Some lessons arrive as information. Others arrive as interruption.

The first kind can be studied. Organized. Underlined. Repeated back. It comes to us through books, classrooms, lectures, teachers, mentors, and institutions. It gives us language, frameworks, credentials, and ways of making the world intelligible.

I have great respect for this kind of education. I have built much of my life through it. But there is another education that does not begin when we enroll or end when we graduate.

It does not always announce what it is teaching. It rarely provides the lesson before the test. It does not issue credentials when we finally understand what has happened to us. This education takes place beneath the visible life.

I call it the Deep.

The Deep is where our most convincing explanations begin to loosen. Where the language that once organized our lives becomes insufficient for what we are experiencing. Where certainty reaches the edge of its authority.

The Deep does not ask only what we know.

It asks what our knowing has made of us.

The Education Beneath Education

We tend to think of education as something intentional. A curriculum is designed. Objectives are established. Progress is measured. Completion is recognized.

But human beings are always learning more than anyone intended to teach.

We learn from atmospheres. From what receives attention and what disappears from view. From who is permitted to speak without interruption and who must establish credibility before being heard. From what produces belonging, what threatens it, and what must be surrendered to keep it.

The explicit lesson may say one thing while the environment teaches another. An organization may say that people matter while rewarding exhaustion. A faith community may preach love while forming people through fear.

A family may never articulate its rules, yet everyone inside it knows what can be said, what must remain hidden, and which version of themselves is most likely to be accepted.

A culture may celebrate individuality while punishing anyone whose difference disrupts its arrangements.

That is education too.

Family is faculty. Culture is faculty. Gender is faculty. Love is faculty. Rejection is faculty. Power is faculty. Desire is faculty. Loss is faculty. The body is faculty.

We are being taught before we possess the language to recognize that learning is occurring. And because much of this education happens beneath conscious thought, we may spend years calling its conclusions our personality.

I am simply this way.

This is what love requires.

This is what success looks like.

This is who I have to become to remain safe.

The Deep begins disturbing those conclusions.

When Knowing Stops Being Enough

Most formal education rewards our ability to produce an answer. The Deep often begins with our willingness to remain near a question. This is difficult for those of us who have learned to survive through competence.

We know how to research, interpret, solve, organize, and explain. We can turn confusion into a framework before it has had time to tell us why it came. There are seasons, however, when intelligence cannot rescue us from encounter.

The old answer may still be technically correct and existentially useless. The familiar language may still sound impressive and no longer tell the truth. The life that looks coherent from the outside may become impossible to inhabit from within.

The Deep does not always give us new answers. Sometimes it removes our ability to keep living inside borrowed ones. That removal can feel like failure.

We may think we are losing direction when we are losing instructions that were never written for us. We may think our lives are falling apart when an arrangement that required our absence is losing its hold.

The Deep dismantles, but it also reveals. It takes language away, then waits to see what voice remains.

The Deep Is Not Suffering

I want to be careful here. The Deep is not another name for pain. Suffering is not automatically instructive. Trauma does not become sacred merely because we survived it.

Loss does not owe us wisdom. Some experiences wound without explaining themselves. Some deprivation should never be romanticized as preparation.

The education is not the injury.

The education begins in the attention we bring to what the injury altered, exposed, concealed, or made impossible to ignore. Pain can narrow a life. The Deep, as I understand it, asks whether we can become conscious inside what has narrowed us.

What did this experience teach me to fear?

What did I begin calling love because I needed it to be love?

Which adaptations protected me once but now keep me from participating fully in my own life?

What have I mistaken for identity because I have practiced it for so long?

The Deep does not congratulate us for suffering. It invites us to examine what suffering, power, belonging, and survival have written into us. Then it asks a more difficult question:

What was put into me, and what has always been mine?

A Dark Night Has No Streetlights

A dark night of the soul does not have streetlights. There are no illuminated signs announcing that uncertainty is carrying us somewhere meaningful. No rubric confirms that the questions undoing us will eventually become wisdom.

No institution can certify that a life stripped of its familiar coordinates is becoming more truthful. We cannot see the entire landscape from inside it. We are asked to develop forms of perception that certainty made unnecessary: attention, patience, discernment, interior honesty, and the capacity to remain present without prematurely naming what is happening.

We learn to notice what becomes audible when performance quiets. We learn that clarity and certainty are not the same. Certainty wants the question closed. Clarity may simply allow us to see what the question is asking.

Certainty says, I know where this is going.

Clarity says, I know I can no longer go where I was going.

The Deep teaches us not to confuse familiarity with home.

The Body Is Also Reading

The mind is not the only part of us receiving an education. The body studies repetition. It learns the rooms in which it must become smaller. It learns which voices signal danger.

It learns how quickly joy may be followed by disappointment. It learns to prepare for the interruption, the demand, the withdrawal, the loss. Long after the conscious mind has produced a reasonable explanation, the body may continue carrying another account.

The résumé says success.

The body says exhaustion.

The doctrine says peace.

The body says fear.

The relationship says love.

The body says disappearance.

This does not mean every sensation is an infallible instruction. The body can remember dangers that are no longer present. But it is still a witness. It contains evidence our preferred narratives may have excluded.

To be educated by the Deep is to become willing to hear testimony that does not arrive in sentences.

Fatigue may be speaking. Restlessness may be speaking. Grief and desire may be speaking.

Even numbness may be speaking through its refusal to speak. The question is not simply, How do I silence this?

It may be, What has this been trying to tell me about the life I am living?

The Deep Is Pregnant

The Deep is not barren.

It is pregnant.

What looks empty from the surface may be carrying a life that cannot develop under constant observation. What feels like inactivity may be an interior reorganization. What appears to be the absence of direction may be the slow recovery of an orientation buried beneath adaptation.

The Deep does not always produce a shinier identity. It may make us less interested in identities that require constant proof. It may not return us to the world more impressive. It may return us more present.

Presence is a different kind of achievement.

It allows us to participate in our lives rather than merely manage them—to recognize when we begin abandoning ourselves to remain acceptable, and to question a curriculum while we are still enrolled in it.

Perhaps this is one of the Deep’s central lessons: transformation cannot be outsourced.

Other people may accompany us. Traditions may give us language. Books may offer maps. Communities may witness our becoming. But no institution, teacher, relationship, or belief system can participate in our lives on our behalf.

Eventually, we must become present for our own formation.

An Education Without Graduation

To be educated by the Deep is not to arrive at permanent clarity. It is to develop a different relationship with what we do not know. To stop treating every unanswered question as an emergency.

To understand that the inner life is not a problem to solve but a world in which we must become skillful.

What formed us unconsciously can be examined consciously—even if it cannot be changed quickly.

We can question an education that increases our knowledge while decreasing our presence.

The Deep has taught me that becoming is not the construction of an entirely new self. Often, it is the difficult recovery of the self that adaptation taught us to leave behind.

There is no diploma for this.

No final course.

No moment when the soul becomes a completed subject.

There is only the ongoing work of listening for what has been hidden beneath performance and becoming accountable for how we participate in what we are becoming.

Some lessons arrive as information.

Others wait beneath the life we know until we are quiet enough to hear them.

Deep calls to deep.

I have been seeing a particular kind of invitation on Substack lately. And I’m growing tired of it.

If you have fewer than fifty subscribers, share your publication here. If you are a writer, introduce yourself below. Drop your latest essay in the comments and let’s support one another.

Then, this morning, I saw a post that said:

“Don’t be shocked if you gain 100 new subscribers from this note.”

Thousands of people liked it. More than a thousand had commented. Dozens had restacked it. At first glance, the post looked generous. Perhaps it was.

Writers want to be read. New writers especially know the peculiar experience of placing something carefully made into the world and watching it disappear beneath everything else arriving at the same time.

An invitation to gather can feel like relief. Here is a place where someone might finally find you. Here is a person willing to use their visibility to help you acquire some of your own. I understand the hope inside the comment section.

But as I looked at the numbers beneath the post, another structure became visible to me. And strangely, it looked like church.

A promise of Increase

I grew up around religious language that treated giving as a pathway to increase. Tithe, and you will be blessed. Sow a seed, and it will return to you. Give faithfully, and God will open the windows of heaven.

In some churches, the promise became even more explicit. You would not merely have enough. You would become wealthy. Your obedience would produce visible abundance.

And yet, for the most part, the person becoming visibly wealthy was the one making the promise. The promise was distributed. The benefit was concentrated.

That does not mean no one in the congregation experienced material improvement. Some did. Their stories became testimonies: the new job, the unexpected check, the debt forgiven.

These stories mattered to the people who lived them. But they also performed another function inside the system. They became evidence that the promise worked.

Meanwhile, the people who gave and did not prosper rarely became part of the sermon. Perhaps they had not believed enough. Perhaps they had not given cheerfully. Perhaps their blessing was coming later.

The promise survived because success was made visible and disappointment was individualized. I wonder whether something similar is happening in digital spaces.

The Post as Pulpit

“Don’t be shocked if you gain 100 new subscribers from this note” holds out more than an opportunity to meet other writers. It holds out the prospect of multiplication. Come here. Participate. Make yourself visible beneath this message.

And perhaps your numbers will increase. The post becomes the pulpit. The comment section becomes the offering plate.

Each participant contributes a small unit of attention. But those units do not remain small once they accumulate beneath a single post.

Thousands may arrive hoping to receive visibility. Their combined activity immediately produces a visible benefit for the person who gathered them: a post filled with engagement.

We bring our engagement to the altar of someone else’s visibility and call the exchange community.

Perhaps some people gain one hundred subscribers. Perhaps someone finds a writer whose work becomes important to them. Perhaps real relationships begin in the replies.

None of that makes the structure imaginary. A system does not have to benefit only one person to benefit people asymmetrically. That is what makes the arrangement difficult to name.

Genuine connection can happen within a structure that concentrates the value of everyone’s participation in one place. And when the testimonies arrive—I gained twenty subscribers!—they make the prospect more believable for the next person. Those outcomes may be entirely true.

They also travel farther than the unspoken experience of the person who commented, followed dozens of strangers, received little engagement in return and quietly moved on. Success announces itself. Disappointment usually does not.

What, Exactly, Has Grown?

A subscriber is not the same thing as a reader. A follower is not the same thing as a community member. A like is not the same thing as attention. A comment is not the same things as a relationship.

These gestures may become doorways to those things. But when we collapse the distinction, numerical accumulation begins to look like evidence of human connection. That is where the prosperity logic becomes especially powerful. In prosperity theology, wealth can become evidence of divine favor.

In algorithmic culture, visibility can become evidence of value. The more people who follow, the more followable someone appears. The more a post travels, the more worthy of travel it can seem.

The larger the number, the less likely we are to ask what the number contains. Does growth represent relationship, curiosity, obligation—or people clicking a button because everyone else beneath the post was clicking one too?

This does not happen because people are foolish. Platforms make measurement public while leaving much about distribution difficult to understand. So we interpret the numbers socially.

This writer has five thousand subscribers. Something important must be happening here. This person keeps appearing in my feed. They must be someone I should know.

Visibility becomes familiarity. Familiarity becomes credibility. And credibility begins attracting more visibility. The blessing compounds.

Who Receives the Offering?

When thousands gather beneath a prospect of growth, at least three parties may benefit. Some participants find one another. The person who created the post receives concentrated engagement and may gain greater visibility and authority as someone who can convene a crowd.

And the platform receives activity from all of it. Every like. Every comment. Every new follow. Every return visit to see whether the numbers changed.

The platform does not need to promise anyone abundance directly. Users can make the promise to one another. We recruit ourselves into deeper participation.

We create the revival. We fill the room. We testify about what happened there. This is more than engagement bait. It is a small economy of hope.

People who want their work to matter bring that hope into the comment section. The post gathers it and converts it into activity. Hope becomes data. Longing becomes distribution.

The desire to be read becomes labor performed on behalf of the platform—and on behalf of whoever successfully gathers that desire in one place.

The Person Making the Promise May Believe it Too

I do not think every person creating these posts is cynically manipulating people. That conclusion would be too easy. They may remember what it felt like to publish into silence.

They may have watched writers connect beneath earlier posts and decided to create another opening. They may also understand that communal language travels well and that generosity can be rewarded with engagement. Both things can be true.

A person can intend to help and still occupy the most advantaged position inside the help they have designed. A pastor can believe in tithing and still benefit materially from preaching it.

A creator can believe in mutual support and still benefit from becoming the location where mutual support is performed. Intent does not eliminate structure. The more useful question is how value moves.

Who contributes? Who accumulates? Who can verify the promise? Who disappears from the story when it does not materialize?

The Failure Becomes Person

Prosperity systems are remarkably durable because they know where to place failure. if the blessing comes, the teaching is true. If it does not, the believer must continue preparing to receive it.

Algorithmic prosperity works similarly. If your audience grows, the strategy worked. If it does not, perhaps you did not comment early enough. Perhaps you did not engage consistently.

Perhaps your profile was unclear or your writing insufficiently accessible. Perhaps you need to participate in the next thread. And so the writer returns. Another introduction. Another link.

Another hopeful comment beneath someone else’s promise of recognition. The structure remains innocent because the individual absorbs the disappointment. We rarely ask whether the prospect being offered exceeds what the gathering can provide.

We rarely ask whether being followed by people who are also seeking to be followed creates a readership—or merely a temporary alliance of mutual need.

What Kind of Community Is Being Formed?

Community is one of the most attractive words on the internet. it suggests belonging, relationship and support. But not every gathering is a community. Sometimes a crowd is organized by a shared hope of individual advancement.

Sometimes reciprocity means: I will perform attention toward you in the hope that attention returns to me.

Sometimes support means subscribing without reading. Sometimes belonging means appearing beneath the right person’s post at the right time. The gestures resemble community. But the underlying relationship may remain transactional.

That does not make the people insincere. It tells us something about the environment in which they are trying to be found.

When people must gather around promises of visibility to encounter one another, we should examine more than their hunger for numbers. We should examine the architecture that keeps so much meaningful work obscure while rewarding those who learn how to organize obscurity into engagement.

Religious Scripts Do Not Stay in Church

I am increasingly interested in what happens to religious patterns after people leave explicitly religious spaces. The language may change while the structure survives. Blessing becomes abundance. Calling becomes purpose.

Testimony becomes a success story. Evangelism becomes personal branding. The offering becomes engagement. The congregation becomes a following. And prosperity becomes reach.

We may no longer be told that God will reward our faithfulness. Instead, we are told that the algorithm will eventually reward our consistency. Keep showing up.

Keep posting. Keep engaging. Your breakthrough may be one post away. There can be wisdom in persistence.

But persistence becomes theology when the system is treated as ultimately just—when we assume that good work faithfully offered will eventually receive the recognition it deserves. Algorithms make no such covenant with us.

An essay’s cost to its writer, its truthfulness and its capacity to deepen understanding are not interchangeable with the signals a platform uses to distribute it. Nor does visibility establish that someone has developed the capacity to hold the authority it creates.

Yet we can become so fluent in producing signals that recognition begins to look like reward for righteousness.

What Would Support Look Like Without the Promise?

I do not want to make writers suspicious of every invitation to share their work. Discovery matters. Recommendation matters. Generous people can use their access to widen someone else’s.

Writers have found me because another person shared something I wrote. I have found writers because someone placed their work in my path. That kind of circulation can be beautiful.

But perhaps support becomes more honest when it is separated from outcomes no individual can guarantee. Read this writer because their work deserves your attention. Recommend an essay because it changed the way you understand something.

Subscribe because you want a relationship with the work—not because subscription has become the price of admission to a growth ritual. Use your visibility to point beyond yourself without making a gathering beneath your generosity the condition of discovery.

Tell people what support actually means.

Reading.

Responding.

Remembering.

Recommending.

Returning.

Perhaps even disagreeing carefully enough to reveal that the work was encountered rather than merely counted. Because writers do not only need larger audiences. They need actual readers.

And communities are not formed merely by increasing the number of people standing in the room. They are formed by what those people become responsible for in relation to one another.

Who Gets Blessed?

The question that arrived for me beneath that post was not whether anyone would gain one hundred subscribers. Someone might. The question was who receives the accumulated value of thousands of people hoping to receive a fraction of it.

Who gets to hold out the promise while the algorithm helps determine whether it will be kept? And what are we becoming when we mistake proximity to a promise for community? The algorithm prosperity gospel does not require us to send money.

It asks for our attention. Our participation. Our belief that if we keep giving both, visibility will eventually prove that our work mattered. But perhaps the work mattered before it was distributed.

Perhaps being counted was never the same as being read. Perhaps growth without relationship is not abundance. And perhaps before we enter the next digital sanctuary promising multiplication, we should ask who is holding the offering plate—and where all that accumulated attention is going.

One year ago, I pressed publish on Does God Like Black Women? without knowing what would become of it.

It remains my most liked essay to date. I began with a question I could no longer keep to myself. I had questions. Years of journals. A notebook. A body trying to tell me something. And a life that no longer fit.

