hiding running. Which is why ten months of vacations left me more tired than working would have.

I told myself I was laying low. What I was doing was performing a life I hadn't earned while I waited for the ground to disappear.

And the ground always disappears. Every open loop closes. The only question is whether it closes on a schedule you chose or one somebody else chose for you.

I gave up the right to choose in March of 2021.

Solid ground is not a good year. I had a great year. Phoenix, Pentwater, Florida, Disney. Fantastic by any measure you can photograph.

Solid ground is whether the people who love you know what's actually true about your life. Everything else is a floor painted over a hole.

Two minutes, and it's uncomfortable, which is how you know it works.

Pick the three people closest to you. Not who it's supposed to be. Who it actually is.

Ask: is there anything true about my life right now that would genuinely surprise them?

Not embarrass. Surprise. Something that has already happened that they don't know happened.

If the answer's no, your floor is solid. It might still be a hard year, and hard years are fine. Hard years on solid ground are just work.

If it's yes, write down what it is, then write down how long they haven't known.

That second number is the one that matters. The thing itself is almost always survivable. What turns survivable into catastrophic is duration, because duration converts a mistake into a pattern of concealment, and people forgive a mistake much faster than they forgive being managed.

Mine got to two years.

If your number is small right now, that's the most valuable thing you've got, and it's depreciating today.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.