I Know What I Should Charge

You know what you should charge. That is the strange part of this.

There is no confusion here. You worked it out two years ago, properly, with the materials and the hours and the wear on the machine, and you arrived at a figure, and you have not forgotten it and you have not revised it downwards.

And then somebody asks, and a smaller number comes out.

Every single time. You know the real one is sitting there in your head while you say the other one, and you have watched yourself do it so often that it has stopped being surprising and has become simply what happens.

I am not going to explain how to set a price. You did that two years ago and you did it better than I could. I am going to talk about what happens between knowing and saying, because that is the only gap in this whole thing.

She maketh, and she selleth

There is a verse in Proverbs 31 that puts two things next to each other without any fuss at all, and most people read straight past the second one.

The chapter is famous and it is mostly read as being about virtue. Look at the verbs in this one line.

She maketh fine linen, and selleth it: she delivereth girdles unto the merchant. (Proverbs 31:24, King James Version)

You are a person who makes and also sells, and the second half has never once been less honorable than the first. Proverbs 31:24 puts making and selling in one breath with no apology between them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a kitchen table with finished work stacked on it.

She makes it. Then she sells it. The verse does not pause between those two and it does not soften the second one. There is no suggestion that the selling is the regrettable part of the making.

And she deals with a merchant, which means a negotiation, which means a figure said out loud by somebody. Scripture records it the way it records the weaving.

You have a place in the selling, and it has never once been the unspiritual half of the work. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a line about linen and merchants reach a woman with a diary open in front of her, and Proverbs 31:24 treats the selling as plainly as it treats the making.

The gap between knowing and saying

Let me say what is happening in that gap, because it is not ignorance and it is not a pricing problem.

The true number has a person attached to it. The moment somebody is standing there, the figure stops being the result of arithmetic and starts being a thing you are asking of them. And you have never been able to ask.

You were not pricing anything in that moment, you were asking, and the work has never once needed to be asked for. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what happens to a figure on its way out of her mouth, and the written word sets making and selling side by side in Proverbs 31:24.

And notice what it has cost besides money, because that is the part worth naming. Two years of your own careful work has been overridden by a feeling at the moment of speaking, which means the arithmetic has never once been tested in the world.

You do not actually know what happens if you say it. You have assumed, for two years, and assumption is not information.

You have never once had the evidence, because the sentence has never been said. His Spirit is the one who makes a true figure sayable without making a woman hard, and Proverbs 31:24 has a woman selling her own work to a merchant with no embarrassment recorded anywhere in the verse.

Write it, then use it

So here is the exercise, and half of it is paper.

Write the real price down. The one from two years ago, updated if you know it needs updating. Write it on something you will have with you.

You are able to put a true figure on paper, and writing it has never once been a demand on anybody. Proverbs 31:24 has the making and the selling in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest number writable for a woman who has held it silently for two years.

Then use it on the next person who asks. Not everybody, not your regulars, not as an announcement. The next person, who has nothing to compare it to and will simply hear a price.

And then stop talking. The figure does not need your help and it does not need an explanation. Let it be in the air.

You were never asking for a favor when you named a price, and you are not asking for one now. The Spirit of God carries an honest figure past the feeling that arrives when somebody is standing there, and the written word puts the selling of what she made into the same line as the making in Proverbs 31:24.