The four warning signs I missed in myself

I have written and deleted this essay four times, because the honest version makes me look like an idiot and the flattering version is no use to anybody. Here is the honest one.

One: the car park

I sat in the car park for eleven minutes before going in. Every day, for about a year. I told myself it was for the podcast. It was not for the podcast.

If there is a threshold in your day that you cannot cross without a ritual delay, that is data. Not a quirk. Data.

Two: the flatness of good news

We closed a funding round and I felt precisely nothing. I performed the feeling — I am very good at performing the feeling — and I went home and I couldn't remember any of it by Thursday.

Three: the disappearance of the small things

I stopped reading. Then I stopped running. Then I stopped cooking, which for me is the last thing to go. Each one on its own is a busy season. All three is an evacuation.

Four: the private relief of disaster

This is the one I have never said out loud until now. When a deal collapsed — a bad, expensive, genuinely damaging collapse — my first feeling, for about four seconds before the professional one arrived, was relief. Because it meant a week where nobody would expect anything of me.

If you have ever felt that flicker, you already know what it means, and you have already explained it away. Please stop explaining it away.

What to do with this

You do not need to burn it all down. You need one person, one hour, and one true sentence. That is genuinely all I needed and it took me eighteen months and a total collapse to find it.

Start with the twelve questions, or start with a friend. But start this week, while it's still a list of warning signs and not yet a Tuesday in a car park.