The book · in progress
Everyone has a version of this sentence loaded and ready. We say it about a friend’s spending habits, a stranger’s parenting style, a neighbor’s unkempt yard. It feels like moral clarity. It is usually the moment our brain finishes writing a script about a person whose life we know almost nothing about — and then mistakes the script for the truth.
A real arc: chaos, judgment, shame, repair, collapse, rebuild — and the slow discovery that a self built only out of negations is still a kind of prison. Just a tidier one. Underneath the story sits a portable practice: three questions you can ask in any moment of certainty.
Jill’s question. At the time she was a close friend, a confidant, a business owner, an Army National Guard Colonel, and a nurse — someone I highly respected and looked up to. One question that breaks the confirmation-bias loop and reopens curiosity about another person — or about yourself.
The mechanism. Gaps in information get filled by the fastest, cheapest, least charitable explanation available. Once the words are locked in, they play like a script. Noticing that is the beginning of freedom.
The geometry. Some situations are not mine to stand in judgment of. Off-the-line certainty is almost always fiction dressed as fact.
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