Factory Settings

A woman quits the book club she’s been in for eleven years. She doesn’t want to host the holidays anymore. She stops showing up to the thing she used to organize. She’d rather sit on a beach with a paperback and a sandwich than go to one more brunch where people talk about their “next chapter.”

Give it about a week before somebody explains her to herself.

She’s conditioned. She’s in resistance. She’s in her Not-Self. She’s out of alignment. She needs to come back to herself.

I like Human Design. I like the idea of deconditioning: noticing everything you soaked up from your mother, your church, your culture, your first boss, and setting down what was never yours to carry. That’s useful.

But I’ve started to think we reach for it too fast, as if every change in a grown woman is a malfunction waiting for a diagnosis.

Maybe she’s conditioned. Sure. It happens.

Or maybe she buried somebody. Maybe she turned fifty-five. Maybe her knees changed, or her marriage did, or her tolerance for bullshit. Maybe she’s finally lived long enough to know that the thing she kept trying to want is something she doesn’t want, and maybe never did.

There’s a word for that, and it isn’t conditioning. It’s getting older. Some of us paid full price for it.

When every change that doesn’t match the map gets treated as suspicious, the map has started doing the living for her.

How do you tell conditioning apart from a woman who changed for perfectly good reasons? I don’t have a clean answer. I’m suspicious of anyone who does.

What I do know is that sometimes the smartest thing is to stop interpreting for a minute and ask what actually happened. Not everything needs healing. Not everything needs to go back to factory settings.

Sometimes she’s just different now.

She’s down on the beach, if you want to ask her about it. Bring a sandwich.