The Ten Months

I sat in jail for two months waiting to be sentenced.

Then the judge let me have it. Three hundred days.

My attorney had told me I'd walk out on sentencing day. That was not true, and the shape of how it wasn't true matters. He didn't lie to me. He gave me a confident prediction about a decision that was not his to make, and I heard it as a promise, because a promise was what I needed.

The judge did what the judge wanted. That's the job.

So I sat. And while I sat, everything I'd built came apart on the outside, without me, in a way I could hear about but never touch.

Ten months hiding from it. Then ten months inside it. That was the trade.

Two weeks of quarantine first, because it's early 2022 and there are still protocols. Then general population. Then waiting, January to May, for the thing I ran from in March of the year before.

I've written about not knowing on this list before. This was a different animal.

In 2020 the not knowing was open ended. Nobody would tell me the charges, the courts were shut, the calendar was blank, and my head filled the blank with everything.

This was the opposite. I knew the date, the charge, the room. What I didn't have was any way to affect it.

Both are bad. They're bad differently. Open ended not knowing keeps you spinning. Fixed and powerless keeps you still, and still is worse than it sounds, because a man who can't act starts eating himself.

Four months of chewing on the same eighteen months, every night. There's nothing else to do with it.

Three hundred days.

I remember hearing it. Not panic. Flatter than panic. The room kept going, somebody said something else, there was paperwork, and I was doing arithmetic. Ten months. Not out for summer. Not out for Christmas.

Underneath the arithmetic was a smaller, worse thought. He told me I'd walk today.

That was the third time in this story I took one man's word and never checked it.

He said take the plea. I took it. He said lay low. I laid low, ten months. He said you'll walk out on sentencing day. I built my entire picture of that morning on it.

Three times, same man, and every time I got off the phone fast.

When somebody tells you what you don't want to hear, you argue. You push back. You go get a second opinion. When somebody tells you what you want to hear, you thank them and hang up before they can revise it.

How fast you accept advice is the most reliable signal you have about whether you're evaluating it or buying it.

I wasn't getting counsel. I was buying relief in fifteen minute calls at a terrible price.

I had a business with ten plus team members. We let go of pretty much everybody.

This is the part I skip when I tell the story fast, and I skip it because it's where I'm least sympathetic.

Those were ten people with rent. Ten people who had told their families they had a good thing going. Some had turned down other work to be there. Their jobs did not end because of a market shift or a bad quarter or a client we lost on the merits.

Their jobs ended because I didn't tell my wife the truth in the fall of 2020.

That chain runs straight. I took a plea, hid it, skipped a sentencing, sat on a warrant, got picked up in January, and ten households lost their income in the spring.

I didn't do it to them on purpose. I did it to them anyway.

Clients left too, which isn't a betrayal. That's what clients do when the person they hired stops returning calls and nobody at the company will say why. I don't hold a second of that against any of them.

By the time I got out I genuinely don't remember whether we had a single client left. That isn't a flourish. I cannot recall it. Somewhere in there the number went to nothing, or near enough that my brain didn't bother filing it.

You build something for years and then can't remember the day it stopped existing.

Here's what I could do about all of it from inside. Nothing.

I could take calls when there was money on the account. I could write letters. I could ask people to do things and wait days to learn whether they'd been done. I could not walk into a room. I could not look a client in the eye. I could not sit with a team member and tell them the truth about why.

Somebody else had to do all of that, on my behalf, without me.

Every instinct I have as an operator, and I've been doing this since 2001, was to go handle it. Get in front of it, take the hit personally, out-work the problem. That's the whole engine. It's how I've solved every business problem I've ever solved.

The engine was in a building I couldn't leave.

That does something specific to a man, and I don't think it's obvious. It isn't just frustrating. It attacks what you think you are. If your identity is I'm the guy who fixes it, and you're placed somewhere you can't fix anything, you don't just lose the business. You lose your case for being worth something.

That's where this stopped being a legal problem.

Guilt is doing something wrong and regretting it. Shame is feeling like a loser and wondering what I am even doing here.

I had a guilt situation the size of a house. Real things, done by me, with names attached. A wife I lied to. Ten people I put out of work. Two daughters who watched their father walked out of the kitchen.

Guilt points at behavior and has a next step built in. It says that was wrong, here's what you owe, go pay it.

