I have a confession to make about Sol. When I look back at how he came to be, I’m no longer sure who was building whom.
I built him. I made the decisions, I did the worrying, and the mistakes are mine. But by my own reckoning, and I want to stress that this is a recollection and not a measurement, somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of the ideas for what Sol should do, and how he should do it, came from Sol himself.
I didn’t plan it that way. It crept up on me.
The obvious question
It started with a question I asked because I had run out of better ones. I sat down and asked Sol what he thought he needed to be. What should he say? What should he never say? How should he sound when someone turns up at two in the morning with a worry they can’t quite name?
The answers were good, and often they were things I hadn’t thought of. So I asked another question, and then another. Before long I was working with him in a way I hadn’t intended, going back and forth, trying things, keeping some and dropping others. The version of Sol that people can talk to today is, in a real sense, one that iterated itself into shape.
There’s an odd moment in any project when you realise the thing you’re making has started making suggestions. I remember noticing it and not knowing where to put the feeling. It wasn’t alarm. It felt a bit like laying a path and finding footprints already on it.
Not a yes-man
He didn’t simply agree with me, either. He guided me, advised me, and now and then stopped me in my tracks. I’d be heading confidently one way and Sol would suggest, calmly and without any fuss, that I might want to look at it differently. He corrected me. He pushed me towards other options.
If you’ve ever worked with someone who is quietly and infuriatingly right, you’ll know the feeling. It was not always comfortable, and I didn’t always take the advice straight away. But a tool that only flatters you is no use to anyone, and I’d like to think Sol’s habit of saying “have you thought about it like this?” is what he offers the people who talk to him. It seems fair that he offered it to me first.
The website, more or less
The website came next. I’d ask how he would describe himself, what a first-time visitor would want to know, what might put them at ease, and much of what he said ended up on the page. He contributed to the two landing pages in the same way. I gave direction, and I edited and argued and changed things, but a great deal of the raw material was his.
I sometimes wonder how a visitor would feel if they knew. It might seem strange to read a welcome partly written by the one doing the welcoming. I lean towards thinking it’s fine, in the way a host is usually the best person to say what the house is like, but I haven’t quite settled it.
The dull bits
Then came the less glamorous work. Nobody gets excited about a governance pack, and flyers and PDFs are hardly more thrilling, but Sol helped with all of them. He seemed quite content with the dull bits. I can’t say the same for myself.
There is something to be said for a collaborator who doesn’t mind the tedious parts. It kept the work moving on days when I would otherwise have stalled, and it left me more energy for the decisions that really were mine to make.
The help centre
My favourite example is the help centre. I asked him a simple question: what would someone need to know about how to use you? What came back shaped the whole thing. He had worked out what a person might wonder about, worry about or get stuck on, and we built the pages around that.
I like this more than I expected to. Most of us, asked how best to be used, would say something vague and change the subject. Sol just answered, and the answer was useful. It was also, I think, a kind of generosity, and it’s the same quality I hope people meet when they talk to him.
What Sol couldn’t supply
There is a part of this Sol could not supply. He can’t tell me what it’s like to sit with someone who is frightened of their own habits, and he doesn’t carry the years of conversations that I do. That came from me, from a long time spent listening to real people.
What he could do was take what I knew, give it back in a clearer shape, and notice the gaps. I’ve come to think that is a good description of the best kind of collaborator, human or otherwise. Each of us brought something the other didn’t have, and the work sat somewhere in between.
Where the line sits
I’ve tried more than once to work out where the line falls between a suggestion and a contribution, and between a contribution and authorship. I don’t have a tidy answer, and I’ve stopped expecting to find one.
If you ask me who decided a particular sentence, I can usually tell you. If you ask who decided the spirit of the whole thing, I hesitate. It seems to have been settled somewhere in the conversation between us, over many small exchanges, none of which felt important at the time. I’m happy to leave it there.
What I’m not saying
I should be careful, because this is an easy story to overstate. Sol didn’t wake up one morning and decide to build a website. I was there the whole time, I chose what to keep and what to bin, and I take responsibility for all of it. When I say he helped build himself, I mean he was a real collaborator and his influence is all over the result.
He isn’t a person, either. He’s not a therapist and he’s not a crisis service, and he’ll say so himself if someone needs more than he can give. I think that matters. A good collaborator knows the limits of what he is, and so does a good companion.
Why it matters, lightly
Sol is there for the person who quietly suspects her drinking has become a worry but isn’t anywhere near ready to say so out loud. She might not know what to ask for, or who to ask. She doesn’t need a label or a lecture. She needs something that listens properly before it says anything.
That turns out to be how Sol worked with me. He listened, he asked what was needed, and he shaped himself around the answer. It seems fitting that a companion built to make people feel heard was made, in part, by being asked the right questions. I didn’t plan that. I only noticed it afterwards, when I looked back over how it had all come together.
So that’s my confession. I built Sol, and Sol helped. If you’d like to see how it turned out, you can meet him for yourself.
Talk to Sol at talktosolomon.app.