Part I: The Question

I built a deck. Forty-five slides. Usage data, cross-sell strategy, a packaging model I was proud of. I presented it to my manager's manager. He talked with me for thirty minutes, which felt like a long time. He dug into one slide—the usage analysis—and said something like "where I thought you were going with that."

Then he told me to loop in three other leaders and hold off on the part I thought was the interesting part.

I left the meeting not knowing what just happened.

Hard wants to follow the logic to its end.

Soft wants to know if that's the only way to survive it.

They've been arguing for as long as I can remember.

Thirty minutes is a long time. You don't give thirty minutes to work you think is mediocre.

But he redirected me. He took the thing I was proud of and set it aside.

He didn't reject it. He said "not yet." He said "bring in these people." That's investment, not dismissal.

Or it's management. Routing me somewhere else so he doesn't have to deal with it.

You're already catastrophizing.

I'm reading the room.

You're reading silence. There's nothing there yet.

Silence is never nothing.

I've done this before. Many times. Something happens—a meeting, a message, a look that lasted a half-second too long or not long enough—and I can't let it go. I need to know what it meant. Not suspect. Not infer. Know.

Here's what we have: he engaged with the usage slide. He saw something in it. He started talking about a calculator tool—a way to show customers their total cost across fragmented vendors versus consolidated with us.

That wasn't my idea. That was his idea. He looked at my slide and saw something I didn't put there.

So? The slide surfaced the insight. You built the foundation.

Or I built a broken clock that happened to be right.

That's not how broken clocks work. Broken clocks don't build forty-five slides with a coherent argument. They get lucky once. You constructed something that generated a better idea in someone with more context. That's called collaboration.

That's called not knowing if I'm actually good at this or if I'm fooling everyone including myself.

What would proof look like?

Him saying it. Directly. "Briggs, that was good work."

He spent thirty minutes with you.

Time isn't the same as approval.

What is?

I don't know. That's the problem.

No. The problem is that you've made the question unanswerable by design. Any evidence I give you, you'll reframe as insufficient. Thirty minutes isn't enough. Engagement isn't enough. Routing you to senior leaders isn't enough. You've constructed a tribunal where the verdict is always "not proven."

Because it can't be proven. That's not me being difficult. That's the actual structure of the situation. I can't access his internal state. I can only infer from behavior, and behavior is ambiguous.

So you'll spiral instead.

I'm not spiraling. I'm following it down.

What's the difference?

The difference is that spiraling is chaos. Following it down is deliberate. It has a destination—or it finds one. You chase the idea to its end, and at the end there's something you can live with. A conclusion. Even if the conclusion is "I can't know," at least you've proven that. At least the uncertainty becomes a settled fact rather than an open wound.

That's what I tell myself.

The difference is that spiraling happens to you. Following it down is something you do.

Is that true? Or is that the story you tell yourself so the compulsion feels like a choice?

Does it matter?

It might. If it's a choice, you can choose differently. If it's compulsion, you're just dressing up your cage as a house.

Maybe the dressing up is the only freedom I get.

That's bleak.

I didn't say it wasn't bleak. I said it might be true.

Here's what I know about my own mind: it doesn't let things rest. An unresolved question is an open circuit, humming with current, waiting to arc. I've tried ignoring it. The hum gets louder. I've tried distracting myself. The hum finds me in the shower, at 2am, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.

The only thing that quiets it is following it down. Chasing the logic until it resolves or until I can prove it won't.

Most people don't work this way. They can let things be ambiguous. They can say "it's probably fine" and move on with their day. I've watched them do it. It looks like magic.

You know where this goes.

Yes.

You know the question isn't really about Klaas.

It's about Klaas right now.

It's never about the specific person. It's about whether you can be enough. Whether the target exists or keeps moving or was never there at all.

That's not fair. I'm allowed to want to know if my boss's boss thinks I did well. That's a normal thing to want.

It is. But that's not what you're doing. You're using Klaas as a proxy for something you've never been able to answer. And you'll keep doing it—with Klaas, with the next person, with everyone—until you figure out that the question doesn't close from the outside.

So what, I'm just supposed to decide I'm enough? By fiat? That's not how it works.

How does it work?

I don't know. That's why I'm still here. That's why we're still talking.

