The king hadn’t inherited the kingdom so much as it had arrived at the right moment. The old queen died without an heir anyone trusted, and three cousins spent a rough winter arguing about which of them had the better claim. By spring, the rest of the kingdom was tired of the cousins’ arguing that it settled on the cousin who seemed most agreeable to everyone, which is a different quality than capable, though it took years for anyone to notice the difference.

The kingdom before the new king had been slow and a little stubborn, run by a woman who kept ledgers in her own hand and made you wait while she checked them. People complained about this constantly and missed it within a year of her being gone.

The new king was not slow. He was quick-witted, and—separately—remarkably easy to talk to, and that combination turned out to be a problem. Whoever stood in front of him became, for the length of that conversation, the only person who had ever spoken to him. His court called this decisiveness. His advisors called it open-mindedness. Nobody called it what it was, because there wasn’t yet a word in that kingdom for a system with no persistent state.

The village at the edge of the kingdom had one well for as long as anyone could remember. It sat a decent walk from most houses, on a low rise the old maps called The Founder’s Well. Every spring, a woman from the water guild came, tested it, and carved that year’s date into the stone along with a small mark meaning clean. Decades of dates ran down the side of that stone like tally marks. Nobody had gotten sick from it in living memory. People trusted it. It had been checked every year, and it had never failed.

The walk to the well was the complaint. It always had been. So when a group of villagers petitioned the king to fund a second well, closer in, he said yes on the spot. He said yes to most things people told him directly and with conviction.

The second well was dug within the season. The king came himself for the opening, and said a few warm words. By the end of the day, people were calling it the King’s Well. Nobody from the water guild ever tested it. There hadn’t been time, and the king hadn’t asked, and asking would have meant admitting his own well might not be trustworthy yet, which didn’t occur to him as a real possibility. He had said yes. That felt, to him, like the same thing as the well being safe.

Most of the village switched to the King’s Well within a month. It was closer. It was, everyone agreed, exactly as good as the old one, though nobody could say why they believed that, beyond the fact that the king had smiled at it and nobody had gotten sick yet.

Still, a handful of people kept walking to the Founder’s Well, ignoring the closer one entirely. To everyone else, it looked stubborn, pointless even. But they had decades of carved dates behind that choice, and that kind of proof doesn’t evaporate just because something closer opened up.

Then, one afternoon, an old woman named Iyla noticed something the rest of the village hadn’t: the households drinking from the King’s Well were more often sick. Nothing dramatic. Stomachs, mostly. Nobody had died. But Iyla kept a kind of list in her head, and after enough seasons the pattern was obvious to her and invisible to everyone still filling buckets a hundred yards closer to home. When she told others, they called her difficult. A few even called her jealous of the new well’s convenience, which made no sense, but got said anyway.

What Iyla had was its own kind of attention—a specific, evidenced suspicion, built the same patient way trust gets built, just aimed in the other direction. She wasn’t undecided, waiting to see. She’d already looked, already counted the stomachs, and reached her own conclusion long before anyone else was willing to check.

Word of the sicknesses reached a traveling auditor—half inspector, half diagnostician, the kind of figure every fable needs and every village council could use—who came to compare both wells side by side.

Visibility of system status, he said, running a hand along the Founder’s stone, tracing the decades of dates. This well tells you, in plain carved fact, exactly how recently it was checked and by whom. Your king’s well tells you nothing. Silence isn’t neutral. Silence reads as safety to people who aren’t looking very closely, and it took Iyla noticing a pattern of stomachaches to make anyone look closely at all.

Then, at the King’s Well: Error prevention. Nobody had tested this water before the village started drinking it; the test came after people were already getting sick, if it came at all. The best inspection is the one that happens before the harm, not the one that explains the harm afterward. A well doesn’t need a good excuse. It needs thorough testing before you hand people a bucket.