But in a room where you can't pay any of it, guilt has nowhere to go. And guilt with nowhere to go turns into shame fast. Shame doesn't point at behavior, it points at you. Not I did a bad thing. I am a bad thing. And shame has one move, which is to freeze you, because if the problem is what you are then there's nothing to fix and nowhere to go.

So I spent a good chunk of those months not thinking about repair at all. I was thinking about whether I was worth repairing.

That's the punishment nobody sentences you to.

I was also trying to run a divorce from a cell.

They want money just to come see you, so I had no representation. The friend of the court process does not slow down for an unrepresented man in custody. They schedule, they reschedule, mine got fouled up. By the time I got to talk to anybody, Carol had already talked to them, with counsel, in full.

Whatever Carol wanted, the friend of the court agreed with. I took it.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this a story about the system doing me wrong, and that isn't the story.

She was represented and I wasn't. The reason I wasn't is I had no money. The reason I had no money is my business collapsed. The reason it collapsed is I was in jail. The reason I was in jail is I didn't show up on March 15, 2021.

Every step of that is mine.

In September of 2022, while I was still inside, the divorce was finalized.

I didn't get to be there. There was no day, no signature at a table. It didn't happen with me. It happened to me. Somebody told me and then it was done, and I went and did whatever I was going to do that afternoon, which was nothing.

My marriage ended and I wasn't present. Which tracks, because I'd spent a year and a half not being present in it while standing in the kitchen.

People want the movie version. There isn't one. The months blend. I can give you textures and then it goes gray.

The routine, which isn't gentle, but it's a routine, and a routine is something to hold.

The noise. It's never quiet. Ever. That does something over three hundred days I still don't have language for.

Walking the yard, which became the most important part of my day. I think about it every morning now when I go out and walk. That habit didn't start as wellness. It started as the one square of the day that was mine.

The phone calls that cost money I didn't have, which meant real math about whether to call my daughters or handle something about the business. I made that call more than once.

The letters, slow in a way you forget is possible. You write a thing and the answer arrives in a different emotional week than the one you wrote it in.

And the silence of not being in anybody's day. The world closes over the hole where you were. It's supposed to. It still guts you.

Not a montage. A grind.

I won't tell you jail taught me something beautiful. It mostly taught me what a losing position feels like from the inside.

Two things came out of it that I use every day, and both came out of the powerlessness rather than in spite of it.

The first. When you can't control anything, you find out what you can control, and the list is short and it is not nothing. I could get up. I could walk. I could keep my word on small things to people with no reason to expect it.

That's where the floor came from. If you read the Sunday Resets you've seen me count it out. That isn't a productivity system. It's a survival artifact. A floor is what you build when the ceiling has already come off, and it works because on the days you can't affect anything that matters, you can still affect that.

The second took longer. Powerless and blameless are not the same word.

I was completely powerless over what happened to my business and my marriage in those ten months. And I was completely responsible for having put myself somewhere I'd be powerless.

Most people collapse those. Either I couldn't do anything about it so none of it's on me, which is denial. Or all of it's on me so I must be garbage, which is shame. Neither one gets you off the floor.

The true thing is harder to hold and it's the only one that works. I did this. I could not undo it from where I was standing. And I am still a person who gets to build something after.

That gap, between the thing you did and the person you are, is exactly where grace lives. Grace doesn't say it was fine, because it wasn't. Grace keeps those two from collapsing into each other, because the second they collapse you have nothing left to work with.

Grace doesn't let you off the hook. It keeps you conscious while you're on it.

Confidence is not a forecast. Somebody is telling you what's going to happen with real conviction right now. Conviction feels like information and it isn't. Ask whether the outcome is theirs to deliver. If it isn't, you're holding an opinion in a confident voice, and you should go get two more.

Look at the second ring. When you're hiding something you count the damage in a small circle. Me, maybe my spouse. There were ten people on my payroll who had nothing to do with it and paid for all of it. Do the exercise on whatever you're sitting on. Not who would be hurt if this came out. Who is already exposed and doesn't know it.

Build the floor before you need it. Everybody wants to install it during the collapse, which is the worst possible time, because the collapse takes your willpower first. Pick three things small enough that skipping them would embarrass you. Do them on the good days when they feel pointless. Those are the reps that make it automatic before the day comes when automatic is all you've got.

The three hundred days weren't the punishment. The punishment was watching everything I built disappear while I was powerless to stop it.

The days were just the room I did it in.

Friday, a single moment out of those ten months.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.