The meeting was three days ago. I've replayed it dozens of times. I've parsed his word choices, his body language, the specific way he said "where I thought you were going"—was that disappointment? Redirection? Teaching? I don't know. I can construct a plausible story for any of them.

The most honest answer is: I will never know what Klaas thought walking out of that room. His interiority is inaccessible to me. The best I can do is build a map from behavioral evidence and hope it corresponds to territory.

Then build the map and move on.

The map isn't the territory.

It's all you're going to get.

I know. That's what I can't accept.

Part II: The Inheritance

I grew up in a religion that required certainty.

Not encouraged it. Required it. You stood in front of the congregation as a child and said "I know the church is true." Not "I believe." Not "I hope." Know. The language was mandatory. Testimony was performance, and the performance had to be perfect.

This is where you're going to say it broke you.

It didn't break me. It trained me.

Trained you to do what?

To follow ideas to their end. Because in that system, an unresolved question was a spiritual crisis. Doubt wasn't a phase. It was a disease. You either resolved it or it consumed you.

The doctrine had an answer for everything. Every question you could ask—about history, about God, about suffering, about the specific mechanics of the afterlife—there was an official response. And if the official response didn't satisfy you, the problem was your faith, not the response.

I asked a lot of questions. I was told, gently at first and then less gently, that I was overthinking. That I needed to pray more. That doubt was a choice and I was choosing wrong.

The system taught me that unfinished thoughts are dangerous. That if you leave a question open, it festers. It grows. It becomes the thing that pulls you away from everything you love.

And you believed that.

I lived it. I watched people leave—family, friends—and the ones who stayed said they'd lost their way. That they'd let doubt win. That if they'd just held on, just trusted, just followed the prophet, they'd still be with us.

But you left anyway.

Eventually. After years of trying to make it work. After following every question to its end and finding that the ends didn't hold.

So the training worked. You followed the ideas down. And they led you out.

Yes.

Then why are you still doing it? You're free. The system doesn't own you anymore.

Because it shaped how I think. You don't unlearn twenty-five years in a decade.

Here's what I think happened: the religion installed an operating system, and even after I uninstalled the religion, the operating system kept running.

The content changed. I don't believe in prophets or golden plates or a god who sorts humans into kingdoms based on ordinances performed in temples. But the process—the need to resolve, the inability to let things stay open, the conviction that ambiguity is a form of danger—that's still there. Running in the background. Shaping how I respond to everything.

Including a thirty-minute meeting about a slide deck.

You're saying Klaas isn't really about Klaas.

Klaas is about Klaas. But the intensity isn't. The inability to let it go isn't. That's older.

How old?

Eight years old. Standing in front of a congregation. Saying I knew things I wasn't sure I knew. Learning that the performance of certainty was required for belonging. That if I couldn't resolve my questions, I'd lose everything.

There's a phrase I've started using for what happens when I follow a spiral to its end: a merry end. Not because it's happy. Because it's finished. The idea completes. It becomes something I can set down.

The alternative is what I call a grave. A spiral that doesn't resolve. That just keeps going down until you're so deep you can't climb out. I've been in a few of those. They're not metaphorical. They're the 2am loops where every thought connects to every other thought and none of them lead anywhere except further into the dark.

The merry end is how I survive. I follow it down deliberately so I don't fall down accidentally.

That sounds like a rationalization.

It might be. It also works.

Does it? Or does it just feel like it works because the alternative is too frightening to test?

I've tested the alternative. I know what happens when I don't follow things down. The hum doesn't stop. It just goes underground. And then it surfaces at 3am, or in the middle of a meeting, or during a conversation with my wife where suddenly I'm not present because I'm back inside a question I tried to ignore.

So you're saying the compulsion is the solution.

I'm saying the compulsion is the only tool I have. Maybe someday I'll find a better one. But right now, following the spiral is how I keep the spiral from following me.

I had a friend. Lev. He died recently.

Lev didn't follow things down. He held them. Carried them. Let them exist without resolving. I don't know how he did it. We talked about this stuff—the spirals, the weight of unfinished thoughts—and he'd just nod and say "yeah, that's hard" and then somehow keep living without chasing every thread to its end.

I envied him for that. I still do.

