The Waiting

COVID shut everything down. My case went in a drawer. And for the better part of a year I tried to run a normal life on top of something that wasn't normal.

If you're waiting for the dramatic part, there isn't one. That's the point.

Quarantined at home like everybody. Kids remote. We cancelled spring break. Once school let out we rented a place in Pentwater for a week, still goofy with social distancing the way everything was that summer.

So there I was. On the lake, with my family, in one of my favorite places on earth, with a felony charge sitting in a drawer in a closed courthouse.

I'd have told you I was resting. I was hiding.

Those look the same from the outside and they can look the same from the inside if you're not paying attention. Rest is stepping away because the work's done for now and your body needs to come back. Hiding is stepping away because you can't face the thing.

Though I'll be fair to myself for a second. The trip was also just a trip. My kids had a good week and that was real. It wasn't only a hiding place, and if I tell you it was I'm flattening something more complicated than that.

A lot of you are inside a paused thing right now. A decision you haven't made. A conversation you haven't started. A number you haven't run.

When the courts closed, part of me exhaled. Months where nothing could happen to me. From a certain angle that's a gift.

It's interest accruing.

Nothing got better in those months. The silence I was keeping didn't get shorter. The conversation I owed didn't get easier. All of it got heavier, because the longer you sit on something the more the sitting becomes part of what you eventually have to explain.

At the start I had one thing to tell Carol. A charge. Bad, but one thing.

Every month I didn't tell her I added a second thing, which was: and I've known for a month. Then two. Then six.

Fall 2020. Kids back with masks. Life looking almost normal.

Then my attorney came back with an offer. Attempted uttering and publishing. Pay back the check. Guidelines zero to three, or zero to six months. No jail time.

I had one problem with that offer, which was that I hadn't knowingly done anything.

I said so to my attorney. I got paid for a job, I did the work, I can prove it, I already sent all of it to a detective in December.

His answer was that I didn't have enough evidence. That proving I didn't know is harder than it sounds. That trial is a risk. And that he recommended I take the deal.

So I took it, in September or October of 2020.

I've learned something since, and it cost me a lot to find out. You never take the first offer on the table.

That isn't a legal insight. It's just how negotiation works, in a courtroom the same as anywhere else. There's almost always a second offer, almost always room. Somebody opens, and the open isn't the number.

Nobody told me that. I was paying a man for his judgment, he gave it, and I took it, because that's what you do when you hire an expert. You hire them precisely because you don't know.

I'll be careful about him again on Friday. But the shape of what I did is worth naming, because it happens twice in this season and it nearly finished me both times.

I asked one person. I got an answer I could live with. I stopped asking.

And I didn't tell Carol.

That's the sentence in this whole season that costs me the most.

There was no evening where I sat in my car and decided to run a long con on my wife. It felt like postponing. Not today. She's had a rough week. It's a Tuesday. I'll tell her when I know what the sentence actually is, because right now I don't have the full picture and it isn't fair to hand her half of one.

That last one was my favorite. I got a lot of mileage out of it.

The true version is that I wasn't mainly afraid of hurting her. I was afraid of what I'd become in her eyes. Afraid that the second she knew, I'd stop being her husband and start being a guy with a felony. And as long as she didn't know, I got to keep being whoever she thought I was.

Which isn't protection. It's theft. I took away her ability to decide what to do with the truth so I could keep the version of me I liked.

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

Read those twice. They aren't synonyms, and treating them as synonyms nearly finished me.

Guilt points at a behavior. My wife doesn't know I took a plea, and every day I don't tell her I'm choosing that again. Guilt says that's wrong, go fix it, here's roughly what fixing it looks like. Uncomfortable and useful, because it moves you. There's a next step built in.

Shame points at you. Not I did a bad thing. I am a bad thing.

And shame doesn't move you. It freezes you. If the problem is something you did, you can go fix it. If the problem is what you are, there's nothing to fix and nowhere to go, so you stay put and hide.