There was no strategy tucked neatly behind the courage. I was writing. And more importantly, I was listening.

For most of my life, I knew how to sound like someone who knew what she was doing. I knew the languages of good girl, professionalism, scholarship, theology, competence, responsibility. I knew how to enter rooms and discern which version of my intelligence would be most useful there.

I knew how to translate myself. W.E.B. Du Bois described double consciousness as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” As a Black woman, I had plenty of practice.

My life was asking me to stop translating long enough to hear the original language. Writing became one of the ways I learned to listen. Apparently, that takes a while.

I have always loved words and learning. For years, I assumed that meant another degree. Another classroom. I knew how to be a student. I was very good at it. What I did not understand was how much of my life had been an education already. Family, religion, motherhood, corporate life, relationships, the hustle for worthiness.

Some lessons arrive without a syllabus. Writing made the curriculum visible.

I would think I was writing about religion and find power. About work and find identity. About leadership and find formation. Eventually, a question began following me everywhere:

How do we become who we become?

That inquiry found a name. Human formation.

There’s a Miles Davis quote I love:

“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.”

I had spent years developing the capacity to speak in rooms. Writing was helping me hear what I wanted to say. When work became unstable, I initially thought I had lost structure. I had also lost a way of authorizing my own life. That recognition is now a companion.

Writing gave me somewhere to put it. I have spent enough of my life believing that understanding something meant I had transformed it. It doesn’t. Sometimes language is only the beginning of the encounter.

The audience is still small. I cannot offer a spectacular subscriber count as proof that persistence always pays off. But I have learned something about what happens to me in the making of the work.

Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” I have come to understand that through my own writing. There are beliefs I could see only after they became sentences. I have learned to sit with contradictions without rushing to resolve them. And I can now hold earlier versions of myself with love and esteem.

Numbers tell me something about reach. They cannot tell me whether I am a writer. I would keep writing.

I have wondered what would have happened if Substack had produced the kind of success I initially imagined.

I would have married the process—committed myself to repeating whatever appeared to work before discovering how much more I wanted to explore.

As I began exploring, the work began taking other forms. A podcast. Body Sermons. Somara.

And somewhere among the essays, research, conversations, losses, and questions, a book began making itself known to me.

Educated by the Deep.

It is still taking shape. I look forward to sharing more with you as it does.

I began seeing continuity where I had once seen unrelated interests: education, theology, psychology, leadership, bodies, power, relationships, systems.

Human Formation was becoming the lens through which I understood these connections. Human beings do not live in disciplines. They live whole lives.

My questions were crossing boundaries because the lives I was trying to understand crossed them too. Across those boundaries, I kept returning to one question:

What forms a human being?

Recently, I wrote a sentence that stopped me:

I am grateful that I didn’t die estranged from myself.

I could have lived an entire life knowing how to be useful without knowing what I desired. Fluent in everyone else’s expectations while barely conversational in my own interior life. That possibility grieves me.

This year did not give me a finished self. But I am less absent from myself. That may be the most accurate thing I can say.

One year ago, I thought I was beginning a relationship—with language, inquiry, my body, my own mind. I still don’t know where all of this is taking me. I know I want to write. To research. To build something capable of holding these questions.

And after a year of publishing, I am more interested in the work than when I began.

After all these years of learning how to sound competent, faithful, professional, useful, strong, and certain, I am beginning to recognize another sound.

My own.

And I would like to hear where it goes.

There is a phrase we use for jobs that become difficult to leave because the rewards of staying are so valuable:

Golden handcuffs.

The image has always been interesting to me.

They are still handcuffs.

We just make sure to mention the gold.

The salary is good. The benefits are excellent. The title carries weight. The bonus arrives in March. The retirement account is growing. The health insurance covers the family. The vacation days have accumulated. The professional identity travels well.

None of these things are insignificant.

Money matters. Security matters. Healthcare matters. Stability matters. Being able to provide for ourselves and the people we love matters.

But what happens when something that benefits us also begins governing us.

When does security become instruction?

When does compensation begin influencing not only whether we stay, but what we are willing to tolerate in order to keep staying?

When does the life a salary makes possible begin determining which life we believe we are permitted to want?

And what happens when the rewards of remaining inside a system become entangled with the fear of what might happen if we stop moving according to its expectations?

That is where another phrase comes to mind.

The velvet hammer.

A hammer does not cease being a hammer because it has been wrapped in something soft.

Power does not disappear because it has learned to speak politely.

Organizations rarely need to announce:

We would like you to become more cautious here.

Please learn which disagreements are professionally expensive.

Your advancement may depend upon becoming easier for us to recognize.

We reward people who make institutional instability look manageable.

You are technically allowed to say no, but we will remember that you did.

The language is usually better than that.

Alignment.

Opportunity.

Visibility.

Leadership presence.

Culture.

Fit.

Development.

Feedback.

Commitment.

Professionalism.

All reasonable words. Sometimes even beautiful ones. But words do not tell us the entire story of a system.

Consequences do.

And somewhere between the gold and the hammer, human beings learn how to move.

The Economy We Rarely Name

Every organization has an economy beyond money.

There is the formal economy, of course: salary, bonuses, benefits, raises, stock, retirement contributions, paid leave.

But there is another economy operating alongside it.

Access.

Credibility.

Belonging.

Visibility.

Sponsorship.

Reputation.

Proximity to power.

Flexibility.

Opportunity.

Grace.

The benefit of the doubt.

These things circulate through organizations too.

And like other currencies, they are not always distributed equally.

Over time, people begin learning the exchange rates.

How much disagreement can I afford?

What does candor cost here?

How much availability purchases the reputation of being committed?

What happens when I say no?

Who receives another chance?

Who becomes “difficult”?

Who can violate a stated value without losing institutional protection?

These questions rarely appear in employee handbooks.

They do not have to.

Human beings are extraordinary students of environments.

We watch.

We compare.

We remember.

We notice who gets promoted and who stops getting invited. We notice whose mistakes become developmental opportunities and whose become evidence of character.

We notice what leadership says.

And then we notice what happens.

Eventually, we learn the difference.

This is the hidden economy of organizational life.

An organization can tell us what it values.

Its economy tells us what actually carries value.

Gold Is Not the Problem

It would be easy to make golden handcuffs into a morality tale.

Money bad. Freedom good.

Leave the job. Follow the dream.

I don’t believe that.

I have known financial instability too intimately to romanticize it.

There is nothing inherently enlightened about not knowing how you will pay your bills. Struggling to survive does not automatically bring you closer to your authentic self. Sometimes it simply frightens you, exhausts you, limits your choices, and consumes the very imagination you need to build something different.

Security can be deeply humane.

The problem is not the gold.

The question is what the gold begins purchasing from us.

A salary purchases labor. That is the explicit agreement.

But organizational life can produce additional exchanges that were never written into the contract.

Availability.

Silence.

Emotional management.

Self-translation.

Tolerance.

Deference.

Identity.

Sometimes the exchange is worth making.

Sometimes it is temporary.

Sometimes we make it consciously because there are people depending on us and responsibilities we have chosen to carry.

And sometimes we no longer realize we are making an exchange at all.

That is where formation enters.

Repeated exchanges can become habits.

Habits can become expectations.

Expectations can become identities.

And eventually we may have difficulty distinguishing between what the organization requires and what we require of ourselves.

The handcuffs no longer need to feel like handcuffs.

They can feel like adulthood.

Responsibility.

Success.

Being realistic.

Being grateful.

Having too much to lose.

The Hammer Does Not Have to Be Loud

We tend to imagine power most easily when it is dramatic.

Someone is fired.

Someone is yelled at.

Someone is publicly humiliated.

Someone is denied a promotion.

Someone is formally disciplined.

Those things happen.

But much of organizational power is quieter.

The meeting you are no longer invited to.

The opportunity that goes somewhere else.

The leader whose warmth cools after disagreement.

The performance language that shifts.

The label that attaches itself to you and begins entering rooms before you do.

The subtle realization that something you were told was welcome was not welcome when you actually practiced it.

This is where the velvet matters.

The interaction may remain perfectly professional.

The email may be beautifully written.

The conversation may begin with appreciation.

The policy may have been followed.

The documentation may be complete.

The hammer can be administratively impeccable.

And still, something consequential has occurred.

This does not mean every disappointing workplace experience is evidence of institutional harm. Organizations must make decisions. Leaders must give difficult feedback. Employees will not receive every promotion, opportunity, accommodation, or outcome they want.

The question is not whether organizations should have standards or consequences.

The question is what those consequences teach.

Because human beings do not experience organizational decisions only as isolated events.

We interpret patterns.

We learn from what happens to us.

And from what happens to everyone else.

Consequences Are Curriculum

We have a familiar phrase for education acquired through difficulty:

the school of hard knocks.

But lately I have found myself wondering:

Who built the school?

Some of the hard knocks we experience are part of being alive. Loss happens. Plans fail. People disappoint us. Bodies change. Economies shift. No institution can remove the vulnerability inherent in human life.

But some hard knocks are produced by systems.

And systems have curricula.

A company may say it values candor.

Then an employee watches what happens to the person who speaks candidly.

A workplace may encourage boundaries.

Then everyone notices who gets rewarded for answering messages at 10:30 at night.

A leader may say mistakes are part of innovation.

Then the organization discovers who is actually permitted to make one.

A company may describe itself as people-first.

Then people watch what happens when protecting a person becomes inconvenient.

The stated lesson and the taught lesson are not always the same.

And when they conflict, consequences are persuasive teachers.

Organizational behavior, then, is not merely behavior. It can also be evidence of learning.

When people stop speaking, perhaps courage is not the only variable worth examining.

When employees become hypervigilant, perhaps resilience training is not the only intervention worth considering.

When people carefully manage their visibility, perhaps we should examine what visibility purchases.

When employees perform enthusiasm while privately exhausted, perhaps engagement scores are telling us less than we think.

Human behavior can contain information about the environment in which it developed.

The question cannot always be:

What does this person need to learn?

Sometimes we need to ask:

What has this system already taught them?

Between Reward and Consequence

This is where the gold and the hammer meet.

The gold teaches us what to preserve.

The hammer teaches us what to avoid.

And somewhere between them, we develop choreography.

We learn how much truth the room can tolerate.

We learn which version of ourselves receives the best response.

We learn how to translate disagreement into language power can hear.

We learn when “optional” does not actually mean optional.

We learn when to push and when to retreat.

We learn how to remain valuable when the organization changes its definition of value.

Eventually, the movements become efficient.

We no longer have to think about every step.

That is what makes choreography useful.

And that is also what makes it formative.

The system does not have to constantly enforce behavior once people have learned how to anticipate the system.

A manager does not need to tell an employee to remain available if availability has already become associated with advancement.

A leader does not need to prohibit disagreement if employees have watched disagreement become costly.

An organization does not have to demand self-sacrifice if self-sacrifice has already been coded as commitment.

The hammer can remain in the drawer.

The gold can remain visible.

The human being completes much of the work.

When the System Enters the Person

But what happens when we leave?

The salary stops.

The title disappears.

The performance review no longer comes.

The leader no longer has authority over us.

The organization cannot promote us, demote us, praise us, rate us, or fire us.

The external choreography has been interrupted.

And yet sometimes the body keeps dancing.

We still feel guilty when we are not producing.

We still interpret rest as something that must be earned.

We still anticipate evaluation when no one is evaluating us.

We still organize our desires around what sounds professionally defensible.

We still feel anxious when we cannot answer the question, “What do you do?”

We still look for evidence that we are useful.

Sometimes we leave systems before systems leave us.

I have been learning this in my own Vocational Valley.

I once thought the hardest part of leaving institutional life would be losing the structures around the work.

I did not fully understand how much of the structure had moved inside me.

There were no longer meetings filling my calendar, but my mind still understood an empty calendar as suspicious.

There was no annual review approaching, but some part of me still wanted evidence that I was performing well.

There was no corporate ladder in front of me, yet I could still feel the old instinct to locate the next rung.

This is one of the strange things about formation.

The teacher can leave the room while the lesson continues.

The Soul and the Cost of a System

I have recently found myself thinking about something I can only describe, for now, as the soul of systems.

I do not mean that corporations possess souls in the way human beings might understand themselves to possess one.

I mean something closer to character.

An interior logic.

A pattern of appetites, protections, tolerances, priorities, rewards, sacrifices, and repeated choices that tells us something about what animates a system.

Organizations are skilled at telling us who they are.

They have mission statements.

Values.

Purpose statements.

Leadership principles.

Culture decks.

Codes of conduct.

But perhaps the soul of a system becomes most visible somewhere else.

What does it protect when protection becomes expensive?

What does the organization sacrifice first?

Whose suffering can be absorbed without structural change?

Which values survive contact with financial pressure?

What happens when integrity becomes inconvenient?

Values are easiest to possess when they are inexpensive.

Character becomes more visible when there is a bill.

Perhaps systems are no different.

And perhaps one way of studying the soul of a system is to examine the adaptations people develop while living inside it.

Show me what people must become to succeed here.

Show me what they are afraid to say.

Show me what they must learn to tolerate.

Show me what everyone knows but no one can put in the meeting minutes.

And perhaps I will know something about the system that its values statement could never tell me.

For a long time, we have asked employees what they bring to organizations.

Skills.

Experience.

Education.

Commitment.

Creativity.

Leadership.

Adaptability.

Resilience.

Perhaps we should become equally interested in what organizations require human beings to spend.

Attention.

Time.

Relational energy.

Self-trust.

Imagination.

Presence with family.

Capacity to absorb contradiction.

Some organizations replenish more than they consume.

Some provide genuine community, meaningful work, development, economic stability, intellectual stimulation, dignity, friendship, purpose, and opportunities people could not have created alone.

Systems are not inherently enemies of human formation.

They are among its environments.

Which is precisely why they deserve examination.

A balance sheet can tell us what an organization spent.

It cannot tell us everything the people inside it spent to make those numbers possible.

Becoming Conscious of the Exchange

There is another side of golden handcuffs that I understand differently now.

The more successful we become inside a system, the more expensive questioning that system can become.

Years of expertise.

Professional reputation.

Lifestyle.

Status.

Relationships.

Compensation.

A carefully constructed story about who they have become.

Success accumulates assets.

It can also accumulate reasons not to interpret the choreography.

This is why I no longer think freedom can be reduced to the ability to leave.

A person can walk away from an organization and remain governed by everything it taught them.

Another person can remain inside one while becoming increasingly conscious of the exchanges they are making.

Leaving and freedom are not synonymous.

Neither are staying and captivity.

The deeper question may be whether we can recognize the economy in which we are participating while we are still participating in it.

Can I know what I am being paid without losing sight of what I am paying?

Can I receive security without making security the highest authority in my life?

Can I accept recognition without allowing recognition to define me?

Can I learn an institution’s choreography without confusing it with my identity?

Can I remain conscious of what is happening to me while I am becoming good at what the environment rewards?

Gold is beautiful.

Hammers hurt.

Most of us would prefer to move toward one and away from the other.

Systems know this because systems are built by human beings who know it too.

I do not want a life without systems.

I want to understand the systems I inhabit.

I want to know their curricula.

I want to know their economies.

I want to know what they reward, what they punish, what they overlook, what they normalize, and what they ask human beings to become in exchange for belonging.

I want to know when adaptation is helping me participate and when it is helping me disappear.

This is part of what Human Formation has come to mean to me.

We are formed through repeated participation in environments.

Families.

Religions.

Schools.

Workplaces.

Economies.

Technologies.

Relationships.

Institutions.

Systems.

Each teaches something about what kind of person can belong there.

Each can give us capacities we did not have before.

And each can ask for adaptations we may eventually mistake for ourselves.

Perhaps maturity is not refusing all adaptation. Human beings could not live together without adjusting to one another.

Perhaps maturity is becoming increasingly conscious of the exchange.

What am I receiving here?

What am I spending?

What am I learning?

What am I becoming?

And is the exchange still one I am willing to make?

I used to think the most important question about work was whether I was succeeding.

Then I began asking whether the work aligned with who I was becoming.

Now I find myself asking something larger:

What does this system require human beings to become in order for the system to remain successful?

That question changes what I see.

The gold looks different.

So does the hammer.

And somewhere between them stands a human being, learning the steps.

The question is whether she knows she is being taught.

Society tells us not to quit one job until another job is waiting.

If we leave without one, we should have enough money saved to protect ourselves from the consequences. This is practical advice. Rent still comes due. Bodies still need food. Security is not an imaginary concern.

But I have begun to question what the advice assumes.

Can we meet ourselves from a place of security?

Can we become conscious of who we are while remaining inside the structures that taught us how to disappear? What if the life we have secured depends upon our continuing to perform a self we have outgrown?

Waiting for perfect conditions to become who we are seems bizarre to me now.

Perfect conditions often require us to remain the person those conditions were built to sustain.

