"A nail does not go flush on the first blow" - #TEXIT
I Wrote A Secret Book
I Wrote A Secret Book
(Daniel Miller, Texian Partisan) - I started this spring with a simple project. A document. A response to the line, repeated for twenty years now, that the TNM is not doing anything. Five years of work, dates and numbers, twenty pages, a weekend.
I sit here at the end of April with the project on my desk, and it is no longer twenty pages. It is no longer a document. It is no longer about five years.
I want to say something about what I found.
When you spend long enough doing something, the doing becomes invisible to yourself. Years compress. Days that felt enormous at the time turn into footnotes. Days you barely remember turn out to have been the days everything depended on. You forget. Not the events themselves. Their weight.
Going through the files this spring, I kept having to stop. Not from grief, though there was some of that. From recognition. The shape of what I had been part of for thirty years was different from the shape I had been carrying in my head.
A few things I want to share, because I think they matter to the people reading this.
Most of the work that wins is invisible while it is being done.
The Republican Party of Texas conventions, where the independence planks first cleared ninety percent, did not happen because people showed up to those conventions. They happened because of work done years earlier, in counties most Texans cannot find on a map, by people whose names will never…