Low diatribe

I am halfway through a consulting contract that, twenty years ago, would have ended a search I didn't know I was running.

Ample compensation. Total freedom. Roughly two hours of meetings a week. The work itself sits at the edge of what I know — familiar enough to be useful, unfamiliar enough to hold my attention. The client is good. I am glad to be there. By every spec I would have written for myself at thirty, this is it.

And I am keeping it at arm's length.

I notice it in small ways. The reluctance to fully settle in. The part of me that stays slightly outside the work, watching it rather than inhabiting it. I know the contract ends. I don't know what comes after. And somewhere underneath the knowing, something is bracing.

I've been here before. Not in this job — in the gap after the last one. I know what it feels like when the runway ends and there's nothing after. That experience left something behind. Not a lesson. Scar tissue.

The body remembers what the mind has already processed.

I worked out my own theory. I wrote about it. There are no destinations — only means. The present moment isn't instrumental. It's the thing itself. The job, when it came, would shift the terrain and reveal the next set of means. I knew that. I believed it.

And here I am, treating the contract as a means and the next role as the end. Holding the present at arm's length until the destination clarifies.

The destination won't clarify. I know this. So I started pushing against the pattern.

The team I joined was fragmented — independent pieces running in parallel, everyone mid-story, relationships and shorthand already established. Joining felt less like joining and more like being a character added in the seventh season of a show. You're present, but you're not yet part of it.

The main team finished their deliverable. Ours is the priority now, and the team has followed the work — we're finishing it together.

One of them is a counterexample I didn't expect. Deeply skilled, genuinely trying to help — and completely unable to be in the room without making sure everyone knows it. I recognize the shape of it. I've walked that road.

I didn't want to be my own cautionary tale. So I stopped watching the work and started doing it.

And doing it showed me something. The version of me who wrote the spec for this job — ample compensation, total freedom, minimal meetings, work done largely alone — was a younger coder who saw collaboration as friction. I've since learned otherwise. The dream job was designed for someone I no longer want to be.

There's a version of this I used to carry as a dream. I wanted to arrive somewhere that felt like this.

Now I am here. The feeling I was waiting for isn't.

Not because the job is wrong. Because the dream behind the dream job was built for someone else — an earlier version of me who measured success by personal output and preferred to work alone. That person wanted to arrive. I've since learned that arrival isn't real, and that the work is better when it isn't done in isolation. The destination dissolved before I got here, and I find I don't miss it. I wrote its eulogy without knowing that's what I was doing.

This is the requiem. Not for the job. For the belief that getting here would feel like getting somewhere.

I carry the fear. The end of the contract is visible from here, and my nervous system treats that visibility as a threat. I don't get to unknow what I know about what happens when things run out.

But I'm showing up anyway. Doing the work that's in front of me. Not because the fear is gone — it isn't — but because the alternative is to spend the dream job somewhere outside it, waiting for it to be over.

I'm scared of the end. I'm here anyway.

That's the whole practice.