I would never romanticize financial instability. Precarity can consume the mental, physical, and spiritual capacity needed to imagine another life. But security has its own seductions. A dependable salary, an impressive title, and a recognizable professional identity can make estrangement feel like success.

Sometimes we do not know what our lives have been asking of us until the choreography is interrupted.

Learning the First Steps

I always knew I wanted to work in healthcare.

Initially, I wanted to become a physical therapist. Before the dream became a credential, I worked as a physical therapy assistant while completing the prerequisite courses for a physical therapy program. I was already close to the work. I could see myself in it: bodies, movement, healing, restoration.

But the academic system made admission rigid, competitive, and discriminatory. Eventually, I had to acknowledge that I was not going to be accepted into the program.

I had already learned about bodies by then.

My first job right after high school was a certified nursing assistant, a role I loathed. I watched bodies being treated inhumanely. The people in our care could be handled as tasks to complete rather than human beings to encounter. Mean nurses gave directives, and sometimes I refused them. I said no to senior leadership before I possessed any of the language we now associate with leadership

I also remember a feeling from that time with unusual clarity: I knew I was more than the role.

That knowledge was not arrogance. It was an early form of vocational consciousness. I could distinguish between the position I occupied and the person occupying it. A role could use my labor without possessing the authority to define the entirety of me.

I would eventually lose sight of that feeling as I moved upward.

The roles became larger. The work became more complex. The titles carried more authority, responsibility, and economic value. Advancement gave me external evidence that I was succeeding, but it also made it easier to confuse institutional usefulness with vocational alignment.

The choreography became more sophisticated.

But work did not teach me my first choreography. It professionalized movements I had learned much earlier.

Long before I entered an executive room, I knew how to read an atmosphere. I knew how to monitor what was happening around me, anticipate disruption, and adjust myself accordingly. Later, organizations would call these capacities leadership, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and executive presence. They would reward me for being able to sense what a room needed and become it.

I have spent a lifetime being brilliant in rooms while managing the room—visible but filtered, powerful but careful.

What looked like professional instinct often had a much older origin. Work did not create the adaptation. Work gave it a title, a salary, and an audience.

Rerouted Around Closed Gates

For years, I thought of my career as a series of pivots.

Physical therapy did not open, so I moved. The Air Force did not become possible, so I moved. After I could not enter the Air Force, I carried a private dream of perhaps becoming a military chaplain. That path eventually closed because of age restrictions, so again, I moved.

There was always a gate: admission requirements, age restrictions, institutional rules, economic realities—the conditions under which a dream would be permitted to become a profession.

Looking backward, I no longer see a woman who could not decide what she wanted to become. I see one vocation repeatedly searching for a form the world would permit it to take.

The work moved from bodies to records, from records to systems, from systems to teaching, from teaching to theology, and from theology toward human formation. But something underneath remained remarkably consistent. I was drawn to healing, meaning, learning, transformation, and the systems that either make those things possible or stand in their way.

My vocation was coherent long before my career appeared coherent.

The fragmentation belonged, at least in part, to the available pathways—not to me.

From Bodies to Records to Systems

At one point, I worked in Medical Records at one of the largest hospitals at the time. I had moved from handling bodies directly to handling the institutional documentation of bodies.

A medical record is not the body, but it becomes the authorized account of what happened to the body. It determines what can be known, coded, billed, retrieved, defended, and remembered. Long before I had language for systems thinking, I was learning how institutions translate human experience into information.

My career continued taking me farther into the infrastructure surrounding care: hospital operations, emergency medicine, education, health information, technology, implementation, revenue, and leadership. I learned to see healthcare from multiple altitudes. I could stand near the patient, inside the record, in the classroom, within operations, and eventually inside the enormous technological and financial systems that organize care from a distance.

Each institution taught me another set of movements:

How to anticipate what leadership wanted before it was spoken.

How to translate complexity for everyone else.

How to carry responsibility beyond my authority.

How to remain composed while absorbing institutional instability.

How to make broken systems function.

How to become indispensable.

I worked while attending college for each of my degrees. Nearly every role moved me into some form of leadership. At the time, that progression looked like proof that I was climbing. Now I wonder what else it was teaching me.

A career is never only a sequence of jobs. It is a formative environment. Over time, work teaches us what to do with our voices, bodies, ambitions, convictions, and need for belonging. It teaches us which parts of ourselves will be rewarded and which must be translated, concealed, or left outside the room.

Some of those movements become so well rehearsed that we mistake them for personality.

When I Became the Choreographer

There was a period in my career when I stopped merely performing the choreography and began teaching it.

I owned a job-readiness and placement organization during the early-2000s welfare-to-work initiative. The business was my way of giving back to the people and place that raised me. We partnered with the city to help single mothers find employment, reconnect with their children, and rebuild their lives.

I wrote the curriculum myself. It combined practical instruction with spiritual formation: job skills, career budgeting, self-love, discipline, and divine purpose. I wanted people to leave with more than a résumé. I wanted them to recover a relationship with their own dignity and possibility.

I believed in transformation with my whole heart.

And transformation happened. Women found livable-wage work and could provide for their children. Parents returned to their families differently. Lives changed.

But the program existed within a five-million-dollar federal grant whose definitions preceded every person who entered the room.

Before I could encounter them as human beings, the system had to recognize them as eligible participants.

I was going through a file cabinet one day and found an old agreement. Typed in stiff bureaucratic language, it outlined the “eligible participants to be served.” At the time, the document represented possibility. It meant resources, partnership, and a chance to build something our community needed.

Now I can see what else the phrase required.

People had to become legible through their deprivation. the deeper the crisis, the clearer the eligibility. Their suffering had to be documented. Their family conditions had to satisfy the criteria. Their progress had to become measurable enough to justify the dollars attached to it.

Pain became data.

Absence became a statistic.

Black motherhood became an eligibility code.

I had been given enough freedom to write the curriculum, but not enough power to redefine the architecture surrounding it. The grant, city contract, welfare policy, labor market, and theology had already determined which movements would be rewarded.

I stood between the government and the participant, between funding requirements and human complexity, between institutional compliance and personal transformation. I stood between labor market and people it had already excluded. I stood between the pulpit’s theology and the material conditions of Black life.

I was sandwiched between systems, I tell you.

I did not invent the choreography. But I had become responsible for teaching some of its steps:

How to present yourself to an employer.

How to explain the gaps.

How to demonstrate discipline.

How to translate your life into evidence of readiness.

How to become employable.

I thought I was teaching people how to become free. I did not yet fully understand that I was also teaching them how to become recognizable to systems that had already misread them.

Years later, in an essay title Paper Chains, I would write: “What I was really doing was translating freedom into the language of compliance.”

I can see now that the sentence was also about career choreography.

Becoming Legible

I recently found an old résumé and noticed that I had included my StrengthsFinder 2.0 results:

Relator. Analytical. Learner. Belief. WOO.

There is something almost tender about my decision to put those words on a résumé. I was trying to tell an employer who I was using language an institution had already authorized. An assessment had certified my capacity for relationship, analysis, learning, conviction, and connection. Once quantified and named, those qualities could become professionally legible.

The results were not wrong. They still describe me. But the assessment could only identify my raw material. An employer could imagine how those capacities might serve an organization. Neither could tell me what those capacities were forming together.

The system could name my strengths without knowing my vocation.

I now see the same mechanism operating across my career.

In Medical Records, bodies became documented facts.

In the welfare-to-work program, people became eligible participants and measurable outcomes.

On my résumé, a vocation became a series of titles, competencies, and certified strengths.

In each setting, something human had to be translated into institutional language before it could be recognized.

Translation is not always violence. Sometimes it creates access. The agreement brought funding. The résumé opened doors. The record allowed care to continue. The curriculum helped people find employment.

But translation always raises a question: What could not survive it?

What was omitted because there was no field for it?

What did the institution learn to recognize, and what did the human being learn to conceal?

For years, I thought I was studying different subjects: leadership, theology, race, the body, organizational life, psychology. Eventually, I understood that one question had been following me through all of them:

How do we become who we become?

I found a name capacious enough to hold the inquiry: Human Formation.

It did not feel like another professional identity. It felt like recognition—the feeling of walking into a house I somehow already knew.

My career had been one of its classrooms.

The Vocational Valley

I used to think unemployment was the opposite of vocation.

I do not anymore.

There is a landscape between the career one has built and the vocation one cannot yet fully inhabit. I call it the Vocational Valley. It is the place where an old identity no longer fits but the emerging one has not yet become economically recognizable. It is where transformation is easily mistaken for failure.

The valley removed the structures that one told me who I was. There was no title large enough to hide inside. No organizational urgency to organize my days. No salary to assure me that my abilities still had value. No institution regularly reflecting an identity back to me.

The insecurity was real.

So was the encounter.

Each departure removed a structure I had unconsciously mistaken for myself.

Healthcare taught me to see systems.
Leadership taught me to see adaptation.
Unemployment taught me to see the identities I had built around productivity.

Without the old choreography, I could begin to notice the dancer.

This is why I question the near-sacred cultural instruction never to leave until the next thing is secured. Again, I understand the practical wisdom. But I also know that the next job can become a bridge carrying us directly from one performance into another. We can preserve financial continuity while never interrupting the conditions that keep us estranged from ourselves.

Not everyone must quit. Not everyone can. Leaving is not inherently liberating, and staying is not inherently cowardly. But each of us may eventually have to ask whether our security is supporting our becoming or financing our disappearance.

Some knowledge arrives only after the music stops.

Becoming Conscious of the Dance

I have spent much of my working life learning choreography.

Every institution had its own timing, posture, gestures, and rules. I learned when to speak, what to conceal, how to demonstrate competence, how to make myself useful, and how to remain in rhythm with systems that were not always in rhythm with human beings.

For years, I called that adaptability.

I called it leadership.

I called it professional success.

Some of it was all of those things. Adaptation helped me survive. Leadership allowed me to protect people, influence decisions, and build what did not exist. My business changed lives. My career developed genuine capacities that still belong to me.

This is not a confession that everything I did was false. It is an examination of the conditions under which my good work became possible—and of what those conditions asked me and others to become.

Not every movement I mastered was mine.

That is the work of vocational formation as I now understand it: not merely choosing a new occupation, identifying a passion, or locating the correct title. It is becoming conscious of what our work has trained us to do with ourselves—and what we may have been enlisted to train others to do with themselves.

Which movements protected me?

Which ones diminished me?

Which rewarded me for abandoning myself?

Which did I pass on because I once believed they were the steps to freedom?

Which still belong to me?

Career choreography is not about pretending that we can design a life free from constraint. Race, gender, class, caregiving, age, health, geography, and institutional access all shape which movements are available to us. I know what it is to encounter a closed gate. I also know what it is to build a door, walk through it, and later discover that the larger structure had followed me inside.

Perhaps freedom is not the absence of choreography. Perhaps it is the movement from unconscious performance to conscious participation.

And perhaps vocational formation begins when we stop outsourcing authority for our becoming to institutions capable only of evaluating our performance.

Organizations can train us, assess us, promote us, compensate us, and give our capacities somewhere to operate. They cannot perform our transformation for us.

Transformation cannot be outsourced.

I once thought my career was the story of how I kept moving upward.

Now I think it may be the story of how something within me kept moving through—closed gates, pivots, titles, institutions, entrepreneurship, success, complicity, awakening, and eventually rupture.

My work taught me how to read systems.

The valley taught me how to read myself.

I am still learning the difference between the life I adapted to and the life I was formed to live.

But at least now, when the music begins, I know to ask who chose it.

And before I teach anyone else the steps, I know to ask where they lead.

What happens when systems of recognition begin participating in human formation?

I have been thinking about algorithms differently lately. Most conversations about algorithms seem to begin with what they are doing to us.

What are they showing us?

What are they hiding?

What are they collecting?

What are they predicting?

What are they recommending?

Those are important questions.

But I am becoming interested in another one.

Who are we becoming for them?

Because human beings do something remarkably well.

We adapt.

We learn environments.

We study consequences.

We notice what gets rewarded and what gets ignored.

We figure out what gets us invited back into the room.

And increasingly, the room has an algorithm in it.

We Learn What the System Likes

Anyone who spends enough time on a social platform eventually develops theories about what “works.”

Post at this time.

Don’t post at that time.

Use a photograph.

Don’t use a link.

Make the first sentence short.

Ask a question.

Use keywords.

Don’t use too many hashtags.

Write for engagement.

Some of this is simply communication strategy. Writers have always considered audiences. Editors have always considered readers. Businesses have always studied markets.

But something changes when the audience we are anticipating is not entirely human.

Before another human being encounters what we have made, a system may participate in determining whether they encounter it at all.

So we begin learning the gatekeeper.

We study what travels.

We watch impressions.

We examine engagement.

We compare one post with another.

And eventually a subtle question can enter the creative process:

What does the system want from me?

That question interests me.

Not because asking it makes someone shallow.

Because asking it repeatedly may be formative.

When Measurement Becomes Instruction

Numbers do more than describe.

Sometimes they teach.

A post receives 300 impressions.

Another receives 30,000.

One essay attracts subscribers.

Another seems to disappear.

One résumé gets through an automated screening process.

Another does not.

One employee is repeatedly classified as “high potential.”

Another keeps receiving feedback about executive presence.

The measurements appear to tell us what happened.

But human beings are meaning-making creatures.

So measurement rarely remains measurement.

We interpret it.

And then we adapt.

What gets measured can become instruction.

Do more of this.

Less of that.

Say it this way.

Shorten this.

Make yourself more searchable.

More clickable.

More discoverable.

More employable.

More promotable.

More recommendable.

More legible.

Perhaps that last word is the one I am most interested in.

Legible.

The Algorithm Has a Tempo

Something else happens when measurement becomes continuous.

We begin waiting for the measurement.

While writing this essay, I watched one of my own comments unexpectedly begin traveling through LinkedIn.

The impressions climbed.

Reactions accumulated.

People visited my profile. Some went from the comment to another piece I had written. Someone encountered the idea and carried it into a post of their own.

And the system kept reporting the movement back to me.

Another reaction.

Another profile view.

Another follower.

Another hundred impressions.

Nothing instructed me to keep checking.

The system didn’t have to.

I had learned that there might be something new to see.

That experience made me wonder whether algorithms form us not only through what they recommend or reward, but through the tempo of attention we develop around them.

Feedback-intensive environments create conditions in which something may always have changed.

Another message.

Another metric.

Another ranking.

Another opportunity.

Another response.

The feedback may be intermittent.

The possibility of feedback is continuous.

And anticipation can begin doing work that instruction no longer needs to do.

We learn vigilance.

We monitor.

We return.

We check.

We become increasingly available for interruption.

Perhaps that distinction matters.

Because “distraction” easily becomes another individual deficiency to correct.

Develop better focus.

Turn off your notifications.

Practice discipline.

But what kind of environment continually produces conditions in which human attention must defend itself?

A person can appear extraordinarily engaged with a system while simultaneously being organized toward depletion.

Engagement and exhaustion can coexist.

So perhaps algorithms form us not only by teaching us what deserves our attention.

They may teach our attention to remain perpetually interruptible.

Becoming Machine-Legible

Human beings have always learned how to become legible to other human beings.

Families have expectations.

Schools have rubrics.

Religions have doctrines.

Workplaces have competencies.

Cultures have norms.

Communities have codes of belonging.

We learn what versions of ourselves can be understood, rewarded, tolerated or rejected within particular environments.

But algorithmic systems introduce another kind of reader.

And increasingly, we know we are being read.

A résumé may not be written only for a recruiter.

A social post may not be written only for another person.

Performance feedback may be summarized by artificial intelligence.

Workplace communication may become searchable organizational data.

Our clicks become signals.

Our pauses become signals.

Our purchases become signals.

Our searches become signals.

Our words become signals.

Pieces of human behavior become data from which systems attempt to infer something about us.

And once we know that, something fascinating happens.

We begin producing ourselves with the reader in mind.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Have to Tell Us What to Become

Formation does not always require someone standing over us issuing instructions.

Environments form through consequences.

A child learns what happens when she speaks.

An employee learns what happens when he disagrees.

A congregation learns which questions are welcomed.

A workplace learns which mistakes are survivable.

A creator learns what receives attention.

Eventually, nobody has to announce the rule.

The environment has taught it.

An algorithm doesn’t have to tell us:

Become more provocative.

Become easier to categorize.

Become more predictable.

Become more agreeable.

Become more extreme.

Become more productive.

Become more visible.

It may only have to consistently reward certain behaviors and make others harder to see.

Human beings are quite capable of completing the curriculum ourselves.

But We Are Not the Only Ones Receiving Access

There is another side to this that I think we examine less often.

While we are learning how to become visible to algorithms, algorithms are also participating in deciding what becomes visible to us.

Which writer.

Which expert.

Which interpretation.

Which framework.

Which story.

Which voice.

Which product.

Which idea.

Which explanation of the world.

We tend to talk about this as recommendation.

But recommendation creates access.

