It happened gradually and I did not plan it.
There was no morning when I decided I was done with the explaining, done with the pre-emptive justification of my choices to rooms that had not asked for it, done with the particular habit of a woman who had learned that her decisions required context in order to be tolerated, that arriving at a conclusion without showing her work first was considered arrogance in a person with her body and her gender and her long history of being assessed before she spoke.
I just stopped.
Someone asked why I had retired when I did, the implication in the question being that it was early, that there was more I could have done, that the departure required an accounting. And I said: it was the right time. And I did not add anything. I let the sentence stand without scaffolding and something in the not-adding felt like a muscle I had not used in years, a muscle I had not known I still had, a small and specific strength in the saying-enough-and-stopping.
I have been explaining myself since I was old enough to know that my explanations were being graded.
In school and in institutions and in meetings and in the rooms where the door opened and you were expected to justify your presence in it, to prove in real time that the letting-in was warranted. I became very good at the justifying. I could anticipate the objection and pre-empt it, could frame my choices in the language that made them legible to the people whose legibility I needed, could manage the impression I was making in the gap between what I thought and what I said.
I am tired of the gap.
At this point in my life I would like my thinking and my saying to be more or less the same country. Not cruelly. Not without consideration for what other people need. But without the layer of translation that was always for someone else’s comfort and not mine. Without the performance of uncertainty when I am not uncertain. Without the hedging that made my knowledge smaller and more palatable for rooms that were made uncomfortable by a woman who simply knew what she knew.
I know what I know.
It was the right time. That is the whole of the answer. I am done explaining why.
