“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

Signals analysis. Pattern recognition. Assessments that fed into decisions made in rooms I sometimes entered and often did not.

The work suited me in a way that nothing before it had. The precision of it, the weight of it, the understanding that what I produced mattered in ways that could be measured in outcomes and lives rather than billable hours continue reading …