Words in Progress
Or the privilege of choosing who.
This week I took a flight and learned something that had been circling me for months without a name.
I spent Monday morning at a client’s office. We’ve been working together for months, almost all of it on screens, and he cleared the day so we could sit without an agenda and close what we’d left open. We had lunch: grilled artichoke flowers, Barbastro tomato with the good oil, a brasa-grilled turbot fit for a maharaja.
I let myself be looked after — and anyone who knows me knows I’m not easily won over, that I’m more giver than receiver. But I let myself be carried.
We didn’t go to lunch alone. He brought along his point person from the team. And watching how he treated her told me more than everything in the files they sent me back at the start. That is leading.
I speak from privilege and it’s worth saying out loud: the privilege of being born on the good side, of owning my own time, of not handing over my judgment to the highest bidder. I enjoy closing a deal as much as I enjoy saying no to a project I know isn’t for me. For me, that is also leading.
Tuesday was another story.
I put on my raw linen wrap jumpsuit — judoka-style, in case things went south and I had to put someone in a hold, and because it was hot as hell. I took a taxi (I wasn’t getting on the metro in that sun) and arrived early to map the place before the event began. There I ran into the person who had invited me. He planted two kisses on me at the door. So good to have you here. We took the service lift up to the loft on the sixth floor. That is also leading.
The event began. Two heavyweights of the industry played masters of ceremony. Let’s say they work with the kind of brands we all dream of and brag about — in the closet, in the garage, in the feed. The room filled up. Forty-nine international creatives. And me.
Brilliant people. People playing Champions League. And also people working with smaller clients, mid-size ones. Craft studios, circuit voices, names you recognize and names you don’t yet. The whole spectrum.
I spent the night listening.
I didn’t go quiet out of fear, or out of feeling out of place. And I didn’t go quiet out of precision either, though that too — live English without two beers wasn’t going to land where I wanted it. I went quiet, above all, to listen. I haven’t been at this that long.
And though I speak from the privilege I’ve already named — my own time, judgment that isn’t for sale, partners in mind who aren’t on a payroll — precisely because of that, it was my turn to keep quiet. To let the voices of those who’ve walked more of this road, who carry the same weight without the net I have, map out in their own words what I suspect is endemic. I didn’t want to leave an echo. I wanted to receive one.
That is also craft. Knowing when privilege is exercised by speaking and when it’s exercised by listening.
And listening from the other side I noticed something I’d already sensed but had never seen operate among strangers: the ache was the same. Transversal. The same in the one signing work for global brands as in the one running a small studio.
The system wears you down equally from inside the premium pen as from outside it. Exhaustion. Quiet fatigue. The sense of feeding something that drains you.
It wasn’t a cliché. Clichés go lukewarm the moment they’re named. This one didn’t. It recognized itself without needing to be explained, and that is exactly what tells a room with skin apart from a room with a script.
What I’ve been trying to put in order for days is this: we’ve confused validation with recognition.
Validation asks for volume, speed, noise — and we hand it our work in exchange for the next spike in visibility. Recognition asks for something else, much more expensive: time, witnesses, someone who, after months of work and a flight, tells you it’s taken you ten years to get here. But how good that you came. No sprint produces that sentence.
In Spanish we say comerse la rana — to eat the frog. A beautiful way of saying you kissed a supposed prince who turned out to be a frog, and you swallowed him anyway.
We all eat the occasional frog. I’ll grant that. But if you have frog for starter, frog for main, and frog for dessert because that’s how the numbers add up, good for you — it works. Only it has a cost. And the cost doesn’t show on the balance sheet because we don’t know how to count it. It shows up as absence. It shows up as that night in the loft, where forty-nine brilliant people quietly admitted they were tired of their own success.
On the way back to the hotel, part walking part metro, and enjoying a cigarette, I thought about how messed up the world is: that we all loathe it and keep feeding what drains us.
This morning I went back to my client’s office. We closed a new project, talked about the next ones, and he drove me to the airport. In the car I understood what I’d been failing to put in order for two days.
Between Monday and today a whole room of international exhaustion fit inside that room. But the week wasn't decided by that — not by the loft, not by the names on the billboard. It was decided by the two ends. The skin of a client who brings his point person along to lunch because that is leading. The skin of someone who waits for you at the door with two kisses and a so good to have you here. The skin of the drive to the airport.
Maybe the verb we keep in progress without ever conjugating is to choose. Choose the client. Choose the pace. Choose who you share a room with and who you don’t. Choose when to get on the plane and when to get off the project. Choose to eat one frog or three. The word lives in every manifesto. The verb, almost never.
But when it gets exercised, it leaves skin.
It takes you to lunch. It takes you to the airport. It opens doors you didn’t ask for. It gives you two kisses at the entrance and a so good to have you here worth more than any fee. It tells you ten years late, but how good.
The rest — the noise, the manifesto, the quarter, the three-course frog — is words in progress.
Words in progress.
Forever
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com