Then, to the crowd that had gathered, most of whom were still visibly more loyal to the well the king had smiled at than curious about whether it deserved to be: Consistency. Everyone in the village used the word “trustworthy” to describe both wells, as though it meant the same thing applied to either—decades of carved proof on one, a king’s warm afternoon glance on the other. If a word can mean two completely different standards of evidence depending on which well you’re standing next to, the word has lost all meaning.

The fix, when it came, wasn’t clever. And that’s usually true for fables. The king ordered the water guild to test his well the way they’d always tested the Founder’s: properly, seasonally, with dates carved in stone for anyone to check for themselves. It came back, eventually, safe enough, with one spring’s adjustment to a runoff channel nobody had thought to route around.

The sicknesses stopped.

The stone by the King’s Well started collecting its own tally marks, one date at a time, the only way trust had ever actually been built at the other well. And while Iyla didn’t get an apology, she did get something better: she got to be right, on the record, in stone, where everyone could see it.

“You’ve just built the only thing that matters. Trust isn’t the well you smiled at. It’s the well someone checked, and checked again, and wrote down honestly every time, whether or not you were standing there to take credit for it,” the auditor told the king. Then he left the village on foot, unthanked.

As for the king, the story doesn’t give him a full redemption, not really. Fables are honest that way. The king fixed the one well because a specific old woman refused to stop saying what she’d seen, which is a different thing than learning, on his own, to tell the difference between being liked or being trustworthy. He went on running on the last voice in the room for most matters that came after. The court still called it something flattering. The people who loved him carried the continuity he never did— because someone had to.

Here, if the story has one, is the moral: trust is not a feeling you inspire in someone. It’s a structure you build, one honestly carved date at a time, until the person on the receiving end stops wondering if the water’s safe and starts knowing it is. And distrust, when it’s earned, isn’t the absence of trust. It’s trust’s mirror: the same confidence, built the same slow way, out of the same repeated checking, except the evidence kept showing the thing that couldn’t be relied on. Trust and distrust both take attention. Neither one is a default.

Loyalty asks for none of this. It can run for years on nothing but convenience or on the memory of someone likable once standing there and smiling. Iyla had spent seasons paying attention—real attention, the kind loyalty never bothers with, the same discipline the water guild spent on the Founder’s stone—and it kept leading her to the same answer: not this one.

Once the King’s Well had its own decade of carved dates, Iyla started drinking from it too, without ceremony, the way she did everything. She’d never distrusted the water, not really. She’d distrusted the silence.

The moment the well started keeping a record, she had no more argument left to make.

It’s rarely the person with the big-shot title. Yes, I’ve learned to spot this person almost on instinct now, because the pattern repeats itself so reliably that it stopped surprising me somewhere around the third organization I was working with.

Simply put, every organization has a person who knows how it actually works.

They know which form to use, where the current version lives, and why the instructions on the website are technically correct but practically useless.

They know that the request must go to Angela, even though the directory says Marcus handles it. They know which meeting needs to happen before the official meeting. And they know that the “final” document is not the file called Final_FINAL_v3_ACTUALFINAL, but the one buried nine replies deep in a thread whose subject line stopped describing its contents weeks ago. They know who can approve an exception, which deadline is flexible, and what happened the last time someone tried to follow the process exactly as written.

Sometimes this is their formal job, what they were hired to do. Often, it is not.

I’ve seen versions of this person in universities, corporations, nonprofits, volunteer groups, healthcare systems, and even families. Sometimes they are an administrator. Or a longtime employee, a project manager, a nurse, a receptionist, a longtime volunteer, or the colleague who has been around long enough to remember why everything is the way it is.

They are the person everyone asks for…well…everything. And because they usually know the answer, the organization appears to have one.

The organization’s memory has a name

We tend to imagine institutional knowledge as something an organization possesses. It lives in the handbook. The shared drive. The database. The onboarding materials. The carefully-named folder called “Resources.” But much of what allows an organization to function never makes it into those places.

It lives in people. It lives not only in what they remember, but also in the connections they make between things: the policy and the exception, the person and the history, the official workflow and the workaround that became necessary six years ago and, still is, to this day, never formally acknowledged.

