Unpacking a thing I talked about with my therapist not too long ago:

Growing up in fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, I was taught about the immense importance of The Truth, about the need to read, study, parse, understand, explain, and defend a sacred book, and that not getting it right (or at least right enough) had eternal consequences. And I was a good student.

In retrospect, there are all sorts of problems with that approach. It’s not as simple as the teachers said it was. There’s millennia of interpretation around what the things mean. Nobody ever gets it 100% right. The point isn’t about getting it all exactly right, anyway - it’s about loving God and our neighbor.

And yet, let me describe my career niche (certification of safety-critical airborne software), an expertise in which I have risen to the highest levels in my industry.

We have a complicated and somewhat esoteric “sacred book” - an industry standard for how to do safety-critical software. I spent a long time reading and studying that book, understanding the meaning and subtext, teaching that meaning to others, evangelizing its importance, evaluating others’ attempts to meet that standard, and arguing with incredible levels of pedantry about whether the words that a project wrote down actually correctly describe that they demonstrated compliance to the book.

Sound familiar at all?

It’s a complicated thing, trying to pick apart and understand both how the same formative experiences were in some ways difficult and damaging and in other ways created skills that make me very successful in some aspects of my life.