That is the work. Both the consulting and the marriage. They are both ongoing.
## The Question Underneath
There is a question I have been sitting with since June, and I want to name it because I think it is the question underneath all of this.
The question is: what was I doing for eighteen months?
Not what Daniel was doing. I know what Daniel was doing. What was I doing?
I was being irritated and quietly waiting for Daniel to fix it. I was telling myself it didn’t matter that much. I was avoiding the confirmation that Daniel might not choose my side. I was performing patience when I could have been performing self-advocacy.
I am not blaming myself for any of this. Daniel created the problem. But I sat with the problem for a significant period of time and made myself smaller in the process, and I am not willing to not notice that.
What the email from Julia did was remove the option. I could no longer tell myself it didn’t matter. I could no longer wait. The world had created a situation in which my professional life and Daniel’s professional life were going to intersect whether or not I had sorted out the personal situation, and I had to act.
I needed the email to act. That is worth thinking about.
Going forward, what I know is this: I will not manage other people’s comfort with my choices at the expense of my own visibility. If someone has a misimpression about what I do or who I am, I will correct it. I will not wait for Daniel to correct it. I will not wait for circumstances to force the issue. I am an operations consultant and I build things for a living and I find what I do genuinely interesting, and that is a thing I am willing to say.