A document can tell you what the process is supposed to be. A person can tell you what usually goes wrong: which step everyone skips, which form bounces back twice before it’s accepted, which approval actually needs two signatures instead of the one the policy lists. One is the process. The other is how the work actually gets done. And that difference matters.

Knowledge-management researchers have a name for that second thing, the how-it-actually-gets-done kind of knowing. They call it tacit knowledge, a term the chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi coined back in 1966 with a line that’s stuck around for sixty years because nobody’s said it better since: we know more than we can tell. Judgment, context, relationships, the small signals that tell an experienced person when the usual approach is about to fail—Polanyi was describing exactly this, decades before anyone called it a workplace problem. The American Productivity & Quality Center’s (APQC) more recent work on knowledge transfer keeps circling back to the same finding: so much of what an organization actually knows lives only in the heads of the people who’ve done the job long enough to know it.

Tacit knowledge is why a new employee can read every available document and still end up asking Angela for help.

Competence can hide a broken system

The person who knows how everything works is usually seen as extraordinarily capable. And they are.

But their competence can conceal just how much the organization depends on them. Each time they retrieve a missing file, explain an undocumented decision, redirect a request, or warn someone about a predictable complication, they slowly but surely close a gap in the system. And, because the gap gets closed, it rarely gets properly fixed.

The work continues. The deadline is met. The problem disappears before anyone with the authority to redesign the process has to see it. This creates a strange organizational illusion: the more effectively one person compensates for a weak system, the more functional the system appears. In a sense, the person becomes a bridge everyone mistakes for solid ground.

Eventually, questions begin to flow toward them automatically: Can you remind me why we do it this way? Do you know who has access to this? Where did we put that? Has this happened before? Who should I talk to?

No single question seems burdensome. Most take only a few minutes. But the person is no longer simply doing their own job. On a given day, they’re the department’s search engine when the intranet fails, its historian when nobody remembers why a rule exists, its translator when two teams use the same word to mean different things.

They become infrastructure. And infrastructure is easiest to ignore while it’s working. Nobody thinks about the plumbing until the pipe bursts.

I’ve noticed something else, too, watching this happen across enough organizations to stop calling it coincidence: it’s almost always a woman who ends up in this role. Often a woman of color. Not exclusively, but often enough that I no longer treat it as an accident. The unglamorous work of remembering, of keeping track of what nobody else bothered to write down, tends to land on the people already expected to absorb whatever the org chart doesn’t account for.

Researchers Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart spent years studying exactly this pattern and gave it a name: non-promotable work, the tasks that keep an organization running and never show up on anyone’s review. Research by law professor Joan C. Williams and business researchers Katherine W. Phillips and Erika V. Hall goes further into why that work lands so disproportionately on women of color specifically, not just women in general: their studies on workplace bias found that women of color are more often expected to prove their competence over and over, and more often handed the office “housework” nobody’s tracking, the two expectations stacking instead of canceling out.

I didn’t need Linda and her coauthors or Joan and hers to notice the pattern; I needed them to confirm what I’d already watched happen, more than once, to the people I respected.

Knowing is work

We don’t always recognize memory as labor.

Remembering can look passive, as though information simply remains inside certain people because they happen to have good recall. But organizational memory is active work. Someone has to notice which details matter—and still remember, four years later, why they mattered enough to explain again and again. Someone has to know that two departments use the same word to mean different things, and catch the mistranslation before it becomes a problem.

Someone has to know not only where the information is, but also what it means.

This is especially easy to overlook when the person does that work generously. They answer quickly. They forward the old email. They explain the acronym again. They add the context that keeps everyone else from making the wrong call. Their knowledge becomes so reliably available that people stop seeing it as a contribution. It starts to feel like a feature of the organization.

Then the person goes on vacation. Or gets sick. Or retires. Or changes jobs. Or simply gets tired of being the human help desk. Suddenly, the organization discovers that a process used by twenty people was only ever understood by one. Their absence didn’t create the weakness. It simply revealed it.

