My dog Marla has absolutely no interest in whether I've had a productive day.
She doesn't know whether I've replied to every email, remembered every birthday or crossed enough things off my list. She doesn't care whether I've been useful or impressive. If I've spent the morning writing, she'll settle at my feet. If I've spent it staring out of the window because I can't quite find my thoughts, she'll settle there too. The welcome is the same.
I don’t romanticise this and imagine dogs have solved the mysteries of being human, but I do recognise they seem blissfully uninterested in one of the questions that has shaped much of my own life.
What does it mean to be good? For years, I don't think I ever asked myself the question directly. I simply lived inside the answer.
Good people worked hard. Good people coped. Good people replied promptly, remembered things, didn't make a fuss, showed up, smiled, tried harder, stayed grateful, and didn't disappoint anyone if they could help it. It never occurred to me that this was only one definition of goodness. It felt less like an opinion and more like gravity: simply the way the world is.
Lately, though, I've found myself asking a different question.
What's the story inside this story?
Where did this version of goodness come from? Who handed it to me? Which parts belong to my family, which to school, which to work, which to the culture I've grown up inside? Which parts have helped me to become more fully myself, and which have quietly asked me to become smaller?
I'm becoming less interested in the stories themselves than in the inheritance they carry.
I've found myself returning to the story of Eve. Not because I think it explains everything, nor because I want to argue about whether it happened, but because I wonder why this story has endured for so long. A woman reaches towards knowledge. Towards curiosity. Towards something she has been told is not hers. She steps beyond a boundary and the world changes.
I wonder what we've inherited from that story, whether consciously or not. How many of us learned, somewhere along the way, that curiosity can be dangerous? That questioning the rules carries a cost and more painfully, that belonging sometimes depends upon obedience.
Perhaps that's why so many of us become extraordinarily good at reading a room, anticipating other people's needs and shaping ourselves accordingly. It's an ancient human skill. We belong because we learn the stories of our tribe.
But every inheritance asks something of us.
Sometimes the stories we've inherited help us to flourish. Sometimes they protect us. They teach us kindness, responsibility and care for one another. But sometimes they outlive the life they were trying to protect.
People come to therapy at precisely the moment an old story stops working. An illness arrives. A relationship ends. A parent dies. Hormones shift. A child is born. Burnout quietly takes up residence. Suddenly the person who has always been able to be "good" in the old ways discovers they can't anymore.
What interests me isn't so much the crisis, but the invitation hidden inside it.
Nature has never expected endless summer. Winter isn't a failure. Storms aren't mistakes. The river doesn't apologise for changing course after heavy rain; it simply responds to the landscape it finds itself moving through.
We are no different.
Perhaps healing begins, not when we become better at living inside the stories we've inherited, but when we become curious enough to ask whether they're still ours.
Not every story needs to be discarded and many deserve to be cherished.
But perhaps some are waiting to be rewritten and I think that's why writing has always mattered so much to me. Not because writing necessarily changes the past, but because it allows us – word by word – to discover that we were never only characters in somebody else's story and that we are allowed to be the author of a new one.