That fall I didn't have a guilt problem. I had a guilt situation and a shame response. Guilt would have said tell her, take the sentence, pay the money, start over. Painful, survivable, and it had a plan. Shame said if she knows what you are it's over.

I took shame's advice for two more years.

Somebody always pushes back here, and it's a real argument.

Shame is good at one thing and genuinely good at it: stopping a behavior before it happens. I won't argue with that.

But that's prevention. That's before. The second you've done the thing, shame's usefulness is over. It failed at its only job. It didn't stop me. And from that point on it isn't a deterrent, it's a description of what I am, and you can't do anything with a description.

Ten second test. Does the feeling suggest an action?

If it's got a verb in it, go call him, go pay it back, go tell her, that's guilt. Take it seriously.

If it just describes you, notice that it didn't suggest anything. It handed you a verdict instead of an instruction.

Try it on something ordinary. You missed your kid's game. Guilt version: I missed it, she noticed, I should apologize and move something on the calendar. Uncomfortable, and three action items you can start tonight.

Shame version: I'm a bad father, I've always put work first, my kids will grow up remembering I was never there.

The shame version feels more serious and more honest, because it hurts more. Read it again though. No action anywhere in it. So you feel terrible, you don't talk to your daughter, and next month you miss another one.

It feels like accountability and behaves like an escape hatch.

A diagnosis with no treatment is just a nicer way of feeling bad.

If shame is what freezes you, grace is what lets you move.

And grace has been sanded into a greeting card word, so let me be clear. Grace isn't saying it was fine. It wasn't fine. I lied to my wife for two years, and there was a real person on the other end of that, sitting across a table from me at dinner. Anything that erases it isn't grace, it's denial with better branding.

Grace lets you look straight at what you did without concluding it's the sum total of what you are. It stands in the gap between the thing you did and the person you are and keeps them from collapsing into each other, because the second they collapse you've got nothing left to work with.

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

Practically it's mostly language. You catch yourself saying I'm a liar and you rewrite it as I lied. Not softer, more accurate, and accurate in the direction that lets you act. You refuse to let one fact become the whole file. And you extend the same thing to other people, because you can't run one standard on yourself and another on everybody else for long.

The hardest part is receiving it. People would have given it to me freely if I'd let them near the truth. I didn't, because I'd already decided what I was and wasn't giving anybody the chance to disagree with me and be wrong.

Which is a strange sort of arrogance when you look at it. So sure of my own verdict I wouldn't submit it for review.

What I wish somebody had said at my kitchen table in October 2020: Dan, this is bad, and you're not.

A few weeks after the plea I did the pre-sentencing investigation. It's an interview about your whole life, run by somebody writing a document a judge will read. Enormous stakes, boring room.

Most of it was just biography. Where'd you grow up. What do you do. Who's at home.

Somewhere in the middle I realized I was giving this person a more complete account of my life than I was giving my own wife. A stranger with a form knew more than she did.

That realization did nothing. I noticed it, felt sick for an hour, drove home and said nothing.

Which is the thing about insight. We treat it like it's the hard part. Insight is cheap. I understood my situation with real clarity for two straight years and it changed nothing, because understanding what you're doing and stopping are separate machines.

The report came back. No jail time. One year probation. Pay back the check. Sentencing in January 2021.

I had the exit in my hands and I still didn't tell my wife.

That's how strong the shame response is. It doesn't update on evidence. A rational person reads no jail time and thinks, survivable, bring everybody in. Shame reads the same page and says great, now you've got more to lose if she finds out.

Find the guilt in whatever you're carrying. Name the behavior, not the feeling. One sentence, with a verb in it.

If you can write that sentence, that's guilt, and guilt you can work with.

If it keeps coming out as a sentence about what you are, that's shame. It never had a next step. It's only ever had one move.

You're not what you did. You do still have to go handle what you did.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.