Research keeps connecting employee turnover to organizational knowledge loss, and one thing that comes up often is timing: the loss can start well before someone actually leaves, especially in places with no real plan for capturing what that person knows. The risk isn’t only that a person will take information with them. It’s that the organization never valued them enough, while they were there, to notice everything they were holding together.

The handoff-document fantasy

Many organizations address this problem shortly before someone leaves.

They schedule a transition meeting. They create a spreadsheet. They ask the departing person to write down everything someone else might need to know, usually while that person is finishing projects, transferring responsibilities, training colleagues, cleaning out an inbox and a desk, and attempting to compress fifteen years of experience into a document called “Handoff Notes.”

The result may be useful. It’s rarely sufficient.

The problem is partly timing. Knowledge transfer can’t be treated as an emergency evacuation procedure.

But it’s also a problem of form. A checklist can preserve steps, but it can’t preserve judgment. A contact list can tell you whom to call, not why that person needs to be the one consulted first. The folder holds the final decision and loses everything around it—the rejected options, the competing pressures, the one small condition that changed the outcome. In my experience, in academic departments, the process-is-a-person person, is almost always the department secretary, the one person who knows which forms the dean’s office actually accepts, which committee assignments are political landmines, and why a policy exists that nobody else currently employed remembers writing.

Information storage is not the same as organizational memory.

Documentation is only the beginning

The solution to this problem isn’t simply to document everything.

Anyone who has searched a shared drive containing seven years of abandoned templates knows that more documentation can create its own kind of ignorance. The goal isn’t accumulation. It’s usable continuity, which means asking better questions while the knowledge is still alive and in use.

What decisions still depend on one person’s memory? Where does the written process diverge from the one people actually follow? And of what’s left—what needs a document, and what needs a mentor standing next to someone the first time they try a task and get it wrong?

Some of this belongs in a decision log, a process map, a clearly maintained system. Some of it only transfers through mentoring, shadowing, or the kind of conversation that happens because two people are in the same room on a Wednesday before the big meeting. And, frankly, some processes shouldn’t be preserved at all. Sometimes the person everyone depends on is carrying the knowledge of how to survive a process that should have been fixed years ago. In that case, the goal isn’t to document the workaround more beautifully. It’s to remove the need for it.

This is the larger design question: how do you build the structures that let knowledge move on its own, instead of relying on one person to carry it?

That question is only getting more urgent as organizations rush to point AI at their internal knowledge base. But even the research on human-AI decision-making keeps landing on the same limit: organizational knowledge is scattered across software, documents, and whatever’s still only in someone’s head. A system can search what’s been captured; it can’t reliably retrieve context that was never made visible in the first place. Put another way, technology might help you find the file. Someone still has to explain why that file matters.

The process should survive the person

The person who knows how everything works is incredibly valuable. The goal isn’t to make them less valuable, or to extract everything in their head before they can escape the organization. It’s to stop making their constant availability the price of keeping the place running.

Healthy organizations don’t eliminate human expertise. They build conditions where it can be shared, questioned, and carried forward. They notice when one person has become the route every uncertainty travels through, and they treat explaining things as real work, ongoing, not something crammed into the weeks before someone leaves. And they notice the other thing too: that being everyone’s only route in is exhausting, and that exhaustion is often part of why the person quits or retires at all.

Every organization has at least one bridge nobody built on purpose. It just showed up, over the years, made of goodwill and long memory and someone’s refusal to let things fall apart. I’ve spent my career learning to spot those bridges early. Increasingly, my job isn’t to walk across them. It’s to ask who’s building the second one, before the first one gets tired of holding everyone else up.

Ask someone how they make dinner, and they’ll probably say, “Oh, I just cook.”

Just. That’s the giveaway.

Because “just cook” actually includes opening the refrigerator six times, discovering you’re out of garlic, wondering whether sour cream expires, loading the dishwasher enough to make room for one cutting board on the counter, and somehow using every mixing bowl you own.

