Why I’m writing I Would Never Do That

Everyone has the sentence loaded. I'd never do that. We say it about the friend who spends money a certain way, other people's parenting, the stranger in the news everyone agreed was unforgivable.

I'd never do that: it feels like integrity. That's the trick — if we realized what judgmental jerks we were being, we'd stop in our tracks.

What I've come to believe is that it's usually the sound of a story finishing early. Our brains fill gaps in information with the fastest, cheapest, least charitable explanation available, and then quietly promote that explanation to fact. The certainty arrives before the evidence does. That's it! Book closed!

I'm not writing this book from a position above it. I'm writing it because I've been the judgmental jerk.

I married my first husband because he was as steady as an afternoon thunderstorm in July. Same breakfast every morning. He didn't drink. I never had to wonder whether he'd hit me. That was the bar, and clearing it felt like winning. That's what chaos does — it turns predictability into the highest value there's, and it teaches you to sort people fast: this kind is safe, that kind isn't. Getting good at that sorting is how I got out. It's also exactly the instinct I'm writing a book about, because the same speed that kept me safe as a kid made me wrong about people as an adult.

The practice I ended up with isn't do not judge. That's a useless instruction; you'll judge before you finish reading the sentence. The real practice is catching yourself in the act, in real time, before the story hardens. Three questions do the work:

What else could that mean? It doesn't require you to be generous. It only requires you to admit there's more than one available reading.

Am I writing my own script right now? You're almost always holding a first draft you didn't know you wrote.

Am I even on this line? Some situations are simply not mine to stand in judgment of.

The book is part memoir and part field guide, and it doesn't end with me arriving somewhere enlightened. It ends with a discovery that took me too long: a version of myself built only out of the things I'd never do is still a kind of prison. Just a tidier one.

I'm writing it slowly and I'm writing it honestly, which means including the parts where I was the one who got it wrong. VERY, very wrong! If you want to know when it's real, let me know.