Every So Often Somebody Has No Idea Who I Am

Every so often I meet somebody who has no idea who I am.

No search result. No opinion already formed. No careful little look to see how I am going to react.

Just a person asking me what I do for a living.

I have gotten so used to the other thing that a plain question catches me flat.

The pause

There is a half second in there where I have to decide something.

Do I answer the question they asked, or do I answer the question I am used to being asked?

Because those are two different questions.

The question they asked is what do you do. The question I am braced for is what happened to you.

For a long time I answered both. Every time. Nobody had to ask. I would get out ahead of it, because getting out ahead of it felt safer than being found out.

That is not honesty. That is flinching with extra words.

What I did not expect

I thought being unknown would feel like relief.

Some of it does. You get to be a guy in a parking lot. A guy in line. Somebody's dad. You get to be the size of a normal person for a minute instead of the size of a story.

But there is a grief in it I was not ready for.

Because the story is also the proof. It is the years. It is the part where I did not quit. And a stranger who knows nothing about me also knows nothing about that.

He does not know what it cost to be standing there answering a normal question in a normal voice.

That is the trade. You cannot be free of the record and be credited for surviving it at the same time. It is one or the other in that conversation, and you get about a half second to pick.

What I am learning to do

I answer the question they asked.

That is it. That is the whole discipline.

I build things. I write. I have a family. If they want more, they will ask, and if they ask I will tell them straight. But I do not hand my file to a man who asked about my work.

Not because I am hiding it. The whole record is on this website. I have never once asked anybody to take my word for anything.

I do it because a man who does not know is not an accusation. He is just a man. And treating him like a threat says more about where I still am than it says about him.

The part that is faith

Genesis 50 does not say the evil was not evil. It says God meant it for good.

That has always landed on me as a sentence about the future, not the past. Something gets made out of it. Later.

I am starting to think part of what gets made is smaller than I pictured.

Not a stage. Not a vindication. Just a man who can stand in a parking lot and answer a normal question in a normal voice without his hands shaking.

That is a thing that got built. It was not there four years ago.

Where I am at

I am not going to pretend I have this handled. Some days I still overshare and drive home mad at myself about it. Some days the half second gets away from me.

But I notice it now. That is new.

If you are somewhere in the middle of your own thing, and you find yourself explaining yourself to people who never asked, hear this one from a man who does it too.

You are allowed to just answer the question.

You do not owe the whole file to every person who says hello.