People compress complexity into labels. UX designers spend a lot of time pulling those labels apart.

Years ago, while I was in graduate school, I shadowed a professor for a research project. I followed her through classes, office hours, meetings, and the thousand invisible transitions that make up an academic life. When I gave her a copy of my final paper, she laughed—and then she groaned.

“I hadn’t realized I did all of that.”

For a while, she said, I’d made her too aware of her own work. She could suddenly see all of the tiny decisions she’d stopped noticing years before.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot over the last fifteen years.

Once you’ve learned to see the work beneath the work, ordinary life starts looking very different. Last week, for example.

Usability Evaluation

Product: Adulthood.

Users: Two married, tired adults with good intentions.

Overall Assessment: Functional but unnecessarily complex.

Recommendation: Significant improvements needed. Users remain, inexplicably, satisfied.

Task 1: Get Up in the Morning

User Goal: Get out of bed and start the day.

Estimated Completion Time: Fifteen minutes.

Actual Completion Time: Forty-five minutes.

Observations

User 1’s alarm goes off.

User 1 turns alarm off, not snooze, with the full and sincere intention of getting up immediately.

User 1 does not get up immediately.

User 1 checks phone “just for a second.”

Eleven minutes pass.

User 1 remembers they are getting up.

User 1 sits up.

User 1 remains sitting on the edge of the bed for an indeterminate amount of time, doing nothing in particular.

User 2, already several tasks ahead of User 1, asks if User 1 if they’re getting up.

User 1 confirms that they are, in fact, getting up.

User 1 does not get up.

User 1 finally stands.

User 1 and User 2 make their bed halfway and decides this counts as “made.”

User 1 goes to the bathroom.

User 1 looks in the mirror longer than necessary for someone who is about to shower anyway.

User 2 goes downstairs and starts the coffee.

User 1 checks one more phone notification that could have waited.

The day has technically begun. Evidence of actual functioning is mixed.

Friction Points

1. Waking up and being awake are two different events.

2. Phones are not a bridge to being awake. They’re a detour.

3. “Five more minutes” has never once been five minutes.

Rating ★★☆☆☆ — “Vertical, but not yet operational.”

Task 2: Leave the House to Go to the Store

User Goal: Exit home to go to the store.

Estimated Completion Time: Two minutes.

Actual Completion Time: Seventeen minutes.

Observations

User 2 locates keys.

User 2 realizes phone is charging upstairs.

User 2 retrieves phone.

User 2 makes their way to the door.

User 2 remembers travel coffee mug.

User 2 finds travel mug in the living room.

Mug is empty.

User 2 fills travel mug with stale but drinkable coffee.

User 2 notices a package that needs to go to the post office.

User 2 places package by the door, where it will remain for five more days.

User 2 remembers reusable grocery bags.

User 2 retrieves grocery bags.

User 2 remembers shopping list on the refrigerator.

User 2 grabs shopping list from the fridge.

User 2 returns to front door.

User 2 uses bathroom “just in case.”

User 2 exits home.

Five minutes pass.

User 2 re-enters home because sunglasses are still on the kitchen table.

Friction Points

1. Critical resources stored in multiple locations.

2. High reliance on memory.

3. Excessive task switching.

4. Bathroom always becomes urgent approximately twelve seconds before departure.

Rating ★★☆☆☆ — “Exit achieved. Dignity, questionable.”

Task 3: Put Away the Groceries

User Goal: Unload groceries.

Estimated Completion Time: Ten minutes.

Actual Completion Time: Twenty-eight minutes.

Observations

User 1 opens refrigerator.

User 1 pauses.

User 1 stares.

User 1 moves one yogurt from the first shelf to the second shelf.

User 2 moves the yogurt from the second shelf back to the first.

User 2 discovers leftovers from Thursday.

User 2 attempts to determine whether leftovers are “still good.”

User 2 decides this is a Future User (User 1?) problem.