Sometimes an algorithm introduces us to an idea, and the idea becomes a doorway to the person behind it.

And access has formative consequences.

Because repeated exposure does something.

We become familiar with particular voices.

Familiarity can become credibility.

Credibility can become authority.

And authority can begin to look remarkably like evidence of formation.

But those things are not synonymous.

Access is not formation.

A person can be afforded extraordinary access to millions of human beings without that access telling us very much about the depth, maturity, wisdom or formative consequence of what they are offering.

Distribution tells us something has traveled.

It does not tell us whether what traveled deserved authority.

When Visibility Begins to Look Like Authority

This distinction becomes particularly important in intellectual life.

We live in an environment in which visibility itself can create a kind of credential.

Millions of followers.

A bestselling book.

A viral talk.

Repeated podcast appearances.

Corporate invitations.

Search prominence.

Algorithmic recommendation.

Eventually a person’s ideas become so familiar that we stop asking why this person became one of the people through whom we understand the subject.

The sequence can happen almost invisibly:

Visibility becomes familiarity.

Familiarity becomes credibility.

Credibility becomes authority.

But there is a missing question.

Who granted the access?

Not in the conspiratorial sense.

In the infrastructural one.

What systems of publishing, media, institutional endorsement, search, recommendation, professional networks and algorithmic distribution made this voice repeatedly available?

And what voices were not made similarly available?

Algorithms do not have to tell us whom to trust.

Sometimes they only have to keep introducing us to the same people.

Which Ideas Travel?

Then there is the question underneath the question.

It is not only who gets distributed.

It is what kinds of ideas travel well through systems.

I have become increasingly interested in the enormous market for ideas that ask human beings to change themselves.

Be courageous.

Become resilient.

Communicate more clearly.

Practice vulnerability.

Develop emotional intelligence.

Bring your authentic self.

Have the difficult conversation.

Learn to belong.

Many of these ideas can be useful. Some may be transformative.

But notice where the developmental assignment often lands.

On the person.

The employee becomes more courageous.

The worker becomes more resilient.

The leader becomes more vulnerable.

The individual learns to communicate better.

The human being develops greater capacity to function inside the environment.

But what if the environment itself requires examination?

What if people are silent because candor has consequences?

What if resilience is being prescribed inside conditions that should not require so much of it?

What if someone has already learned to communicate clearly, but the organization has learned to punish what is said?

What if “belonging” requires adaptation disproportionately from the person with the least power?

Individual formation matters.

But individual formation can become a substitute for systemic examination.

A system can become extraordinarily fluent in the language of human development without changing the conditions that make the development necessary.

That possibility should interest us.

Where Does the Developmental Assignment Land?

Perhaps this is one way to examine ideas about human development more carefully.

Whenever we encounter an intervention intended to improve human behavior, we might ask:

Where has the developmental assignment been placed?

On the individual?

The leader?

The relationship?

The institution?

The system?

The technology?

The culture?

And perhaps another question:

Who has been exempted from development?

Employee engagement declines.

The employee needs greater motivation.

People hesitate to speak.

The employee needs more courage.

Workers are exhausted.

The employee needs greater resilience.

Communication deteriorates.

The employee needs better communication skills.

Sometimes those conclusions may be appropriate.

But they should not be automatic.

Because human behavior can also be information about the environment in which it occurs.

Disengagement may not always mean that someone needs to become more engaged.

Silence may not always indicate a communication deficit.

Exhaustion may not always indicate poor boundaries.

Sometimes adaptation tells us something about what people have learned they must do to remain inside a system.

The developmental question therefore cannot only be:

How should this person change?

It must also be:

What, if anything, is this environment being required to become?

I don’t yet know whether ideas that are compatible with existing systems reliably travel farther.

But I think the question is worth asking.

Some ideas promise transformation without requiring much redistribution of power. They teach people how to function more effectively inside organizations without asking whether those organizations should continue functioning as they do.

They make us better communicators.

Better leaders.

Better employees.

Better managers.

Better at conflict.

Better at endurance.

Better at navigating difficult environments.

All potentially worthwhile.

But there is another category of question:

Why does this environment require so much navigation in the first place?

What happens when someone speaks clearly here?

Who absorbs the cost of organizational dysfunction?

Whose adaptation is being called development?

Who is being asked to become more resilient so that something else does not have to become less harmful?

Who is being taught how to survive a structure that has not been asked to examine itself?

And perhaps most importantly:

What kinds of ideas are systems most willing to amplify about changing human beings—and which ideas would require the systems themselves to change?

That is an algorithmic question too.

Because systems of distribution don’t merely determine what becomes visible.

They may participate in determining which forms of transformation become culturally imaginable.

When the Metric Becomes a Mirror

While algorithms help determine who and what we encounter, their measurements begin speaking back to us.

A metric can begin as information about our interaction with a system and quietly become information we believe about ourselves.

Low distribution becomes:

My work isn’t valuable.

A rejected application becomes:

I am not competitive.

Low engagement becomes:

People aren’t interested in what I have to say.

A performance classification becomes:

I am not leadership material.

The movement is subtle.

Measurement becomes interpretation.

Interpretation becomes identity.

But those are not the same thing.

A metric can tell us something without being permitted to tell us everything.

If one piece of my writing travels farther than another, that is information.

Under these conditions, this thought traveled.

But notice how quickly information can become instruction.

Write more of this.

People want this from you.

This is what you’re good at.

This is who you should become.

The algorithm did not necessarily say any of those things.

I did.

That distinction matters.

A metric may tell us something real about what a particular system recognized under particular conditions.

It cannot tell us everything about the human being standing outside the measurement.

An algorithm may recognize patterns in our behavior.

That does not mean it knows us.

Recognition by a system is not the same thing as being known.

And access through a system is not the same thing as having been formed for the authority that access can create.

Performance Becomes Performance

I recently wrote about performance reviews and what happens when human perception acquires institutional authority.

Perception becomes documentation.

Documentation becomes evaluation.

Evaluation can become compensation, opportunity, reputation and access.

Artificial intelligence complicates this because human perception can become data, data can enter a model, and the model’s interpretation can return carrying the appearance of computational authority.

But what happens when the person being evaluated learns how the system works?

We adapt.

Applicants learn how to write for automated screening systems.

Creators learn what platforms distribute.

Employees learn which forms of work are easiest for automated systems to recognize.

Writers learn what gets clicked.

Professionals learn which words produce visibility.

The system does not merely evaluate behavior.

The existence of the evaluation can begin producing behavior.

Eventually, performance becomes performance.

We are no longer simply doing the work.

We may also be learning how to perform the work in ways the system can recognize.

Eventually, we may no longer need the system to evaluate us in real time.

We can begin evaluating ourselves from the imagined position of the system.

Will this travel?

Will this résumé pass?

Will this language register?

Will this work count?

Will this be recognized?

The evaluator enters the model.

And eventually, the model may enter the person being evaluated.

We begin carrying the anticipated judgment of the system inside our own decision-making.

At that point, algorithmic formation has moved beyond recommendation.

The gatekeeper has become partially internal.

The Formation Loop

And now we find ourselves inside a strange loop.

Human beings build systems.

Systems classify human behavior.

Humans learn what the systems recognize.

Humans adapt.

Their adapted behavior produces new data.

That data returns to the system.

The system continues sorting, recommending, ranking and rewarding.

Meanwhile, it is also determining which voices those humans encounter, which ideas become familiar and which forms of authority become visible.

So who is forming whom?

Increasingly, perhaps:

both.

We form systems according to what we value.

Then we live inside systems that teach those values back to us.

Reward becomes information.

Information becomes anticipation.

Anticipation becomes self-monitoring.

Self-monitoring becomes adaptation.

Adaptation becomes habit.

And habit participates in formation.

Eventually, what the system once had to recognize externally, we begin monitoring internally.

We may even forget which desires were ours and which ones we learned by watching what the system rewarded.

What Should Remain Illegible?

I don’t think the answer is to refuse algorithms.

Nor do I think every adaptation to a system represents some loss of self.

Human beings have always adjusted our communication to context. Technology can connect us with people, ideas, opportunities and knowledge we might never otherwise encounter.

I am experiencing some of that possibility while writing this.

An algorithm can create an introduction.

It can help an idea travel beyond the people who already know the person who produced it.

It can create access that might otherwise never have existed.

That matters too.

The question is not whether systems of recognition are simply good or bad.

The more interesting question is whether we can remain conscious of what is happening inside us while we participate.

Can I use the metric without allowing the metric to become my mirror?

Can I become legible enough to participate without confusing legibility with identity?

Can I receive information about what travels without allowing distribution to determine what deserves to be said?

Can I encounter someone repeatedly without confusing their visibility with wisdom?

Can I recognize when I am being asked to develop myself around something that should also be required to develop?

Can I receive the access a system gives me without mistaking that access for evidence of my formation?

Can I appreciate being amplified without allowing amplification to become the measure of what deserves to be said?

And perhaps the question underneath all of them is this:

Can I learn how a system works without allowing its preferences to become my desires?

Because maybe the most consequential power of an algorithm is not that it can predict what we want.

Maybe it is that, over time, what it rewards can participate in teaching us what to want.

We have spent considerable time asking what artificial intelligence will become.

I want to turn the question around.

As algorithms increasingly participate in what we see, whom we encounter, what receives authority, what gets measured, what gets rewarded, how we direct our attention, what we learn to anticipate and what becomes visible:

Who are we becoming for the algorithms?

And how will we know when we have begun becoming someone we never consciously chose to be?

I hated performance review season.

Not because I was afraid of being evaluated. I had spent most of my life being evaluated. School prepared me extraordinarily well for that.

I knew how to perform.

I knew how to achieve.

I knew how to produce evidence.

I knew how to sit across from someone while they told me how well I had done.

What I hated about performance reviews was that I was never entirely certain what was being reviewed.

My work?

My leadership?

My results?

Or someone’s experience of me?

Over the years, an email could become evidence.

My tone could become evidence.

Once, changing my shoes in front of a client before leaving for the airport became evidence.

I remember thinking:

Are we seriously talking about this?

Apparently, we were.

These were not always patterns of behavior. Sometimes they were singular moments retrieved from months of work and placed on the table as though they revealed something consequential about my professional character.

And somewhere between what I produced and what another person perceived, the organization had created a system capable of turning interpretation into record.

And records have power.

When Perception Becomes Documentation

There is a peculiar alchemy that occurs inside organizations.

A person has an experience of you.

That email felt abrupt.

Her tone seemed inappropriate.

She can be intimidating.

She didn’t seem collaborative.

She needs to work on executive presence.

On their own, these are perceptions.

Sometimes they contain useful information. Human beings affect one another. Communication matters. Behavior matters. How we exercise authority matters.

But then the perception enters an institutional system.

It is documented.

Discussed.

Rated.

Calibrated.

Placed into a performance review.

Suddenly something subjective has acquired administrative authority.

Perception becomes documentation.

Documentation becomes evaluation.

Evaluation can become compensation.

Promotion.

Opportunity.

Reputation.

A performance improvement plan.

A designation of whether someone is considered leadership material.

A decision about who gets invited into the next room.

The perception has traveled.

And with every step, its origin can become harder to see.

What began as someone experienced me this way can eventually appear in an organizational record as this is who I am.

That transformation should trouble us more than it does.

Who Gets to Evaluate Another Human Being?

I have been thinking a great deal lately about access.

What qualifies us for sustained access to another human being?

We ask this question imperfectly in professions. Physicians need licenses. Therapists require training. Teachers receive credentials. Organizations establish qualifications for managers.

But there is another kind of access we talk about far less.

Evaluative access.

Who gets to evaluate another human being?

And what qualifies them to do it?

A promotion?

A title?

Tenure?

A box on an organizational chart?

We routinely give managers the authority to evaluate other people’s performance, behavior, potential and sometimes what appears dangerously close to personality.

Nothing magical happens to a person’s formation when they acquire direct reports.

Their biases do not disappear.

Their insecurities do not disappear.

Their cultural conditioning does not disappear.

Their need for control does not disappear.

Their understanding of professionalism did not suddenly become objective.

Their relationship with power did not become mature simply because the organization gave them more of it.

The evaluator enters the evaluation too.

We just rarely put their name in that box.

The Myth of the Objective Form

Performance-management systems give all of this the appearance of neutrality.

There are competencies.

Ratings.

Goals.

Behaviors.

Values.

Calibration meetings.

Drop-down menus.

Sometimes there are numbers.

Nothing makes subjectivity look official quite like giving it a number.

But the form cannot make the evaluator neutral.

A human being is still sitting on the other side of it.

And that human being brings an entire formation history into the room.

What does she consider respectful?

What does he consider aggressive?

What does she hear as confidence?

Who gets interpreted as difficult?

What does leadership look like to him?

What does professionalism sound like to her?

Whose emotional expression feels appropriate?

Whose directness is admired?

Whose directness needs to be “worked on”?

Who is allowed to be angry?

Who gets described as passionate?

Who receives feedback about results?

And who receives feedback about themselves?

The form cannot answer those questions for us.

But the answers can determine careers.

When “Tone” Becomes a Performance Metric

I have received feedback about my tone.

Many women have.

Black women, however, know that word can carry additional freight.

Tone can be remarkably difficult to defend yourself against because tone has no organizational unit of measurement.

There is no tone meter.

No standardized instrument gets passed across the conference table.

According to our calibrated Tone Assessment Device, you registered a 7.3.

If only.

Instead, tone exists largely in interpretation.

That does not make it meaningless. We can absolutely communicate in ways that are dismissive, cruel, condescending or unnecessarily harsh.

But once subjective behavioral language becomes consequential to someone’s employment, we should become intensely curious about whose subjectivity is being institutionalized.

Words like:

professionalism.

executive presence.

attitude.

fit.

approachability.

communication style.

collaboration.

These terms can describe real organizational competencies.

They can also become containers large enough to hold cultural preference, discomfort, gender expectations, racial bias and someone’s personal feelings about another human being.

The question is not whether interpersonal behavior should ever be evaluated.

Of course it should.

The question is:

Who defines the norm from which everybody else’s behavior is being measured?

Race Was Already in the Room

Most of the people who evaluated me throughout my professional career were white women.

I am a Black woman.

That does not mean every criticism I received was racist.

It would be intellectually dishonest for me to claim that, and I don’t need to.

Race does not have to explain every interaction for race to be present in the architecture through which interactions are interpreted.

I remember a white woman who had recently joined the organization as my new leader. She scheduled introductory one-on-ones with each of the leaders who would report up to her. During our first conversation—our very first introduction to one another—she told me that her father was “the biggest racist alive.”

I remember sitting there wondering what I was supposed to do with that information.

We had no relational history. She knew almost nothing about me beyond what was contained in my professional profile and what she could see sitting across from her. Yet somehow, in the opening moments of a new relationship between a white leader and a Black woman who would report into her organization, racism had entered the room.

She had introduced it.

What stayed with me was the strangeness of having to receive it.

What exactly was I supposed to do with that information?

Comfort her?

Understand her?

Distinguish her from him?

Assure her that I did not think she was racist?

Ignore it and continue with our conversation?

Perhaps she intended the disclosure as honesty. Perhaps she believed she was demonstrating awareness. I cannot know what motivated her to tell me.

And that isn’t really the point.

Power was already in the room.

Values Season

Then there were the organizational values.

I loathed those too.

Not values themselves.

The theater around them.

Organizations would announce some polished collection of words:

Integrity.

Respect.

Accountability.

Collaboration.

Excellence.

Then performance-review season arrived and employees were expected to demonstrate how we had embodied them.

We would write examples.

Our leaders would review them.

And sometimes the leader would effectively certify that, yes, the employee had demonstrated the organization’s values.

I found the entire arrangement maddening.

Because I would look at leaders responsible for evaluating employees against those values and think:

Who is evaluating whether you embody them?

I wasn’t objecting to accountability.

I was objecting to its direction of travel.

Because an organizational value becomes something very different when it primarily travels downward.

Does Accountability Travel Upward?

That question has stayed with me:

Does accountability travel upward?

If an entry-level employee violates the organization’s stated values, what happens?

If a manager does?

A director?

A vice president?

An executive?

At what altitude does accountability begin experiencing turbulence?

Because if values primarily regulate the behavior of people beneath power while those possessing greater power can violate them with fewer consequences, perhaps we are not looking at organizational values at all.

Perhaps we are looking at behavioral requirements for the governed.

That is different.

And it makes me wonder whether we have been asking the wrong question about organizational values.

We often ask:

Do leaders model the values?

That’s worth asking.

But I want to go further.

What does the system produce?

If an organization claims dignity, what happens to human dignity inside it?

If it claims respect, what happens when someone with little positional authority disagrees with someone who has a great deal of it?

If it claims integrity, what happens when telling the truth threatens someone powerful?

If it claims inclusion, who is expected to adapt in order to belong?

If it claims accountability, can accountability climb the organizational chart?

