Still Here
Two strangers have a book I spent months on. I don’t know who they are, or what they came looking for.
My mother lives in Sesimbra, twenty minutes from Lisbon if you hit the A2 before seven. I drove down on Friday morning, before the heat settled, and sat in her kitchen for three hours while she moved around me — putting things away, taking them out, asking questions while facing the window.
At some point she set a cup of tea in front of me, without pausing what she was doing.
I picked it up. The tea was very hot.
“So the book is finished,” she said. Testing the sentence for accuracy more than asking.
“It’s out,” I said. “Published. Two people bought it.”
She was quiet for a moment. My mother is not quiet very often. “Two people.”
“Two strangers. I don’t know who they are.”
She looked at me the way she looks at problems without obvious solutions — patient, a little amused. “And?”
I didn’t have an answer. I drank the tea.
That and? is what I’ve been carrying around for six weeks.
The book is out. Two strangers have it. I’m six weeks into what comes after — and the question my mother asked in three letters is one I keep returning to without a clean answer, because I’m not entirely sure what it’s asking. Whether she meant what happened next, or how do you feel, or something older: the way she’s always checked on me, through different words, since I left for London at twenty-three.
There’s no short answer. Which might be the honest one.
My father didn’t say much. He was a man who preferred to work with his hands and said the things he wanted to say early in the morning, before the day got loud. I remember waking up once in Sesimbra — I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, restless in a way I didn’t have language for yet — and going to the kitchen to find him at the table with coffee and a newspaper he wasn’t reading.
He looked up. “You can’t sleep?”
I sat down. We were there for a while without talking.
Eventually he said: “When I work on the boat” — he was a fisherman, it was always the boat — “there’s a long time in the middle where it just looks like parts. Like it could still go wrong.” He folded the newspaper. “That’s still the boat.”
I wrote it down later in a notebook I still have somewhere. I’ve returned to it so many times it’s become less a memory of him and more a story I tell myself — I can’t always tell the difference anymore. But the image stayed.
I’m in the middle of something I can’t name yet.
Book 1 is out. Book 2 is a question I’ve been circling for three weeks without knowing how to hold it — something about what AI conversations do to us in the hours we don’t account for, in the ease of it, in what we learn not to notice. A premise that keeps slipping when I reach for it directly. On Tuesday I wrote four paragraphs and deleted them. On Thursday I kept one sentence: What does it mean to be heard by something that will never forget?
One sentence in three weeks.
And six weeks of a published book I can’t discuss without feeling like I’m performing something I don’t fully have access to yet.
This is what the middle looks like. I’ve sat with enough clients inside their middles to recognise it from the outside — though apparently that doesn’t help from the inside.
I went down to the sea in the afternoon, after the kitchen conversation. My mother’s patio opens onto the hill, and there’s a path to the water — fifteen minutes, steep enough that you focus on your feet. The sea in late July: flat, bright, a little relentless. Two fishing boats anchored further out. A family setting up on the rocks with towels and a bag that kept falling over.
I stood there for a while without knowing what I was waiting for.
The boats didn’t move. The light shifted in the way it does in late afternoon in Sesimbra — when the white walls stop reflecting and seem to emit something from inside themselves — and something loosened in me that had been running tightly for days without my noticing.
A client said something last month, before the launch, that I’ve been thinking about since.
She’d been in a transition for almost a year. Lost her role to restructuring, spent four months recasting it as opportunity, spent the next four exhausted by the effort of keeping that framing intact. She came in for her session and said — before I’d said anything — “I think I’ve been trying to know what it means before it’s finished.”
I wrote it down.
I’ve come back to it several times in the last six weeks, less as coaching material and more as something that describes where I am.
The grandmother’s cup is in Lisbon, on the counter between the kettle and a jar of honey. I made tea from it on Friday morning before I drove south — the same cup I use every morning, the usual first act — and again when I got home in the early evening.
Two kitchens in one day. The familiar things in both.
My father’s sentence is in a notebook in Lisbon. The one line I’ve kept from three weeks of Book 2 is on my phone.
Two strangers have a book I spent months on. I don’t know who they are, or what they came looking for.
The boat in parts.
Still the boat.
— Tiago
This is a newsletter about the inner experience of the AI transition. If this found you at the right moment, share it with someone who might need it.
If you’re new here: I’m Tiago Villares, a career coach based in Lisbon. I’ve spent the last three years working with people navigating career transitions in the age of AI — and writing about what that actually feels like from the inside. My first book, “After the Wave,” is out now.
Thank you for reading. This work is reader-supported, and your presence here matters.
This feels like wisdom worth carrying.
“There's a long time in the middle where it just looks like parts. Like it could still go wrong.”
How many times do we mistake unfinished for failing?
Sometimes the most important thing we can remember is that just because we can't yet see the whole picture doesn't mean the work isn't becoming something meaningful.
It's still the boat. It all belongs.