User 1 finds half a lemon in a plastic sandwich bag of unknown age.

User 1 briefly considers throwing it away.

User 1 places it back on the shelf.

User 1 wonders why they own three different mustards.

User 1 discovers items purchased because Users 1 and 2 were “definitely going to start eating more of these.”

Evidence suggests this has not occurred.

User 2 attempts to fit frozen vegetables into an already-full freezer.

User 2 removes two frozen pizzas to make room.

User 2 discovers ice cream behind frozen peas.

User 2 tells User 1 about their discovery.

Unexpected morale boost for User 1 and User 2.

Users 1 and 2 forget original objective for approximately fifteen seconds.

Users 1 and 2 complete task of putting away groceries.

Friction Points

1. Refrigerator contains historical artifacts.

2. Inventory system relies heavily on memory and optimism.

3. Users consistently overestimate future vegetable consumption.

Rating ★★★☆☆ — “Redeemed entirely by the ice cream.”

Task 4: Make Supper

User Goal: Cook supper.

Estimated Completion Time: Thirty minutes.

Actual Completion Time: Seventy minutes.

Observations

User 1 begins recipe with confidence.

User 1 reads step three and realizes something needed to have started marinating two hours ago.

User 1 shrugs and improvises.

User 1 uses the wrong-size pot, out of habit rather than logic.

Onions take longer than the recipe claims. Onions always take longer than the recipe claims.

User 1 remembers to preheat the oven only now.

User 1 discovers they’re out of one ingredient the recipe called “essential.”

User 1 substitutes with something from the pantry that is, definitionally, not essential.

Smoke detector activates briefly, unrelated to any actual danger.

User 2 opens a window and fans the detector with a dish towel, while User 1 is continuing to cook throughout.

User 1 tastes the sauce four times and adjusts absolutely nothing.

User 2, still fanning the detector, asks “how much longer” and receives the answer they receive every night: “like ten more minutes,” a unit of time that corresponds to no known duration.

Dinner is, ultimately, surprisingly, good.

Kitchen, however, looks like a small, food-related crime occurred.

Friction Points

1. Recipes lie about time.

2. Every kitchen task expands to fill the available panic.

3. “Ten more minutes” is a vibe, not a measurement.

Rating ★★★★☆ — “Structurally chaotic. Outcome: delicious.”

Task 5: Decide What to Watch (and on Which Platform)

User Goal: Choose something to watch together before bed.

Estimated Completion Time: Five minutes.

Actual Completion Time: Forty-nine minutes, which is longer than the show itself.

Observations

User 1 and User 2 sit down on their living room couch, optimistic.

User 1 holds the TV remote and asks User 2 “What do you want to watch?”

User 2 responds “I don’t know, what do you want to watch?”

User 1 opens streaming platform one. Scrolls.

User 1 opens streaming platform two. Scrolls.

Users 1 and 2 recognize nothing on the list they made months ago; the list has become aspirational rather than actionable.

Users 1 and 2 half-watch three TV-show-promo trailers.

User 1 suggests a show they’ve already finished. User 2 remembers this partway through the suggestion.

User 2 suggests a show they’re mid-season on. Neither user remembers where they left off.

User 1 seriously considers rewatching an old favorite instead of deciding anything new. Tempting. Comfortable.

Twenty minutes pass with no show selected.

User 2 briefly falls asleep during deliberation.

User 1 finally selects something almost at random.

Selected show turns out to be great.

Neither user remembers this night the next time they sit down to choose what to watch together.

Friction Points

1. Too many platforms function like too many choices in a grocery aisle.

2. Decision paralysis, dressed up as leisure.

3. The particular paradox of “relaxing” requiring this much negotiation.

Rating ★★★☆☆ — “The deciding costs more than the watching.”

Task 6: Go to Bed

User Goal: Go to sleep.

Estimated Completion Time: Fifteen minutes.

Actual Completion Time: Seventy-four minutes.

Observations

User 1 announces, “I’m going to bed.”