If it claims psychological safety, what happens to the person who says the thing nobody wants documented?

If it claims repair, what happens after the organization causes harm?

These questions tell me considerably more than a values statement.

What Does It Cost You to Be Who You Say You Are?

Perhaps values become most visible when they become expensive.

Integrity is easy when telling the truth costs nothing.

Accountability is easy when the accountable person has little power.

Respect is easy when nobody is challenging us.

Inclusion is easy when including someone requires no redistribution of authority.

Dignity is easy when honoring it does not interfere with productivity, profit or hierarchy.

Repair is easy when acknowledgment requires no institutional admission of wrongdoing.

What happens when being who you say you are costs you something?

That may tell us more about the character of an institution than the language hanging in its lobby.

Because organizations, like people, can become fluent in moral language without becoming what their language describes.

We already know this in other areas of human life.

Knowing is not doing.

Believing is not becoming.

And perhaps organizationally:

Declaring is not embodying.

The Character of a System

I have spent years thinking about the character of leaders.

I am becoming increasingly interested in the character of systems.

Not because systems possess personalities in the same way human beings do.

But systems develop patterns.

They distribute power.

They reward certain behaviors.

They tolerate others.

They establish who gets believed.

They determine whose discomfort becomes actionable.

They decide what gets documented and what disappears.

They create consequences.

And eventually those patterns create an environment another human being has to inhabit.

Perhaps, then, the character of an organization cannot be adequately assessed by what it says about itself.

Perhaps we should ask:

What is it like to be a human being inside it?

Who becomes smaller?

Who becomes quieter?

Who learns to monitor their tone?

Who discovers that disagreement is expensive?

Who gets to make mistakes?

Who is given the benefit of context?

Who receives developmental feedback?

Who receives character judgments?

Who must provide evidence?

Who gets believed without it?

Who is protected?

Who is exposed?

Who gets another chance?

And whose one email becomes a story about who they are?

Those are not merely HR questions.

They are formation questions.

Because every system teaches.

Every system communicates something about what kind of human being can survive inside it.

When Human Perception Acquires Institutional Power

With distance, I understand my frustration with performance reviews differently now.

I thought I hated performance reviews.

Maybe what I hated was something underneath them.

I hated watching human perception masquerade as institutional objectivity.

I hated watching isolated moments become evidence of character.

I hated watching values travel downward more efficiently than accountability traveled upward.

I hated the possibility that someone’s discomfort with another human being could acquire administrative authority simply because the uncomfortable person possessed more organizational power.

And I especially hated systems that required employees to attest to values the system itself had not demonstrated the courage to embody.

None of this means evaluation is unnecessary.

Human beings need feedback.

Poor performance must be addressed.

Harmful behavior should have consequences.

Leadership requires accountability.

But perhaps the existence of evaluation creates an obligation we have not taken seriously enough?

The person doing the evaluating must also be examined.

Not merely for whether they completed the review on time.

Not merely for whether they followed HR procedure.

But for their formation for the power they have been given.

Can they distinguish discomfort from misconduct.

Difference from deficiency?

A pattern from an incident?

Impact from intention without pretending either tells the whole story?

Can they recognize when their own formation has entered the room?

Can they hold authority without converting preference into standard?

Can they receive disagreement without experiencing it as subordination?

Can they evaluate another person’s work without assuming their own perception is synonymous with truth?

Because the moment we give one human being the authority to document another, we have created access.

And access is never neutral.

It carries formative responsibility.

When the Evaluator Enters the Model

Artificial intelligence complicates this further.

As AI becomes more involved in performance management—summarizing feedback, identifying patterns, generating review language and interpreting workplace data—we may be tempted to believe that adding technology creates greater objectivity.

Perhaps sometimes it will.

But I am interested in another possibility.

What if AI does not remove subjectivity from evaluation but makes subjectivity more difficult to locate?

Human perception becomes documentation.

Documentation becomes data.

Data enters a model.

The model produces an interpretation.

And the interpretation returns to the organization carrying the appearance of computational authority.

But where, exactly, did the original subjectivity disappear?

Perhaps it didn’t.

Perhaps the evaluator entered the model.

We just made them harder to see.

The experience becomes feedback.

Feedback becomes data.

Data enters a model.

The model identifies patterns, summarizes information or generates language.

That output returns to the organization carrying the appearance of technological objectivity.

But where, exactly, did the subjectivity disappear?

Perhaps it didn’t.

Perhaps it simply became harder to see.

Someone still decided what counted as leadership.

Someone defined collaboration.

Someone determined what professional communication should sound like.

Someone decided which behaviors were worth documenting.

Someone’s experience became data before the model ever encountered it.

And this introduces a possibility I think organizations should take seriously:

AI can potentially launder human subjectivity into the appearance of computational objectivity.

“She is difficult” can become multiple observations indicate opportunities to improve interpersonal effectiveness.

The language becomes cleaner.

More professional.

More institutional.

Perhaps even more credible because a system produced it.

But polished language does not necessarily mean the underlying judgment became more objective.

The evaluator may have entered the model.

We just made them even harder to see.

Perhaps the question I have been asking about individuals must now be asked of the institutions that authorize them:

What qualifies a system for this much access to a human life?

And perhaps the character of that system is not revealed by the values it asks employees to sign off on.

Perhaps its character is revealed by what happens when those employees ask the system to live by them too.

Being unable to see very far is not the same thing as being lost.

I once thought about the Dark Night of the Soul as though it were a singular passage.

Until I kept having them.

My understanding began with the Dark Night as an event.

Something happens. Life ruptures. Certainty disappears. A relationship ends. A belief collapses. Something we relied upon for orientation can no longer tell us where we are.

And because I understood darkness as an event, I understood emergence as an ending.

I made it through.

There is something comforting about that construction.

Darkness has borders.

You enter.

You endure.

You learn.

You emerge.

The night ends.

Except another one came.

And then another.

They were not identical. They were not always born from suffering. They did not always arrive accompanied by some dramatic external collapse.

Some arrived so quietly that I did not recognize them as darkness at first.

I began to understand that a Dark Night was not simply an event in my life.

Darkness could also accompany formation.

There are times when something is dying.

And there are times when something is becoming.

Both can make it difficult to see.

And perhaps that is what I had misunderstood about darkness.

I thought darkness meant something had gone wrong.

I had not considered that sometimes we cannot see because the life emerging before us exceeds the vision by which we have previously navigated.

Sometimes the street lights go out because the road has ended.

Sometimes we have simply walked beyond where they were installed.

Street Lights

Street lights are peculiar things.

We hardly notice them until they aren’t there.

They do not eliminate darkness. They simply make darkness navigable.

They illuminate enough of the road for us to locate ourselves. We can see where the pavement bends. We can anticipate what we are approaching. We can recognize an intersection. We can avoid what might harm us.

Street lights do not give us daylight.

They give us orientation.

And I have spent much of my life learning how to orient myself.

Before I knew how to read books, I knew something about reading rooms.

Faces.

Silence.

Tone.

Atmospheres.

I learned to notice what changed when someone entered a room. I learned to anticipate disappointment. I learned responsibility. Achievement. Endurance. I learned how to prepare myself for what might hurt before it arrived.

These were their own kinds of street lights.

They did not always take me where I wanted to go.

But they helped me know where I was.

There is comfort in knowing where you are, even when you do not particularly like the location.

I am discovering how much of what we call safety may sometimes be familiarity.

We know the road.

We know where the potholes are.

We know which intersections require caution.

We know which parts of ourselves are useful there.

And sometimes we become so proficient at navigating a particular landscape that we mistake our proficiency for belonging.

Then life changes.

Or we change.

And suddenly the old street lights no longer illuminate the road we are on.

Different Nights Extinguish Different Lights

Experience with darkness does not necessarily give us night vision.

I can know that I survived another night and still be unable to see in this one.

Because this is not that night.

One darkness may disturb what I believe.

Another may disturb who I believe myself to be.

One may arrive through loss.

Another through love.

One may accompany an ending.

Another, strangely enough, may accompany a beginning.

There may be darkness when something is taken from us.

And there may also be darkness when something new is emerging that our existing eyes do not yet know how to recognize.

Not every Dark Night is an encounter with death. Some are encounters with becoming.

That is why I no longer think having another Dark Night necessarily means I failed to learn whatever the previous one had to teach me.

Life is not a course we repeat because we received an unsatisfactory grade.

The road is different.

The questions are different.

Different nights extinguish different lights.

Perhaps maturity is not finally reaching some permanently illuminated state.

Perhaps it is developing a different relationship with ourselves when illumination disappears.

When the Old Lights Stop Working

My external life has been unusually quiet lately.

My internal life has not.

Inside, I feel as though rooms are being emptied. Walls are being moved. Old wiring is being examined.

Things I once understood about myself are being reconsidered.

Things I once called personality I now recognize, at least in part, as adaptation.

Things I called strength sometimes contained endurance.

Things I called goodness sometimes contained self-abandonment.

Things I called patience occasionally required me to tolerate what should have been examined.

And some things I thought needed to be healed may simply be parts of myself I had not learned how to welcome.

Desire.

Agency.

Anger.

Rest.

Preference.

The ability to disappoint someone without immediately assuming I have harmed them.

The ability to say, I want this, without placing my desire on the witness stand.

It is strange to undergo so much movement internally while the exterior remains quiet.

There are no balloons for this kind of becoming.

No commencement ceremony.

No degree arrives in the mail.

Sometimes nobody else even knows something has changed.

You simply wake up one morning and realize that a way of living that once made perfect sense to you no longer does.

And then comes the unsettling part:

The new way has not revealed itself yet.

The old life is recognizable because I have already lived it.

The new life cannot be fully recognizable because I have not made it yet.

Perhaps this is one of the Dark Nights I had not previously understood.

Not the darkness as catastrophe.

The darkness of becoming.

The Old Student Would Like a Syllabus

This is particularly inconvenient for the Old Student in me.

She would prefer a syllabus for darkness.

Learning objectives would be helpful.

A rubric would be appreciated.

At minimum, she would like to know how long the course lasts.

And if there is going to be a test, she would like adequate preparation time—although, historically, she has been known to announce the test herself.

She bypasses quizzes.

Everything is a final.

A changed facial expression?

Final.

Someone is disappointed?

Final.

Uncertainty about what comes next?

Apparently, we are being graded.

The Old Student has spent years believing there must be a correct answer to being alive.

She wants to know:

Am I doing this right?

Did I choose correctly?

What does this mean?

Where is this going?

How long will this last?

What am I supposed to learn?

When will I know that I have passed?

But darkness refuses the examination.

There is no answer key.

There isn’t even a little blue dot announcing:

YOU ARE HERE.

And perhaps that is part of the education.

Being Unable to See Is Not the Same as Being Lost

I have been considering the possibility that I have sometimes confused being unable to see very far with being lost.

They are not the same thing.

Being lost means I do not know where I am.

Darkness means I may know exactly where I am and still be unable to see what comes next.

Knowing the difference changes how I understand where I am.

Because when we cannot see what comes next, we often go searching for illumination.

A sign.

An answer.

A person who knows.

A prediction.

A plan.

A spiritual explanation.

Something that will restore our sense that the road ahead is knowable.

I understand this impulse.

I have spent much of my life learning how to anticipate.

If I could read the atmosphere, perhaps I could prepare for what was coming.

If I could understand someone well enough, perhaps I could predict their behavior.

If I performed well enough, perhaps I could secure the outcome.

If I prepared for disappointment, perhaps disappointment would hurt less.

If I emotionally rehearsed an ending before it arrived, perhaps loss would never catch me unprepared.

Anticipation became its own form of illumination.

But anticipation has limits.

Sometimes what looks like preparation is simply suffering in advance.

Sometimes we begin grieving what is still here.

Sometimes we leave emotionally before anything has actually left us.

Sometimes our desperate need to see the road ahead prevents us from inhabiting the small piece of road underneath our feet.

What Darkness Does to the Senses

When we cannot see well, something interesting happens.

We listen differently.

We move differently.

We become aware of proximity.

The body becomes important.

The ground beneath us becomes important.

We stop walking as though the next fifty feet have already been guaranteed.

Perhaps there are seasons of life that ask something similar of us.

Not passivity.

Not the abandonment of discernment.

Not pretending uncertainty is beautiful when it is frightening.

But a different relationship with knowing.

I am beginning to wonder whether I have sometimes required knowledge of what comes next before granting myself permission to inhabit what is here.

Maybe I do not need to know what this season will become in order for it to be real.

Maybe I do not need to know where a relationship is going in order to experience what is here now.

Maybe I do not need the entire architecture of my next life before honoring the desires beginning to emerge within this one.

Maybe I don’t have to know who I will become before trusting the woman who is becoming.

That last one feels important.

Because perhaps there comes a point when orientation can no longer come entirely from recognizing the landscape.

Perhaps I must also learn to recognize myself.

I know her.

Even here.

Even without the street lights.

The Dark Is Not Always an Enemy

I want to be careful here.

I have no desire to romanticize darkness.

Some darkness is devastating.

Some uncertainty is exhausting.

Some losses leave us disoriented.

Some seasons do not need to be renamed blessings simply because we eventually survive them.

And I am suspicious of any spirituality that rushes into somebody else’s darkness carrying an explanation.

Everything happens for a reason.

God is preparing you.

Something better is coming.

Just trust the process.

Sometimes those statements function less like companionship and more like hastily installed street lights.

We illuminate what we are uncomfortable sitting beside

Maybe some darkness should be allowed to remain dark.

The Dark Night is not valuable because suffering is inherently sacred.

I don’t believe pain automatically makes us wise.

We can suffer and become bitter.

We can suffer and become frightened.

We can suffer and become more defended.

We can suffer and learn lessons that are not true.

Perhaps the question is not simply:

What happened to me in the darkness?

But:

What am I being formed to believe because of it?

That is a different question.

And perhaps it is one worth asking after every Dark Night.

No Street Lights

There is something humbling about admitting:

I don’t know.

I don’t know what every internal shift will eventually require externally.

I don’t know which desires will become decisions.

I don’t know which parts of my previous life will travel with me and which ones have already completed their assignment.

I don’t know exactly where this road ends.

There was a time when that sentence would have frightened me more than it does now.

I have spent much of my life mistaking anticipation for preparedness and preparedness for safety.

I learned to read what might be coming before it arrived.

Sometimes I even began grieving what was still present.

But perhaps darkness has an education of its own.

Not one education.

Not one night.

Not one passage from which we emerge permanently illuminated.

There are nights.

There are depths.

There are endings.

There are beginnings.

There are versions of ourselves we cannot see clearly because we have not become them yet.

And I am learning that being unable to see very far is not the same thing as being lost.

Some roads cannot be illuminated in advance.

Some answers cannot arrive before we have lived the questions.

Some versions of ourselves cannot be recognized before we become them.

And perhaps there are nights when the only light available is enough to see what is immediately here.

My feet.

My breath.

My own hand.

The next step.

I am still here.

Maybe that is enough light for tonight.

The Kendra Vantrice Podcast is now Human Formation with Kendra Vantrice.

We often mistake access for readiness.

This is not a departure from the work I have been doing. It is a clearer name for what the work has been becoming: an inquiry into the body, faith, leadership, systems, and the hidden architecture of who we become.

The name has changed. The conversation has deepened.

And this episode begins with a question: Who do we become when we have power?

I am grieving the thing I didn’t do because I believed what I desired and wanted didn’t align with a good girl.

—Journal, June 2024

I married a man under the Good Girl curriculum.

In fact, much of my adulthood has been lived on the Good Girl campus.

I mothered there. I married there. I practiced faith there. I pursued education there. I built a career there. I entered relationships there. I forgave there. I stayed too long there. I made consequential decisions about my life there.

For years, I didn’t know I was still enrolled.

That is one of the peculiarities of formation:
eventually the curriculum becomes so internalized that we stop recognizing it as something we learned. It begins to feel like personality. Character. Morality. Common sense. Sometimes faith.

Good girls are responsible.

Good girls are considerate.

Good girls don’t disappoint people.

Good girls are grateful.

Good girls forgive.

Good girls don’t make everything about themselves.

Good girls think about how their decisions affect everyone else.

Good girls are loyal.

Good girls don’t leave simply because they’re unhappy.

Good girls sacrifice.

Good girls endure.

Good girls are good.

I became an excellent student.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when I enrolled.

Formation rarely announces itself as curriculum while we are receiving it. There was no orientation, no syllabus placed in my hands. There were simply thousands of small lessons about goodness, belonging, approval, disappointment, femininity, sacrifice, responsibility, and love.

Some were spoken.

Many were not.

I learned by watching. By listening. By reading faces and rooms. By noticing what brought approval and what threatened connection.

Eventually, I no longer needed anyone to tell me what a Good Girl should do.

I knew.

That is how formation works. What begins outside of us can eventually acquire a voice inside of us.

The Good Girl Grows Up

The problem with Good Girl School is that there is no graduation ceremony.

The girl grows up.

