I’m at a party on a rooftop terrace in Bogotá, Colombia, and someone asks how many times we’ve moved.

I’ve got this one. I’ve told it a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. I’m good at it. The number lands, and there’s a little intake of breath I’d come to expect… and then the follow-up: I don’t know how you do it. And I say something rueful and charming about boxes, and everyone in our little social circle looks at me with a warmth I haven’t earned, but I know I’ve broken a little of the awkward ice associated with these types of events.

No one ever contradicts that story. How could they?

For many of the middle and later years you could listen to me talk and come away thinking that I resented my husband’s military career. That’s not accurate. The real truth is less flattering, and I’ve had a lot of practice with it. I didn’t resent his career. I was profoundly proud and grateful… but I did use it.

The moves were the material. The assignments, the timelines I had no control over, the friendships that got eighteen months and then went into a box. All of it was real. All of it was genuinely hard. And none of it was mine to decide. I took all of that, and extended it to cover the rest.

I neglected my health and wellness. I didn’t maintain relationships I cared deeply about. These things that were entirely mine, entirely controllable, regardless of the assignment, or house I lived in. I had an “excellent” reason for all of it: Look at my life!

And I got this wrong for a long time. The challenges were real. The grief was real. Losing a friend to a set of orders is a real loss. Moving a child during their senior year of high school (or every year of high school!) is traumatic. Those things are true. What isn’t true is what I told myself: none of this is up to me.

I told myself I had no control over anything for so long it became fact.

A claim like that has three places, or drawers if you will, it can go:

• Settled: true, done, no longer a question
• Open: might be true, worth examining, ask me again
• Opinion: doesn’t necessarily have an answer and nobody’s wrong

Mine was settled. I wasn’t saying that’s just how I see it. I was saying: this is my life. I would have argued that it was my truth.

My truth isn’t a fourth drawer. It’s a lock you can put on any of the drawers. It carries the full weight of settled — this is how it is… I’m not debating it — and the full protection of opinion, because… how could you argue with my truth?! Nothing behind that lock can be contradicted, which means nothing behind it can be revised.

A settled thing isn’t a question anymore. It doesn’t get asked. It gets worked around. It doesn’t get examined because it wasn’t put in the open drawer.

But this wasn’t really settled. It was a question with an answer. The answer was that I had choices I wasn’t making, and control I was denying the entire time I was telling the boxes story at parties.

To be fair to my husband, who was not in that story at all, until I put him there. He never asked me to trade my health for his rank. He’d have been horrified.

And I need to be fair to the woman on that terrace, because it is easy to see things clearly in hindsight. She wasn’t lying. She had genuinely lost things… a lot of things, over decades. She just couldn’t afford the other drawer.

That’s the part I didn’t understand until much later. It wasn’t laziness that put that question in the wrong place. It was fear. If some things are just true, then I might be on the wrong side of it… and I was. And every year it stayed settled was a year I didn’t have to find out.

It took years to move it into open — and I didn’t do it alone. What changed that allowed me to move it wasn’t an afternoon of insight. It took several people who loved me enough to be slightly less charmed by the boxes story than I wanted them to be, and some serious introspection and unglamorous self-examination and “internal work” to finally believe them.

The practice I’ve been building rests on seven truths — I call them beams. The first one is three words: Truth is real. Some things are true whether we want them to be or not. Some questions are settled, some are genuinely open, and understanding the difference is most of the world. It sounds like a philosophy seminar until you notice the cost. If truth is real, then I can be wrong. Not just “mistaken about details”… wrong, about something I’ve organized my life around.

Everyone I know has something they’ve locked in settled, and I promise you it doesn’t feel like you’re hiding. It feels like you’re seeing clearly. It feels like maturity… like having made peace with something you can’t do anything about. It feels like the “serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

That prayer is a good prayer. The acceptance in it is real work that I’ve needed on many occasions. But it asks for three things, and I only ever wanted two. Serenity to accept what I can’t change. Courage to change what I can. … and the wisdom to know the difference. That wisdom is key. Without it, I’m the one deciding what goes in which drawer, and I will decide in my favor (my comfortable favor) every time.

I still do it… put things in the wrong drawer. Less often, and smaller than before, and I catch it sooner than I used to — sometimes while the sentence is still being spoken.

The Human Flourishing Pledge asks people to put truth ahead of tribe. I signed it thinking about the current issues in the country. But the reality is the first tribe you protect is you.

Part 3 of 14