Between Now and July 1
How 36 days became 24
By the time I got home, my head hurt so badly I could barely keep from crying.
I had been holding it back all day. Sitting in at my desk typing, having conversations, trying to stay present and productive. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything layered together, pressuring from all sides. When I finally got home, I curled up in bed and slept. I didn’t plan to. I just stopped.
When I woke up, the headache was better. Nothing about the situation had changed. But I could think again.
Earlier in the day, someone had mentioned working on a transition plan with me. Then someone else said something similar. Both times, my immediate reaction was the same.
That’s weeks away.
It felt distant. Abstract. Plenty of time.
But sometime this evening, I started counting.
There are 36 workdays between now and July 1.
Thirty six feels like a lot. It sounds like a runway. It sounds like time to finish things, hand things off, prepare for whatever is next.
But then I started subtracting.
Five days off next week for surgery.
Five more in early June for graduation chocolate making and baking.
Two days in mid June for a weaving class.
Things I want to do. Things that matter.
That brings it down to 24 days.
Twenty four days.
That is not a lot of time.
Not when I look at the lists I keep making. Lists that do not seem to get shorter. Make sure to do X, Y, Z. Plan for A, B, C after July 1. Capture this. Document that. Don’t forget to follow up. Don’t forget to prepare.
At the same time, life outside of work is not standing still.
My older daughter is heading to British Columbia this week to tour UBC. She was accepted, and she has to decide by May 20 if she is going. In a little over a week, we may be planning for her to move countries.
Our puppy has a luxating patella and will need surgery. So coordinating that around my surgery.
There is so much change coming, and it is all happening at once.
Even at work, the pace of change feels relentless. It still feels strange to think about a transition plan tied to a date that far out, when I know how quickly everything around me can change.
And layered on top of that, there is the learning.
Today I realized I have been doing something that I thought was just a normal way to approach a problem. It felt intuitive. A natural way to respond to complexity.
It turns out it has a name in the AI world.
If someone had asked me earlier if I did that thing, I would have said no. Not because I don’t do it, but because I don’t yet have the language for it. I am learning so quickly, trying so many things, that I am not always picking up the official names along the way.
I am doing the work. I am finding patterns. I am building approaches that make sense to me.
But I cannot always describe them in the same terms as everyone else.
That gap takes effort to bridge. It takes time to map experience to language. And in a window that now looks like 24 days, even that feels compressed.
By the end of the day, all of it had accumulated.
The shrinking timeline. The growing lists. The decisions coming for my family. The unknowns about work. The constant intake of new ideas, new techniques, new expectations.
It was too much to hold all at once.
So my body made the decision for me.
I stopped. I slept.
When I woke up, I could see it more clearly.
Not the answers. Those are still not there. The lists are still long. The days are still 24, not 36. The changes are still coming.
But I could see the shape of it.
So much change, so much new knowledge, so many things to consider can be overwhelming.
And taking the time to sit with those changes, and the feelings that come with them, matters.
It does not reduce the list. It does not create more time. It does not solve the problem of how to fit everything into 24 days.
But it makes it possible to breathe again.
And for now, that is enough.
Alison + Wiggins