The curriculum often does not.

She becomes a woman carrying childhood lessons into adult rooms where the consequences become considerably larger.

She can marry under the curriculum.

Parent under it.

Work under it.

Lead under it.

Practice religion under it.

Choose friends under it.

Remain in harmful relationships under it.

She can become accomplished, educated, respected, and extraordinarily competent without ever realizing that some of her most consequential adult decisions are still being evaluated according to an old grading system.

Achievement can change the campus scenery without changing the curriculum.

A woman can exercise authority professionally while struggling to exercise agency personally.

She can advocate fiercely for other people while continually negotiating against herself.

She can make multimillion-dollar decisions for an organization and agonize over whether choosing something she wants makes her selfish.

She can become the person everyone trusts while remaining suspicious of herself.

Chronological adulthood does not automatically graduate us from the schools that formed us.

When Desire Takes the Witness Stand

In June 2024, I wrote:

I am grieving the things I didn’t do because I believed what I desired and wanted didn’t align with being a good girl.

I understand that sentence differently now.

I was not simply grieving missed opportunities.

I was grieving the distance between desire and permission.

Somewhere in my formation, wanting became morally complicated.

There were acceptable desires.

Education was acceptable.

Achievement was acceptable.

Responsibility was acceptable.

Service was acceptable.

Making people proud was certainly acceptable.

But desire that might disappoint someone?

Desire that required choosing myself?

Desire that disrupted an existing arrangement?

Desire that made me less accessible?

Desire that could not be justified by its usefulness to somebody else?

That kind of wanting required an internal hearing.

Who will this affect?

Who might be disappointed?

Am I being selfish?

Am I ungrateful?

Shouldn’t I be satisfied?

What does a good mother do?

What does a good wife do?

What does a good Christian do?

What does a good woman do?

The Good Girl curriculum did not eliminate my desires. It taught me to cross-examine them.

And when desire survived the interrogation, I often still needed evidence that acting upon it would not make me a bad person.

This is how desire becomes disobedience without anyone ever formally declaring it so.

Goodness as a Relational Strategy

But I have discovered another layer of the curriculum.

In August 2024, I wrote a note to myself about what I understood then as an effect of childhood trauma:

Trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.

I see something in that sentence now that I could not fully articulate then.

The Good Girl did not merely believe she should be good.

She could also come to believe, somewhere beneath conscious thought:

If I am good enough, perhaps people will be good to me.

Goodness becomes more than morality.

It becomes a relational strategy.

If I am agreeable, perhaps there will be less conflict.

If I am understanding, perhaps you will understand me.

If I am loyal, perhaps you will not abandon me.

If I forgive, perhaps you will repair.

If I am patient, perhaps you will change.

If I love you well enough, perhaps you will eventually learn how to love me well.

If I am unmistakably good, perhaps you will have no reason not to be good to me.

There is something heartbreaking about that logic.

Because adulthood eventually teaches us what the Good Girl curriculum cannot:

My goodness was never a lever that could operate another person’s character.

I can be kind to someone who is cruel.

I can be loyal to someone who betrays me.

I can communicate carefully with someone committed to misunderstanding me.

I can forgive someone who refuses accountability.

I can love someone who does not know how to love me.

My maturity cannot compensate for another person’s under-formation.

My patience cannot manufacture their empathy.

My loyalty cannot create their integrity.

My forgiveness cannot produce their accountability.

My love cannot substitute for their capacity to love.

And my goodness cannot guarantee theirs.

Increasing the Dosage

But what happens when the strategy does not work?

I know what I did.

I increased the dosage.

More patience.

More understanding.

More forgiveness.

More accommodation.

More benefit of the doubt.

More explaining.

More self-examination.

More endurance.

More goodness.

The Good Girl can interpret another person’s mistreatment as feedback about her own performance.

If goodness has not produced goodness, perhaps I have not been good enough.

So she increases the dosage.

Maybe if I explain it differently.

Maybe if I don’t react.

Maybe if I become less demanding.

Maybe if I give this more time.

Maybe if I forgive again.

Maybe if I understand their childhood.

Maybe if I pray more.

Maybe if I become more mature.

Maybe if I work on myself.

Maybe if I love better.

The prescription changes slightly, but the active ingredient remains remarkably consistent:

More of me.

And I can now trace relationships in my life where I overdosed.

That is painful to write.

I continued writing new prescriptions for Good Girl behavior without adequately assessing the pain.

Pain is Information

The Good Girl can become extraordinarily skilled at symptom management.

She feels hurt and asks herself how to become more forgiving.

She feels exhausted and asks herself how to become more generous.

She feels resentment and asks herself how to improve her attitude.

She feels unseen and asks herself how to communicate more effectively.

She wants to leave and asks herself whether she has tried hard enough to stay.

Something inside her says, This hurts.

And she responds:

What do I need to work on?

Sometimes that is an excellent question.

Sometimes we do need greater maturity, better communication, more patience, more self-awareness.

But sometimes pain is diagnostic information.

Anger can contain information.

Resentment can contain information.

Exhaustion can contain information.

Disappointment can contain information.

The desire to leave can contain information.

They are not infallible instructions. But they are data worthy of assessment.

And if a woman has been formed to distrust her interior life, she may spend years medicating the signal without investigating its source.

Perhaps the better questions are:

Why does this hurt?

What exactly am I responding to?

Is this an isolated conflict or an established pattern?

Is repair occurring?

Is reciprocity present?

Am I trying to solve something that belongs to someone else?

Does this relationship require my goodness—or my disappearance?

What am I continually treating in myself instead of examining in the environment?

I became skilled at prescribing more goodness without asking whether goodness was the appropriate treatment.

When Goodness Stabilizes What Is Hurting Us

There is another uncomfortable possibility.

Sometimes increasing the dosage does not merely fail to transform a difficult relationship.

Sometimes it helps stabilize it.

If I continually absorb the consequences, another person may have less reason to confront them.

If I always forgive without requiring repair, the relationship can continue without repair.

If I continually accommodate, the system can remain unchanged.

If I repeatedly explain away harmful behavior, the person behaving harmfully may never have to explain it.

If I remain no matter what happens, remaining itself can become part of the relational architecture.

What I experience internally as:

I am trying harder to save this relationship

may function externally as:

This relationship can continue exactly as it is.

That realization is difficult.

Because goodness is supposed to help.

But mature goodness has to ask more than:

Am I responding well?

It may also need to ask:

What is my response helping to sustain?

The Good Girl Becomes Her Own Proctor

Eventually, nobody has to administer the curriculum.

The student takes over.

I have recently been thinking about an old student who apparently still lives somewhere inside me.

She wakes up announcing a test.

She bypasses quizzes.

Someone’s facial expression changes.

Test.

Someone seems disappointed.

Test.

Someone does not understand my decision.

Test.

I want something that might inconvenience another person.

Test.

I consider changing careers, moving somewhere new, becoming less available, saying no, choosing differently.

Final exam.

The old student wants to know:

What is the correct answer?

But beneath that question is often another:

Am I still good?

That may be one of the most efficient features of formation.

Eventually, the original instructors do not have to remain in the classroom.

We learn to administer the curriculum ourselves.

Who Benefits From the Good Girl Being Good?

Human Formation asks us to examine not only how individuals are formed, but what becomes possible around them because of that formation.

Who benefits from a woman who distrusts her own no?

Who benefits from her chronic availability?

Who benefits when she interprets exhaustion as generosity?

Who benefits when leaving feels like failure?

Who benefits when she responds to mistreatment by increasing her understanding?

Who benefits when forgiveness is emphasized more than repair?

Who benefits when sacrifice is celebrated without asking what is being sacrificed?

Families can benefit.

Religious communities can benefit.

Workplaces can benefit.

Markets can benefit.

Formation can become commercially useful.

A woman who has been taught to experience her own desire as selfish can be sold permission to want.

She can be sold rest.

She can be sold confidence.

She can be sold empowerment.

She can be sold a program that reassures her she can pursue something for herself while remaining a good wife, a good mother, a good employee.

The product may offer genuine value.

But the cultural architecture underneath the pitch deserves examination.

Why does female desire so often require moral reassurance in the first place?

Why must I want this so frequently be accompanied by evidence that nobody else will lose too much access to me?

Markets do not have to create our formations in order to monetize them.

They need only recognize what we have already been taught to fear.

Permission can become commercially useful when people have been formed to believe they need it.

Goodness Is Not the Problem

I am not interested in becoming a Bad Girl.

That would leave the original architecture intact.

I would still be organizing myself around someone else’s categories.

Nor am I arguing against sacrifice, generosity, loyalty, forgiveness, responsibility, service, or care.

These are beautiful human capacities.

But virtues without self-belonging can become vehicles for disappearance.

Generosity without selfhood can become erasure.

Loyalty without discernment can become captivity.

Service without desire can become performance.

Forgiveness without accountability can become permission.

Goodness without agency can become obedience to someone else’s definition of you.

Relationships do require something from us.

Love sometimes inconveniences us.

Healthy intimacy asks for compromise, generosity, patience, forgiveness, and sacrifice.

But there is a difference between surrendering some self-interest and surrendering the self.

I did not always know the difference.

The Good Girl curriculum had taught me how easily self-abandonment could dress itself in the clothing of virtue.

Endurance could look like commitment.

Silence could look like peace.

Accommodation could look like love.

Over-functioning could look like responsibility.

Remaining could look like loyalty.

Disappearing could look like sacrifice.

And because these behaviors had virtuous names, I did not always recognize their cost.

Leaving the Good Girl Campus

There is grief here.

I wrote it plainly in 2024:

I am grieving the things I didn’t do.

I understand that grief better now.

There are things I did not do.

Things I did not try.

Places I did not go.

Questions I did not ask.

Desires I cross-examined until they could no longer remember why they had come to me.

There are relationships in which I prescribed more goodness when I should have assessed the pain.

There are times when another person’s behavior became my report card.

There are moments when I interpreted someone’s disappointment as evidence of my wrongdoing.

There are ways I abandoned myself while believing I was practicing love.

I can grieve that without making a villain of the woman who did it.

She was practicing what she had learned.

She was trying to pass.

And she was very, very good at being good.

But I have been meeting another woman.

Or perhaps I have been recovering proximity to someone who was there all along.

A little girl who had preferences.

Who wanted things.

Who pouted when she didn’t get her way.

Who cared deeply about what she wore.

Who could recognize delight before she knew anything about selfhood, agency, formation, or desire.

She simply knew:

I like that.

I want that.

Perhaps becoming a whole woman does not require returning to childhood.

Perhaps it requires recovering our ability to hear ourselves without immediately convening a trial.

I still care about goodness.

But I am becoming less interested in a goodness that requires my disappearance.

I want a goodness spacious enough to contain integrity and desire.

Love and boundaries.

Generosity and self-belonging.

Commitment and discernment.

Care for others and allegiance to self.

Because allegiance to self does not mean allegiance only to self.

It means I no longer believe that loving another human being requires treason against my own humanity.

Maybe graduation from the Good Girl curriculum does not happen when we finally become rebellious enough to stop caring what anyone thinks.

Perhaps it happens when we understand that our own humanity belongs among the lives we have been taught to consider.

And perhaps it happens when another person’s behavior finally stops functioning as our report card.

My goodness cannot make another person good.

My love cannot form someone who refuses formation.

And another person’s inability to love me well is not an examination I can pass by offering more of myself.

For years, the old student kept waking up announcing another test.

I am beginning to wonder whether there was ever a test at all.

Maybe there was simply a woman trying to live.

A woman with desires.

A woman with preferences.

A woman capable of loving others without abandoning herself.

A woman who no longer needs to prove that she is good before she is permitted to choose.

In June 20024, I asked myself to reckon with everything I had not done because desire seemed incompatible with being a Good Girl.

Today, the question has changed.

It is no longer:

Am I still good if I choose myself?

It is:

What kind of goodness ever required me not to?

Perhaps the next curriculum begins there.

We credential people for roles long before we ask whether they have developed the capacity to hold another human being.

There are roles in human life that give us extraordinary access to other people.

Parent.

Spouse.

Teacher.

Pastor.

Manager.

Executive.

Physician.

Therapist.

Coach.

Mentor.

We have developed requirements for entering many of these roles.

Degrees.

Certifications.

Experience.

Technical competency.

Licensure.

Performance.

Sometimes wealth or status.

Sometimes nothing more than biology, attraction, charisma, or opportunity.

But there is another qualification we rarely know how to assess:

Has this person developed the capacity to hold another human being without making that person carry what they have refused to examine in themselves?

I think about this often.

I have said for years that very few people can wield power maturely.

I have said that possessing a particular skill set does not mean someone has the capacity to lead people.

I have never understood why we treat age as evidence of maturity. Time can produce experience. It does not guarantee development.

I have wondered why we treat the biological capacity to produce a child as though it automatically confers the emotional capacity to raise one.

I have thought similarly about marriage. Loving someone—or wanting someone—does not necessarily mean we possess the relational maturity required to be in intimate proximity to another human being.

Perhaps these have never been separate observations.

Perhaps I have been circling the same question:

What qualifies us for access to one another?

Competence Is Not Maturity

We confuse achievement with development all the time.

Someone is exceptional at her job, so we promote her into management.

Someone builds a successful company, so we assume they know how to lead.

Someone acquires theological knowledge, so we give them spiritual authority.

Someone earns an advanced degree, so we presume expertise in areas far beyond the discipline studied.

Someone reaches adulthood, falls in love and gets married.

Someone becomes pregnant and becomes a parent.

The role changes

The access expands.

The power increases.

But the human being occupying the role may not have undergone any corresponding development.

A promotion can happen on Friday.

On Monday morning, that person has authority over twelve nervous systems.

Nothing magical occurred over the weekend.

They did not suddenly become self-aware.

Their unresolved insecurity did not disappear.

Their need for validation did not evaporate.

Their inability to tolerate disagreement did not mature because Human Resources changed their title.

They simply acquired more power through which their existing formation could express itself.

That distinction matters.

Because power does not only reveal competence.

Power reveals formation.

Give an unreformed person enough authority and eventually the people around them will experience the consequences.

We Confuse Knowing for Doing

This is something I have said for years:

We do it everywhere.

We teach people about leadership and assume they can lead.

We teach people about communication and assume they know how to communicate.

We teach people the language of emotional intelligence and assume they have become emotionally intelligent.

We teach empathy.

Bias.

Psychological safety.

Attachment.

Trauma.

Conflict resolution.

Parenting.

Marriage.

Faith.

And information matters.

But knowing something does not mean we have developed the capacity to live it.

A person can learn the vocabulary of psychological safety and still punish disagreement.

A person can understand attachment theory and remain unwilling to examine what happens inside them when intimacy becomes uncomfortable.

A parent can read every book about emotionally healthy children while remaining unable to apologize to their own.

A religious leader can preach brilliantly about love while humiliating people in private.

A leader can score exceptionally well on an emotional intelligence assessment and still use power to protect an unexamined ego.

We can know the definition of empathy without practicing it.

We can understand our childhood wounds and continue reenacting them.

We can teach accountability and become defensive the moment someone holds us accountable.

We can quote love and still not know how to love.

Knowing is not doing.

And perhaps faith presents us with another version of the same problem:

We can confuse believing with becoming.

Believing love is central to your faith is not the same as becoming loving.

Believing forgiveness matters is not the same as learning repair.

Believing every person bears God’s image is not the same as treating people with dignity.

Believing God speaks to you is not the same as developing discernment.

Knowing Scripture about humility is not the same as becoming humble.

This distinction matters to me because I have spent much of my life around religious formation. And long before I possessed language for what troubled me, I could sense a contradiction.

People could become extraordinarily knowledgeable about God without necessarily becoming more capable of being with people.

They could become well-versed in Scripture, disciplined in prayer, committed to obedience, fluent in theological language—and remain underdeveloped in conflict, intimacy, accountability, repair and self-examination.

I couldn’t always name what I was seeing.

I think I can now.

A theology can teach us how to understand God without sufficiently teaching us how to become safe for one another.

That does not necessarily make the theology false.

But it should make us ask whether knowledge and belief are sufficient measures of spiritual formation.

Perhaps one of the questions we should be asking about any system of formation-religious, educational, professional or otherwise-is not simply:

What does this person know?

Or even:

What does this person believe?

But:

What kind of human being is this knowledge and belief producing?

Because believing something deeply does not guarantee that we have been transformed by it.

And perhaps even doing something occasionally is not the same as having been formed by it.

Neither is practicing what we believe selectively.

If our beliefs only become visible in our behavior toward certain people, under certain conditions or when practicing them costs us very little, we may need to ask how deeply those beliefs have actually formed us.

There have been seasons of my own life when I possessed sophisticated spiritual and psychological language for experiences I had not yet fully learned how to inhabit.

I could articulate something before I could embody it.

I knew the language.

I believed many of the ideas.

I had not yet become what the language described.

That distinction has changed the questions I ask about human development.

