You leave the event. At first, it’s fine. And then, somewhere between the coat rack and the journey home, it starts – That conversation, that sentence, that moment you wish you could rewind. Why did I say that? That sounded awkward. I should’ve said something else. They probably think I’m ….
And just like that, the whole night begins to shift. Not as it happened, but as a story about what you got wrong. We’ve been building this over the last few episodes: what stops you going, what happens when you’re in the room, how you see yourself when you’re there. This is what happens afterwards – the replay, the spiral.
This isn’t reflection. It’s rumination. And if you’re a creative person, you are particularly good at it, because your job is to imagine, to create meaning, to connect dots, to tell stories. Memory and imagination sit very close together in the brain.
