The Case You Closed on Yourself
Believe it or not… the one verdict we never reopen is the one with our own name on it.
You’ve changed your mind about plenty of things.
A city you swore you hated… until you went back as a slightly different person, and somehow it was charming.
A food you wouldn’t touch as a kid… that you now order on purpose.
A song. A book. A person you misjudged in a single conversation and spent years being quietly wrong about.
We do this all the time. We take in something new, we soften, we update the file.
We’re remarkably open-minded… about almost everything except ourselves.
Because somewhere back there, most of us handed down a ruling.
I’m not the kind of person who finishes things. I’m too much. I’m not enough. That’s just how I am.
And here’s the strange part. We entered that verdict into the record a long time ago… often when we were young… often after very little evidence… often on a bad day we don’t even remember anymore.
Then we did the one thing that makes a verdict stick.
We stopped reopening the case.
Think about that for a second. The opinion you hold most firmly, the one about who you are, might be the only opinion you’ve never actually re-examined. Everything else gets revised. That one got stamped settled decades ago and was never appealed.
We treat a first draft as a final ruling.
And the wild thing is how little it takes to reopen it. Not a breakthrough. Not a mountaintop. Usually just one new piece of evidence… one person who saw it differently… one ordinary moment that doesn’t fit the old story.
And suddenly the thing you were so sure was fixed about you turns out to have been a draft all along.
So here’s something to carry into your weekend.
Pick the most fixed thing you believe about yourself. The “that’s just how I am” one. The one you’d defend.
And ask it the question you’ve probably never asked it…
Says who… and when exactly did I decide that?
You might find the evidence is thinner than you remembered.
You might find the judge was nineteen.
You might find the case was never as closed as you thought.
Lately, almost everything I’m working on comes back to this one idea… that the stories we’re most certain about are the ones most worth reopening.
More on that very soon.
Be your best self now… - J
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