What Is Maturity?

I have never believed maturity automatically arrives with age.

We have all encountered people who have accumulated decades without accumulating much self-awareness.

Time can give us experience.

But experience itself does not guarantee that we have reflected upon it, integrated it, learned from it or allowed it to change us.

So what is maturity?

I find myself increasingly interested in our capacity to encounter reality without requiring another person to protect us from ourselves.

Can I be disagreed with without needing to diminish you?

Can I experience rejection without turning it into retaliation?

Can I possess authority without requiring submission to reassure me of my importance?

Can I hear feedback without immediately constructing a case for my innocence?

Can I love someone without requiring them to disappear inside my needs?

Can I parent a child without making that child responsible for repairing what happened in my own childhood?

Can I allow someone close to me to have an emotional experience that I do not control?

Can I recognize when something occurring between us belongs partly to my history rather than entirely to your behavior?

Can I discover that I was wrong without experiencing my wrongness as annihilation?

Can I repair?

Can I apologize?

Can I change?

Can I tolerate discovering something about myself that contradicts the person I believed myself to be?

These are not questions of intelligence.

They are questions of formation.

Power Requires Formation

This is why I have long believed that very few people know how to wield power maturely.

Power increases reach.

And reach increases consequence.

The more access I have to people’s livelihoods, bodies, identities, development, belonging, spirituality or emotional lives, the greater my responsibility to understand what I am carrying into those relationships.

Leadership is therefore not simply the ability to produce outcomes through other people.

Parenthood is not merely providing food, shelter and opportunity.

Marriage is not merely knowing Scripture.

Teaching is not merely knowing the subject.

Every role that grants us sustained access to another human being carries a formative responsibility.

We will affect the people entrusted to our proximity.

The question is not whether.

The question is how.

And yet we routinely grant people greater access to human beings because they have demonstrated competency in something entirely different.

You produced results, therefore you can lead people.

You know Scripture, therefore you can shepherd people.

You understand medicine, therefore you know how to encounter frightened bodies.

You have reached adulthood, therefore you are mature enough for marriage.

You can have a child, therefore you are prepared to form one.

These are extraordinary leaps.

We have confused qualifications for a role with formation for a relationship.

And human beings often pay the difference.

Wounds Have Social Lives

We often speak about wounds as though they belong exclusively to the wounded person.

They don’t

Unexamined wounds travel.

They enter marriages.

They raise children.

They manage departments.

They build companies.

They preach sermons.

They write policies.

They conduct performance reviews.

They sit on boards.

They teach classrooms.

They become organizational cultures.

A private wound can eventually acquire institutional power.

That is why personal formation is not merely personal work.

What we refuse to examine in ourselves can become an environment someone else has to survive.

This does not mean we must become perfectly healed before entering relationship with anyone.

Such a standard would make human relationship impossible.

We will always have histories.

We will always have wounds.

We will always have unfinished places.

Perhaps maturity is not the absence of wounds.

Perhaps it is developing enough relationship with our own interior lives that we can increasingly distinguish:

This belongs to me.

This belongs to you.

And this is being created between us.

Without that differentiation, we hand people emotional debts they never incurred.

Children inherit them.

Spouses absorb them.

Congregations spiritualize them.

Organizations institutionalize them.

And eventually an individual wound can become a system.

Can Formation Be Taught?

This may be the question underneath all the others for me.

How do we teach behavioral change to people who believe themselves superior?

How do we develop someone who does not believe there is anything left for them to develop?

Because learning requires some capacity to encounter the possibility:

There is something I do not know.

Superiority resists precisely that possibility.

If my identity depends upon believing that I am more intelligent, moral, competent, deserving, civilized, righteous, educated or evolved than you, then information that threatens that hierarchy is not simply new information.

It can feel like an identity threat.

And suddenly we are no longer dealing primarily with an educational problem.

We are dealing with a formation problem.

This may be one of the reasons our organizations repeatedly struggle to produce meaningful behavioral change.

We keep trying to educate people out of what they were formed into.

A workshop may be competing with decades of formation.

A leadership course may be competing with a lifetime of learning that power means control.

A seminar on bias may be competing with an entire social structure that has rewarded someone’s assumptions about superiority.

A communication course may be competing with a childhood in which vulnerability was dangerous.

A class can provide information.

But what develops the human being who receives it?

I don’t think information alone can answer that question.

Perhaps We Have Been Credentialing the Wrong Things

I am not suggesting that we create an examination determining who deserves to marry, parent, lead, teach, preach, or hold authority.

That would create its own dangerous form of power.

But I do think we should become much more suspicious of the assumption that access itself proves readiness.

Getting the position does not mean you were formed for power.

Being loved does not mean you know how to love.

Having a child does not automatically teach you how to parent.

Being brilliant does not mean you know how to teach.

Having followers does not mean you should be followed.

Being able to articulate truth does not mean you have embodied it.

Knowing does not mean doing.

Believing does not mean becoming.

Maybe development begins when we stop asking only:

Am I capable of obtaining this role?

and begin asking:

Who will experience me once I have it?

What will it be like to be my child?

What will it be like to be married to me?

What will it be like to report to me?

What will it be like to disagree with me?

What will it be like to depend upon me?

What will happen when someone disappoints me?

What happens to the people around me when I feel powerless?

Who do I become when I possess power?

Those questions change leadership.

They change parenting.

They change marriage.

They change education.

They change ministry.

They change how we think about authority itself.

Because perhaps the measure of our formation isn’t ultimately found only in what we know about ourselves.

Perhaps it isn’t even found only in what we say we believe.

Perhaps it can also be found in what it is like for another human being to encounter who we have become.

And maybe that is one of the questions we should have been asking all along.

A note for listeners:

This week, I’m doing something new with Human Formation. Access Without Formation will also be released as an audio essay later this week. If you would rather listen than read—or would like to experience the piece again through voice—it will be here soon.

I used to have a small gap between my teeth.

Not a large one. Nothing medically concerning. Just enough space between my two front teeth to add to my inadequacies as a young girl.

I was embarrassed by my teeth.

Sometimes the embarrassment determined whether I smiled. If I did smile, I was conscious of whether my teeth were showing. Something as instinctive as smiling had become something I monitored.

And at some point, I decided the gap needed to be fixed.

There is a question people sometimes ask adults about their younger years: What was your first big purchase?

The answers vary. A designer handbag. A television. A car. Something you saved for and finally had enough money to buy for yourself.

One of mine was paying a dentist to close the gap between my teeth.

There is something about that realization that stays with me now.

I had become an adult. I had dental insurance. I had access to something I had wanted for years.

And one of the ways I exercised that new adult agency was to change something about myself I had already learned to dislike.

I explained to my dentist that I wanted all of my teeth together.

I didn’t have language then for what was underneath that request. I believed there was something about my natural appearance that required my intervention.

Something about me had been categorized as wrong.

Long before I could afford to change it, I had already learned to hide it.

And once I could afford to change it, I did.

I fixed it.

Or at least, that is what I thought I was doing.

I have been thinking about that small gap lately because I am beginning to wonder how much of my life has been spent fixing things about myself that were never broken.

Not only physically.

My voice.

My desires.

My instincts.

My emotions.

My questions.

My way of seeing.

My way of knowing.

My way of being in the world.

How much of what we call self-improvement is actually self-correction?

And who handed us the definition of correct?

That question feels different to me now.

Because correction does not begin when we change ourselves.

It begins much earlier.

It begins when we learn to look at something that belongs to us and experience it as a problem.

A child does not arrive knowing her teeth are wrong.

She does not arrive knowing her body is too much or not enough.

She does not arrive believing her voice is too loud, her questions inappropriate, her emotions inconvenient, her intelligence intimidating, her curiosity dangerous, or her needs burdensome.

Someone—or something—teaches her how to interpret herself.

This is formation.

And eventually, if the lesson is repeated often enough, the teacher is no longer required.

We become both student and instructor.

We learn to correct ourselves.

I did.

For years, I have described part of my journey as finding my voice. I am no longer certain that is true.

Maybe my work has never been about finding my voice.

Maybe it has been about removing everything that made it difficult to hear.

That is different.

Finding assumes absence.

Hearing assumes presence.

My voice wasn’t absent.

It was obscured.

There is a passage in Women Who Run With the Wolves that I returned to recently. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about ancient understandings of the auditory nerve. Early anatomists believed its pathways suggested that human beings possessed different capacities for hearing: one for the ordinary conversations of the world, another for learning and art, and another for what Estés describes as “soul-hearing”—the capacity to hear guidance and knowledge at a deeper level.

I cannot stop thinking about that.

Soul-hearing.

We talk so much about finding our voices that perhaps we have neglected the question of hearing. What if voice is downstream from hearing? What if the more important question is not:

How do I find my voice?

But:

What happened to my capacity to hear myself?

And perhaps even more unsettling:

What taught me to trust certain voices more than my own?

Families form our hearing.

Schools form our hearing.

Religious institutions form our hearing.

Workplaces form our hearing.

Beauty standards form our hearing.

Professional cultures form our hearing.

Entire societies participate in teaching us what deserves our attention and what should be dismissed.

Every system has an acoustics.

Some things are amplified.

Others are muffled.

Some voices are given microphones.

Others learn to whisper.

Some ways of knowing are called expertise.

Others are called emotional.

Some questions are rewarded.

Others quietly teach us what not to ask again.

And eventually, the external system can become an internal one.

We begin doing the silencing ourselves.

That is what fascinates me now.

Because successful formation eventually conceals its source.

What began as someone else’s instruction becomes our common sense.

What began as someone else’s expectation becomes our ambition.

What began as someone else’s judgment becomes our self-assessment.

What began as adaptation begins to feel like personality.

Eventually, what formed us begins to sound like us.

Its judgments arrive in our own voice.

Its expectations feel like our own desires.

Its corrections feel like our own wisdom.

We say:

I need to fix this.

And rarely stop to ask:

Who taught me that this was broken?

I can look backward now and see that the real me was remarkably available.

She was there.

Before the titles.

Before the achievements.

Before the credentials.

Before the adaptations.

Before I learned how to make myself legible to environments that had their own ideas about who I should be.

I did not need to invent her.

Perhaps I did not even need to find her.

I needed to hear her.

And hearing her has required becoming curious about all the noise I once mistook for truth.

The voices that told me what success looked like.

What beauty looked like.

What intelligence looked like.

What faith looked like.

What leadership looked like.

What a good woman looked like.

What a good life looked like.

Some of those voices belonged to actual people.

Others belonged to systems.

And some had been inside me for so long that I mistook them for my own.

I think about that little gap in my teeth now.

I am not interested in romanticizing it. I am not suggesting that changing something about ourselves is inherently an act of self-rejection. We alter our bodies, our habits, our environments, and our lives for countless reasons.

The question is not simply whether we change.

The question is the consciousness from which the change emerges.

Did I choose this?

Or did I learn to experience myself as unacceptable until changing felt like the only reasonable response?

That distinction matters to me.

Because the same outward act can emerge from entirely different interior places.

Change can be an expression of sovereignty.

It can also be an act of conformity.

Leaving can be liberation or avoidance.

Staying can be commitment or fear.

Speaking can be authenticity or performance.

Silence can be suppression or choice.

The behavior alone cannot tell us what happened.

We have to understand the formation underneath it.

Because there is a difference between transformation and correction.

There is a difference between becoming and abandoning.

There is a difference between changing something because I desire something different and changing something because I have been taught that who I am cannot remain.

I have done both.

I can see that now.

And strangely, I feel tenderness toward the girl who tried to close the space between her teeth.

I do not need to shame her for having felt shame.

She was responding to what she had learned.

She was trying to make herself acceptable according to an architecture she did not build.

There was space.

She learned the space was wrong.

So she closed it.

I wonder how many other spaces I learned to close.

The space for questions.

The space for desire.

The space for anger.

The space for uncertainty.

The space for my own knowing.

The space between what the world expected of me and what something deeper inside me was trying to say.

But I am no longer standing inside that architecture without examining it.

That may be what this season of my life has actually been about.

Not finding myself.

Not reinventing myself.

Not becoming a better version of myself.

Listening.

Listening beneath the mundane conversations of the world.

Listening beneath achievement.

Listening beneath approval.

Listening beneath expertise.

Listening beneath all the instructions I inherited about who I should become.

Soul-hearing.

And underneath all of that noise, I keep encountering someone who was there all along.

Me.

I wonder how many things we have spent our lives trying to fix that were never evidence of our brokenness.

How many parts of ourselves have we corrected simply because someone taught us to see them as errors?

How many desires have we disciplined?

How many instincts have we overruled:

How many questions have we swallowed?

How many voices have we softened?

How many gaps have we closed?

Perhaps some of the deepest work of becoming is not adding anything at all.

Perhaps it is learning to distinguish between our own voice and the noise that formed around it.

To recognize that what sounds like our own voice may sometimes be an old teacher, an old institution, an old standard, an old architecture still speaking from inside us.

And then listening long enough to discover what remains when those voices grow quiet.

The real me was always available.

My voice was never absent.

It was obscured.

And I can hear her now.

I thought I wanted a dog. I wanted one badly, actually. And eventually, I got one. His name is Rumi (I named him after Rumi, a Sufi Mystic, and Poet).

For a long time, that seemed like the entire story. I wanted a dog. I got a dog.

But recently I remembered something that happened before Rumi entered my life. I had said to God: I want to know what love is. The song by the Foreigners immediately started playing in my head. I wasn’t asking for a dog when I said it. I wasn’t asking for anything in particular. I just wanted to know.

And then, sometime afterward, I found myself bringing home this living being who would require something from me every single day.

Food.

Walks.

Attention.

Patience.

Protection.

Presence.

Consistency.

He would need me when I was tired.

He would need me when I was busy.

He would need me when I didn’t feel like being needed.

And he would love me without knowing my résumé.

Without knowing what I had accomplished.

Without knowing whether I had been productive that day.

Without knowing anything about the identities I had spent a lifetime constructing.

He just knew me.

I thought I had gotten a dog because I wanted a dog. Now I wonder whether I had been given somewhere to learn love.

Or perhaps more accurately:

We had been given to one another.

That distinction has been following me.

Because I have been thinking about the way we understand support, particularly when one person is experiencing a crisis.

When your own life is on fire, your need becomes enormous.

Understandably so.

You can see it.

You can feel it.

Other people can see it too.

And when someone arrives to support you, it becomes very easy to understand the relationship entirely through the lens of your need.

They are here to help me.

God sent them to me.

They showed up when I needed them.

Maybe.

But lately I have been wondering whether that interpretation is too small.

Not because the support isn’t real.

But because the other person is real too.

They have an interior life.

They have questions you may know nothing about.

They have longings they may not have articulated.

They have losses.

They have desires.

They have places within themselves still becoming visible.

They may need something too.

Their need simply may not look like yours.

Visible need has a way of becoming the center of the room.

A job loss.

An illness.

A divorce.

A death.

A financial crisis.

A broken relationship.

These kinds of experiences announce themselves.

They make themselves known.

But not every human need arrives with sirens.

There is the need to be known.

The need to contribute.

The need for companionship.

The need to give.

The need to receive.

The need to be witnessed.

The need to discover a part of yourself that can only emerge in relationship with another.

The need to love.

Some needs are so quiet that we don’t recognize them as needs at all.

And perhaps that is why I have begun questioning some of the language we use about divine provision.

We often say:

God sent that person to me.

There is something beautiful about that belief. I have certainly experienced people arriving at moments when I desperately needed what they carried.

But I am increasingly uncomfortable with any theology that makes one human being the recipient of God’s care and another human being merely the instrument of it.

If God is all-seeing and all-knowing, why would divine activity account for only one person’s story?

Why would providence recognize my need but overlook yours?

Why would sovereignty arrange an encounter entirely around what I need from you?

Perhaps it doesn’t.

Perhaps our interpretation does.

We stand inside our own lives, so naturally we experience events from the center of them.

I know what I prayed.

I know what I lost.

I know what I needed.

I know what happened just before you appeared.

And so I construct a story:

God sent you to help me.

But you were living an entire life before you arrived.

Maybe you had been asking questions too.

Maybe you were standing at the edge of something.

Maybe you needed somewhere for your gifts to go.

Maybe you needed to discover your own capacity for tenderness, courage, generosity, boundaries, vulnerability, or love.

Maybe there is something our encounter would reveal to you that I could not possibly see.

What if God’s answer was never you for me?

What if the answer was us?

This possibility changes something about relationship for me.

Because if I believe someone exists in my life primarily because I needed them, I can unintentionally stop being curious about them.

Their presence becomes evidence of God’s care for me.

Their generosity becomes provision for me.

Their wisdom becomes guidance for me.

Their time becomes support for me.

And without intending to, I can turn a person into a function.

Helper.

Mentor.

Friend.

Provider.

Intercessor.

Caregiver.

Support system.

The label describes what they do in my life while potentially obscuring the fact that they have a life of their own.

