17. A Game of Snakes and Ladders

Where was that damn note?

Regardless of the note, regardless of the preparation, somehow you still ended up doing exactly what you meant not to do.

And you responded exactly as you had promised yourself you would not.

Afterwards comes that peculiar sinking feeling.

Oh, for God's sake. Not again.

You had seen it. Understood it. Perhaps even rehearsed the alternative.

You knew what you wanted to do differently.

Why does understanding disappear when you need it most?

Yet here you are, apparently right back at square one again.

Perhaps the understanding did not disappear at all.

The conditions changed.

In the quiet beforehand, the new response was perfectly available. You could think about it. Find the words. Consider the alternatives. Perhaps even write them down.

But the new lines still have to be remembered.

The old ones don't.

Do you recall your Understudy? The one that likes to show up when conditions change?

Your Understudy doesn't need the note. It already knows its lines.

It simply never received the memo that the script had changed.

And once the scene is over, the next part is waiting too:

The internal newsreel: already loaded and ready:

Previous conversations. Previous mistakes. Previous occasions when you said the wrong thing, stayed too long, left too quickly, explained too much, or somehow found yourself in exactly this position before.

One after another. Old news presented as breaking news. And now there is fresh footage:

This one. The evidence seems fairly conclusive:

Same pattern.

Same response.

Same result.

You threw the dice. Bad roll. Down the snake you go.

The more clearly you can see the pattern, the worse the apparent failure can feel. What once passed as an unfortunate conversation, a bad decision or simply one of those things now has company.

You know what you are looking at, which makes the conclusion arrive rather quickly:

Nothing changed.

All that understanding. All that effort. And still you ended up here.

Perhaps even further back than before, because this time you knew better.

That is the particularly cruel part:

Understanding can make repetition feel less forgivable, not more.

The newsreel grows longer. The case against you gets stronger. And the board appears to have returned your piece neatly to the beginning:

Square one.

Except there is one small difficulty with that conclusion.

At square one, you didn't even know there was a game.