I’ve been interviewing myself.
It’s a memoir exercise — a long set of structured questions about my own life, answered out loud while I walk, cleaned up afterward. I talk into my phone in a neighborhood in Oklahoma City like a man having an argument with nobody.
What I expected was to remember things. What’s actually happened is stranger. Answering the questions in order has laid my life out end to end, and things I’ve always filed in separate drawers turn out to be the same thing.
Here’s the one I can’t put down.
At twenty-four I ran a youth ministry, and I ran it hard.
I had ideas and energy and total certainty that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, so I put my head down and went. Volunteers who’d been serving in that ministry for years brought me their opinions and I heard interference. They saw a job we’d figure out together. I saw mine.
That job ended in an office with a man telling me I could quit or be fired, and the decision was correct. I’ve never argued it.
What I could not have told you at the time is that I wasn’t failing at youth ministry. I was failing at bringing people with me, which is a different skill and one I did not know existed.
I’ve spent the last twenty years in data.
Reduce my job to a sentence and it’s this: decide how a system ought to work, then get an organization to actually do it that way. The deciding is maybe a fifth of it. The rest is walking into offices, explaining, listening to why my idea won’t work in their department, adjusting, coming back.
You cannot govern data by decree. You can publish the most correct standard ever written and if the people who touch the data every day weren’t part of it, they’ll route around you inside a week and you’ll never know until something breaks downstream.
I am now good at this. It’s most of what I get paid for.
So the sentence I heard myself say on the walk was that I’d grown up. Twenty-four-year-old me charged ahead without looking back. Forty-seven-year-old me won’t move until the room moves with him.
I’ve been sitting with that for a couple of days and I don’t think it’s true.
I don’t think I fixed anything. I think I landed in the one profession on earth where that particular failure cannot survive contact with the work. Not because I chose it — I fell into data by way of an insurance office and a friend who asked for my resume. But the job has been correcting me daily for twenty years, whether or not I agreed to be corrected, because the alternative is standards nobody follows and a phone call about broken data.
The church had no such mechanism. Nobody there was going to make me learn it. So I didn’t.
Which raises a question the memoir exercise handed me without meaning to.
If I only learned it where I was forced to, what does it look like in the places where nobody’s forcing me?
I sat down tonight and listed every creative project I have going. Several of them. Then I tried to pick three to shelve until January, which is not a hard exercise, and I got one. Every other project produced a reason it should stay.
Head down. Ideas and energy. Total certainty that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
Same man. Just nobody in the room to tell him.
David Willis 