Perhaps this is one of the quieter dangers of being in crisis.

Pain can narrow our field of vision.

It doesn’t necessarily make us selfish.

It makes us human.

When something hurts badly enough, we naturally orient toward the wound.

But perhaps healing eventually asks us to widen our vision again.

To look at the person who sat beside us and wonder:

What was happening in you while you were helping me survive what was happening in me?

That question feels sacred to me.

Because reciprocity does not mean that everyone gives the same thing at the same time.

That would make relationship transactional.

There will be seasons when one person carries more.

There will be days when one person has very little to offer.

There will be moments when someone’s crisis legitimately requires the attention of the room.

Reciprocity is not symmetry.

It is recognition.

It is the refusal to believe that only one person’s humanity matters in an encounter.

It is remembering that the person holding me is also a person who may someday need to be held.

And perhaps even more importantly, it is understanding that they may need something now that I cannot see.

I think about this when I look at Rumi.

For years, I understood myself as the one responsible for him.

I feed him.

I walk him.

I protect him.

I make decisions for him that he cannot make for himself.

By almost every visible measure, he is dependent on me.

And yet I have received immeasurably from this relationship.

He has taught me something about presence.

Something about delight.

Something about attachment.

Something about being greeted as though my existence itself is worth celebrating.

Something about caring for another being without needing the relationship to produce an accomplishment.

Something about love.

I thought I was getting a dog.

But before Rumi, I had asked to know what love was.

I can see the sequence now.

What moves me most, though, is that I don’t want to turn him into an instrument either.

Rumi wasn’t placed on earth merely to teach me a lesson.

He has needs of his own.

He needed a home.

He needed care.

He needed someone to learn his rhythms and recognize his sounds and know when something wasn’t quite right.

He needed someone to walk beside.

Maybe I wasn’t simply given Rumi.

Maybe Rumi was given me.

And perhaps even that language isn’t quite right.

Maybe we were brought to one another.

I find myself wondering how many relationships I might understand differently if I looked at them this way.

How many people have I called answers to my prayers without wondering whether I might have been somewhere inside the answer to theirs?

How many times have I interpreted someone’s presence according to what they provided for me?

How often have I mistaken someone’s strength for an absence of need?

How many people have been carrying invisible things while helping me carry something everyone could see?

I don’t ask these questions to manufacture obligation.

Reciprocity born from indebtedness is not reciprocity.

I ask because I want a larger imagination for relationship.

And, increasingly, a larger imagination for God.

If God is all-seeing, perhaps providence is rarely as one-sided as the stories we tell about it.

Perhaps sovereignty is not a divine delivery service, moving people into position according to the needs of a single protagonist.

Perhaps it is something far more intricate.

Lives intersecting.

Needs meeting needs.

Gifts finding places to become useful.

Questions encountering unexpected answers.

People discovering parts of themselves because another human being appeared.

Love moving in more than one direction at once.

Perhaps divine provision sometimes looks less like:

I needed you, so God sent you.

And more like:

There was something here for both of us.

I still believe people arrive in our lives at extraordinary moments.

I still believe there are encounters whose timing feels almost impossible to dismiss.

I still believe in provision.

I just no longer want to assume that I am always the destination of it.

Maybe God is doing something in the person sitting across from me too.

Maybe there is a prayer I don’t know about.

A longing I cannot see.

A question they haven’t found language for yet.

Maybe my visible crisis and their invisible need somehow brought our lives into the same room.

And maybe neither of us will understand the fullness of what happened until much later.

Like a woman who once said she wanted to know what love was,

and sometime afterward, got a dog.

I thought I wanted Rumi.

Perhaps love wanted somewhere to happen between us.

We know the body ages. The evidence is everywhere.

Gray hair.
Wrinkles
Slower recovery.
Reading glasses.

The body keeps impeccable records.

But lately I have been wondering about something else.

Does the spirit age?

Not our beliefs.

Not our religious participation.

Not the number of years we’ve attended church or practiced meditation or read sacred texts.

The spirit.

Does it grow older in the same way the body does?

Or is something entirely different taking place?

I ask because we often assume that time produces maturity.

It doesn’t.

Time produces age.

Formation produces maturity.

Those are not the same thing.

A person can spend decades in religious communities and remain emotionally fragile.

A leader can accumulate titles while becoming increasingly disconnected from themselves.

An organization can celebrate longevity while quietly rewarding adaptation instead of truth.

America recently celebrated 250 years of independence. But age and maturity are not the same thing. A nation can grow older without fully acknowledging the harm it has causes or integrating the truth of its own story.

Years pass.

But has the person?

Perhaps this is why I have become increasingly interested in Human Formation.

I am less interested in what people know than in what they have become.

Less interested in whether they have aged than whether they have deepened.

Maybe we have confused chronological development with human development.

As someone shaped by the Christian tradition, I often find myself listening for the places where Scripture names a question I have not yet found language for.

After sitting with this one for several days, I remembered a passage from Paul’s second letter to Corinthians:

“Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day”

I have read those words countless times.

This time, a different phrase caught my attention.

Paul never says the inner person grows older.

He says the inner person is being renewed.

That distinction has stayed with me.

The body accumulates years.

The inner life seems to move by another rhythm.

then I remembered another prayer that had somehow escaped my attention.

In Psalm 51, David doesn’t ask for an older spirit.

He prays,

“Renew a right spirit within me.”

Again, the language of renewal.

Not accumulation.

Not chronology.

Renewal.

I am not suggesting the Bible answers my question.

If anything, it has made the question more interesting.

Perhaps we have spent so much time measuring the passage of time that we have forgotten to ask what the inner life is actually measuring.

There was a time when I believed each season represented a different version of me.

Corporate leadership.

Seminary.

Theology.

Academia.

Human Formation.

Now I wonder whether they were never separate identities.

Perhaps they were all attempts to recover the same person.

The older I become, the less interested I am in appearing mature.

I am more interested in becoming integrated.

More interested in whether my life is increasingly congruent.

More interested in whether my relationships reflect the truths I claim to believe.

More interested in whether my body has finally stopped carrying what my words refuse to acknowledge.

The body ages.

That much is certain.

But I am no longer convinced the spirit ages in the same way.

Perhaps it awakens.

Perhaps it deepens.

Perhaps it remembers.

Perhaps it is renewed.

And perhaps one of the quietest mistakes we make is assuming that because we have grown older, we have necessarily grown inwardly.

So I leave you with the question that I’ve been sitting with:

If the body keeps time…

What does the spirit keep?

No invoices arrive in the mail.
No reminder emails appear in our inboxes.
No one asks whether we would like to continue the subscription.

The withdrawals simply happen.

Quietly.
Consistently.
Often for years.

I have been thinking about this because life has a way of forcing us to review statements we never intended to open.

Financial hardship has a way of doing that.

You begin looking line by line at what has been leaving your account. You notice subscriptions you forgot existed. Small charges that once seemed insignificant but, over time, amounted to something substantial.

Recently I realized the same thing can happen within a human life.

Our adaptations have subscriptions too.

As children, we learn what earns safety.

What earns belonging.

What earns approval.

Perhaps we become the capable one.

The peacemaker.

The achiever.

The caretaker.

The person who always has the answer.

The one who never needs anything.

At first, these identities are not deceptions. They are intelligent responses to the worlds that formed us. They help us survive environments we did not choose.

Every environment forms a way of being. The question is whether the version of ourselves it required is still the one our present life requires.

But survival has recurring costs.

Every time we silence ourselves to preserve someone else’s comfort, another payment is processed.

Every time we perform competence while privately unraveling, another withdrawal is made.

Every time we confuse usefulness with love, another transaction clears.

Every time we mistake being needed for being known, another charge appears on the statement.

Most of us never notice because the payments have become automatic.

We assume this is simply what adulthood costs.

Then life interrupts the transaction.

A divorce.

A layoff.

An illness.

A betrayal.

The loss of a title.

The end of a relationship.

Or perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all.

We simply become quiet enough to hear ourselves.

And suddenly the transactions we once called “personality” begin looking more like survival.

That is when awakening begins. Not because we suddenly become someone else.
Because we finally notice what has been quietly extracting from us for years.

The remarkable thing about reviewing a financial statement is that you cannot recover every dollar that has already left your account. But you can stop future withdrawals.

You can cancel subscriptions that no longer serve the life you are trying to build.

Perhaps healing is less about becoming a new person than it is about canceling the auto-debits attached to identities that once protected us but now keep us from ourselves.

I wonder how many of us are still paying for versions of ourselves that are no longer necessary.

How many of us are financing stories we did not write.

How many of us mistake exhaustion for responsibility because the payments have become so familiar we no longer question them.

Every formation leaves a ledger.

The question is whether we ever learn to read it.

Human formation is not only about discovering what shaped us.

It is also about noticing what those formations continue to cost.

Because every adaptation leaves an inheritance.

The question is whether we will continue paying for protection we no longer need.

My inquisitive side has been sitting with a question.

Can we become well-formed in faith while remaining unreformed in relationship?

Not because we lack kindness.

Not because we lack sincerity.

Not because we lack faith.

But because we’ve learned how to pray, forgive, serve, and believe…
without always learning how to stay present in disappointment, repair relational ruptures, or cultivate mutuality.

I’m not interested in criticizing religion. I’m interested in understanding formation. Every system forms something.

Some teach performance.

Some teach agreement.

Some teach silence.

Some teach belonging.

Every system teaches us not only how to think, but how to relate.

The question is not whether we are being formed. The question is what kind of relationships our formation is preparing us to have.

I’ve begun to wonder if some of our deepest relational disappointments are not always the result of a lack of love or even a lack of faith.

Sometimes we come seeking relationship…while the other person has been formed to respond from an entirely different framework.

We reach for mutuality.

They reach for certainty.

We seek presence.

They offer explanation.

We long to be met as human beings.

They respond from the system that has most deeply shaped them.

That possibility has stayed with me. Not because I want someone to blame. But because it invites a different kind of question.

If that is true, then perhaps we’ve been asking an incomplete question. For generations, many of us have asked:

How do I become more faithful?

Perhaps we should be asking:

How am I being formed in relationship?

Because every system leaves us with an inheritance—not only in what we believe, but in how we learn to love, trust, repair, withdraw, belong, and remain present to one another.

One of the central questions of Human formation is this:

What kind of relationships are our systems preparing us to have?

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My first classroom was not a school.

It was my mother’s face.

Long before I learned theology or psychology, before degrees and classrooms and leadership and language, I was learning how to read a face. I was searching for the expression that told me I was safe, that I was good, that I wasn’t too much.

I didn’t know it then, but this was my first education.

Years later, I would learn that our first understanding of ourselves is often formed in relationship.

By then, I already knew what it felt like to spend a childhood looking for a face that could tell me who I was.

I don’t remember deciding to search. I only remember searching.

Searching for the version of my mother whose face softened when I walked into a room.

Searching for reassurance that I belonged.

Searching for some expression that would tell me I was home.

As a little girl, I didn’t have words like attachment, formation, or nervous system.

I had a face.

And I had mine.

I only knew that one seemed impossible to reach, while the other was quietly being shaped in response.

Years later I would realize that children are remarkable students.

They study what adults rarely notice.

The temperature of a room.

The sound of footsteps in a hallway.

The silence after a question.

The tightening around someone’s eyes.

The difference between being tolerated and being welcomed.

Children become fluent in emotional climates long before they become fluent in language.

I was no different.

My father sought liquid comfort for wounds he never learned to name.

My mother carried an anger that, to my childhood mind, felt older than I was.

I was the youngest—the cliff-hanger child at the end of a long line of brothers and one sister.

I was fiercely protected.

I was deeply loved in some ways.

I was also being formed by questions no one knew I was asking.

Only years later did I learn that both of my parents had been raised by people other than their biological parents.

What had felt like my story alone slowly revealed itself to be older than me.

The inheritance I received wasn’t only genetic.

It was relational.

Patterns.

Absences.

Ways of surviving that had quietly become family traditions.

Henri Nouwen once wrote, “Our family of origin is the microcosm in which our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with God are first formed.”

When I first read those words, I underlined them. Today I recognize them.
I have been living inside them my entire life.

The mother wound came first.
Then motherhood.

People often say that when a baby is born, so is a mother.

I think something else is born too.
Questions.

What do we inherit before anyone speaks?
How early does belonging begin?
Can love interrupt what has been passed down?
Does formation begin with language?
Or before language?

Perhaps in the womb.

I didn’t know it then, but those questions would stay with me for decades.

Degrees later, I entered seminary.

Learning had become one of the ways I made sense of myself. I thought I was arriving to study theology.

Instead, I encountered something I had never heard before.

Spiritual Formation.

One afternoon, during one of my earliest meetings with a professor, I shared a story about my experience teaching.

He listened for a moment and then said something that has never left me.

“You don’t just teach your students.”

“You disciple them.”

Then he asked a question that lit a match somewhere deep inside me.

“Who discipled you first?”

The room disappeared. I wasn’t in a classroom anymore. I was back in my childhood home. Back in my first classroom. The question followed me long after our conversation ended. I wrote that question on a sticky note and placed it in my home. Eventually it found its way into journal after journal. At first, I thought he had asked me a question about discipleship. Years later, I realized he had asked me a question about formation. Once that question entered my life, I couldn’t stop seeing classrooms. Not the kind with desks and chalkboards. The kind we spend our lives inside without realizing we’re students. I began recognizing them everywhere.

Families.
Churches.
Schools.
Organizations.
Relationships.
Therapy.
Language.
Culture.
The body.

Every environment seemed to be teaching something about what it meant to be human.

I just hadn’t known to call them classrooms.

The more I paid attention, the more I realized that I had spent my life moving from one classroom to another, collecting pieces of a question I didn’t yet know I was asking.

Looking back, I wasn’t changing directions nearly as often as I thought. I was following the same inquiry through different environments.

I just didn’t have a name for it yet.

Years later, while reading through old journals, I began noticing something I had somehow missed while living it. I had never stopped writing about the same thing.

The titles changed.
The question never did.

Part of my writing process has always been receiving the title first. Then I write until I understand why it arrived.

My journals became crowded with names. Each title held something true. None of them could hold everything.

Then, one quiet morning, after years of writing around the same mystery, two words arrived.

Human Formation.

Not as a new idea.
As recognition.

As though every classroom I had ever entered had quietly been teaching the same subject. I had simply never learned its name.

I think it began with a little girl trying to understand a face. Everything since has been an attempt to understand what forms a human being.

Not only in families.
But in churches.
In schools.
In organizations.
In relationships.
In language.
In bodies.
In cultures.
In hope.

And in love.

I still don’t have all the answers. That’s never been the point.

Human Formation is not the name of my conclusions.

It’s the name of the inquiry that has quietly accompanied me for as long as I can remember.

So if you’re here, welcome.

Perhaps you’ve been following a question, too.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve spent years believing you were changing directions, only to discover you were being led by the same quiet thread all along.

If that’s true, then maybe this is not the beginning of the story.

Maybe it’s the moment we finally learn its name.

Kendra

For a long time, I thought I was searching for the right title.

The right framework.

The right way to explain what I was doing.

Each time I found language that felt true, I would eventually outgrow it.

Not because it had become false. Because it could no longer hold what I was beginning to understand.

This week, I realized something that surprised me.

I am tired.

Not from writing.

From naming.

There has been an inner chatter that has followed me for years.

Is this it?

Is this the right language?

Should I call it something else?

Will people understand it?

I don’t think I was searching for the perfect title.

I think I was searching for permission to stop searching.

Over the past day, I did something I haven’t done in a long time.

I looked at my bookshelves.

Not for answers.

For continuity.

I noticed something I had somehow missed.

For years I’ve been collecting books that were asking the same question.
I just didn’t know it.

The human condition.

The awakened brain.

The social brain.

The myth of normal.

Leadership.

Identity.

Shadow.

Trauma.

Formation.

Different authors.

Different disciplines.

One conversation.

Then I realized…

Perhaps I haven’t been wandering at all.

Perhaps I’ve been following a question.

That realization brought me an unexpected kind of peace.

Not excitement.

Not adrenaline.

Relief.

The kind that comes when something inside you finally stops arguing with itself.

I’m not ready to say everything I think this means.

I’m still listening.

Still discovering the language.

Still allowing years of reading, research, writing, work, and living to come together.

But for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel the need to rush.

Sometimes the deepest discoveries don’t arrive with fireworks.

Sometimes they arrive with a quiet sentence that simply says,

“You can stop looking now.”

I think that’s where I am.

And I wanted to share that with you before I shared what comes next.

I’ve spent years collecting questions.
Looking back, I think they were collecting me.
I’m beginning to understand why.

~Kendra

There comes a moment in healing when the work is no longer about leaving.

It becomes learning to remain.

To trust quiet.

To receive peace without waiting for it to disappear.

To allow the body to experience what it has not always known?

Safety.

This episode of After the Sermon, is a reflection on the slow work of teaching the nervous system that survival is n…

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