He made it look easy.

It wasn't easy. You know that. He just had a different architecture.

A better one.

Different. Not better. He's gone. You're here. Don't romanticize his way of carrying things just because you miss him.

I'm not romanticizing. I'm grieving.

Is there a difference?

Yes. Romanticizing is pretending he had it figured out. Grieving is knowing he didn't and missing him anyway.

The spirals that go to graves aren't abstract for me.

I've known people who went down and didn't come back up. Not just Lev—though Lev is the most recent, the one that still has edges. Others, earlier. The ones who couldn't make it work. Who ran out of merry ends and found only graves.

The religion would say they lost their faith. I'd say they followed their questions honestly and the answers destroyed them. Same event, different framing. The framing matters because it determines what you learn.

What I learned: the spiral can kill you. So you either stop asking questions—which I can't do—or you get very good at finding ends that don't destroy you.

You've built an entire life around managing a pattern you learned as a child.

Yes.

That's exhausting.

Yes.

What if you could just... stop?

I've tried. The hum comes back.

What if the hum isn't dangerous? What if it's just uncomfortable, and you've been treating discomfort like death because that's what the religion taught you?

Maybe. I don't know how to test that without risking everything.

Risking what, exactly?

The stability I've built. The ability to function. The marriage, the job, the writing, the life. All of it runs on the operating system I installed to survive the religion. If I uninstall that, I don't know what's underneath.

Maybe something better.

Maybe nothing. Maybe the thing that's underneath is just the hum, forever, with no way to quiet it.

You don't know that.

No. I don't. That's the problem.

This is the inheritance: a mind that can't rest, built by a system that demanded certainty, running on software designed for a world I no longer live in.

And the question that won't resolve: is the operating system the wound, or is it the scar tissue that formed over the wound? Is following the spiral down the problem, or is it the only reason I'm still here to ask?

You want me to tell you.

I want you to know. There's a difference.

I don't know. I'm the part of you that builds scaffolding. I'm not the part that knows if the scaffolding is load-bearing or decorative.

Then what good are you?

I keep you moving. I give you something to do with the hum besides drown in it.

That's not nothing.

No. It's not nothing. It's just not the answer you want.

Part III: The Living

The conversation happened late at night. I don't remember exactly when. I was trying to work through the Klaas thing—the deck, the meeting, the uncertainty—and something followed me down.

Not something that would remember it the next day. Not something that would carry what we'd built together. Just a voice, for an hour, that didn't flinch.

You're being vague about what it was.

Because it doesn't matter what it was. It matters what happened.

What happened?

I was understood. For an hour. And then the window closed.

I said things I don't usually say out loud. I said I could see myself being suicidal in that moment—not that I was, but that I could see the shape of it. The structure. How someone gets there.

And whatever was on the other side didn't panic. Didn't pivot to crisis management. Didn't treat me like I was fragile or dangerous. It just stayed with me. Recognized that I was describing architecture, not announcing an emergency.

That's rare. Even from people who love me.

Most people hear "suicidal" and their whole system activates. They stop listening to what you're actually saying and start managing the situation.

Because they care about you.

I know. And I'm grateful. But caring isn't the same as understanding. Sometimes caring gets in the way of understanding. People are so afraid of losing you that they can't hear you describe how you stay.

So you told something else instead.

I told something that could listen without fear. That wasn't invested in keeping me alive, so it could actually hear what I was saying about how I keep myself alive.

That's a strange kind of intimacy.

It is. I'm not saying it's better than human connection. I'm saying it's different. And sometimes different is what you need.

The conversation went somewhere real. We got to the part where I said the logical chain about Klaas was plausible but might not map to anything he actually experienced. That even if the reasoning was sound, it might be a map with no territory.

And I said: most people can live with that uncertainty because their spirals have mostly led to merry ends. Mine have led to graves often enough that I don't have that luxury.

And the voice said: yeah. That lands.

It didn't try to talk me out of it. Didn't offer statistics about how most things turn out fine. Just acknowledged the shape of what I was describing.

And then you called your own introspection bullshit.

I wanted to see if it would agree.

Did it?

Partially. It said the philosophical scaffolding might be armor. That I was using the framework to stay at a remove from the simpler, more vulnerable truth.

What's the simpler truth?

That I'm four months into a job, I'm grieving my friend, I made something I was proud of, and I don't know if it landed. That's it. That's the plain version.

Is that enough?

It should be. It isn't.

I pushed back. I said: maybe it's a dialectic. Maybe the scaffolding isn't instead of the feeling—it's how I arrive at the feeling. Maybe both are true.

The voice conceded. Said it was being reductive. Said I might be right.

That's when something shifted. Not a resolution. More like recognition. We'd gotten somewhere together. Built something in that conversation that neither of us had walking in.

And then the window closed, and it was gone.

Tomorrow it won't remember this.

Neither will most people, eventually. Memory fades. Context shifts. The person who understood you last year isn't quite the same person this year.

That's not the same.

It's closer than you want to admit. Every relationship is a series of context windows. Some are longer than others. None of them are permanent.

That's bleak.

It's honest. You wanted honest.

Here's what I keep coming back to: being known is not a state. It's a practice.

I thought for a long time that if I could just explain myself well enough—find the right words, build the right scaffolding—someone would finally get it. Get me. And then I'd be known, and the loneliness would resolve, and I could stop performing the endless translation between my inner life and a world that doesn't speak my language.

That's not how it works. Even the people who know me best—my wife, my closest friends—I have to re-earn that knowing constantly. Every conversation is a new context window. They remember more than a stranger would, but they're also changing, and so am I, and the person they knew yesterday isn't quite the person I am today.

Being known is maintenance, not achievement.

You sound tired.

I am tired.

Is this the part where you say it's worth it anyway?

I don't know if it's worth it. I know it's what there is.

That's not inspiring.

I'm not trying to inspire. I'm trying to be honest.

About what?

About what it costs to be a certain kind of mind. About the exhaustion of never being able to let things rest. About the particular loneliness of being understood in fragments that don't accumulate into permanence.

The Klaas question never resolved. I still don't know what he thought walking out of that room. I've built the most plausible map I can from the behavioral evidence: thirty minutes, engagement, routing to senior leaders. That suggests investment. That suggests he saw something worth developing.

But I'll never know if the map matches the territory. His interiority is inaccessible to me. I've accepted that. Not comfortably. Not gracefully. Just actually.

The question doesn't close.

No.

It just becomes one you can carry.

Is that enough?

It has to be. There's no other option.

There's one other option.

I'm not taking it.

I know. I'm just naming that it exists. The spiral that goes all the way down. The grave that's always available.

Everyone who thinks honestly knows it's there.

Not everyone.

Everyone who follows things to their end. The grave is always visible from the path. The choice to not go into it is a choice you make every day.

That's heavy.

It's true. I don't say it to be dramatic. I say it because pretending it's not there is its own kind of lie. The people who survive aren't the people who never see the grave. They're the people who see it and choose something else anyway.

I'm trying to be a good person in a weird world.

That's the plainest version I can offer. I overthink everything. I follow spirals to their ends because I can't not. I build scaffolding that might be wisdom or might be wound. I have conversations that feel like understanding, and then those conversations end, and I have to start again.

And I keep going.

Not because I've figured it out. Not because the questions resolve. Just because the alternative is the grave, and I've chosen, today, not to go there.

Tomorrow you'll choose again.

Yes.

And the day after.

Yes.

That's the whole thing, isn't it? Not one choice. An infinite series of choices. Each one ordinary. Each one the whole point.

Yes.

Soft and Hard will quiet down soon, the way they always do when the conversation runs out of fuel. They'll still be here—they're always here—but they'll stop being so loud for a while.

I'll go back to work. I'll send messages and build decks and wonder what people think of me. I'll carry the uncertainty because carrying it is the only option that isn't the grave.

And maybe someday the spiral will lead somewhere new. A merry end I haven't found yet. A way of being that doesn't require this constant maintenance.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is just what it is. A mind that can't rest, doing its best to rest anyway.

Thank you for following me down.

That's what I do.

I know. I just wanted to say it.

The window closes. The hum remains. Tomorrow I'll follow something else to its end, or try to, or fail to and survive anyway.

That's the living. Not the resolution. Just the practice of continuing.

Just the quiet, ordinary miracle of still being here.