No movement from the downstairs couch to the upstairs bedroom occurs.

Conversation with User 2 begins.

Users 1 and 2 introduce five additional topics, none related to sleep.

Users 1 and 2 eventually stand up from the couch and walk upstairs.

User 2 checks that the thermostat is set correctly, adjusts it by one degree for reasons unclear to User 1.

User 1 checks the weather for tomorrow, for the third time today.

User 1 remembers and takes nighttime pills.

User 2 fills water bottle and sets it on their nightstand, within reach of no one.

Both users enter their en-suite bathroom and brush their teeth simultaneously, in the specific silence of two adults sharing one sink.

User 1 washes their face, applying four separate products in a fixed, non-negotiable order.

User 2 removes glasses and declares themselves “basically blind” for the remainder of the evening.

User 2 remembers the front door might be unlocked.

User 2 goes back downstairs to check.

Front door was locked.

User 2 returns upstairs satisfied.

Upon entering their bedroom, User 2 turns the bedroom lights off.

User 1 finishes their bathroom routine and walks to their side of the bed.

User 1 remembers eye drops and lip balm, requests the lights back on.

User 2 turns the lights back on.

Both users get into bed.

User 1 sets an alarm, checks it twice, unconvinced the first check counted.

User 2 checks their phone “one more time.”

Conversation resumes, now horizontal.

User 2 asks User 1 “are you tired, honey? shall we go to sleep?” with no accompanying silence from User 1.

Twenty more minutes of talking follows.

Actual silence eventually occurs.

User 2 is now on their phone in the dark, having expressly agreed thirty seconds earlier not to do this.

Sleep occurs eventually, by a process neither user could describe if asked.

Unexpected Finding: Users appear genuinely happy throughout nearly every delay. No intervention recommended.

Friction Points

1. Bedtime is not one task. It’s roughly twenty smaller tasks wearing a trench coat.

2. Asking if you’re tired doesn’t make you tired. It makes you talk about being tired.

3. “Going to bed” and “going to sleep” are two entirely different projects that happen to share a name.

Rating ★★★★★ — “Wildly inefficient. But their closeness is the whole feature. Would not change a thing.”

Overall Findings

The primary issue in each task is not user competence. The primary issue is task definition.

Users consistently describe large systems of activity as single actions.

“I’ll just get up.”

“I’ll just run to the store.”

“I’ll just put the groceries away.”

“I’ll just make dinner.”

“I’ll just find something to watch.”

“I’ll just go to bed.”

Each of those “justs” hides dozens of tiny decisions, transitions, and opportunities for interruption. It’s no wonder we end our days feeling like we were busy without accomplishing anything. We weren’t failing to complete simple tasks. We were completing complicated ones while pretending they were simple.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved UX.

People think it’s about designing apps or websites. And, sometimes it is those things. But, at its best, UX does something much more interesting.

It makes invisible work visible.

It notices the steps everyone else has compressed into habit. It reminds us that friction isn’t always a personal failure. Sometimes it’s simply the natural result of asking human beings to navigate systems that are more complicated than they appear.

And once you’ve learned to see those hidden steps, you can’t really unsee them.

Which, admittedly, makes getting up, leaving the house, putting away the groceries, making supper, choosing something to watch, and going to bed considerably more entertaining than they have any right to be.

Somewhere around my fortieth observation, I noticed I wasn't really reviewing tasks anymore. I was reviewing a marriage—the version that shows up in the unglamorous middle of an ordinary day, not the one in anniversary photos. Turns out it’s a five-star product. Efficiency was never the point. Every one of those mundane steps was just another way of saying “I do.”

I could say it’s about design. Or language. Or disability. Or family. Or faith. Or systems.

None of those answers is wrong. They just aren’t complete.

This publication has become my way of practicing attention. It’s where I try to look a little longer at the ordinary parts of life, not because they’re ordinary, but because those ordinary parts of life rarely stay that way once you stop rushing past them.

Over the past few years, my eyes have changed.

These are eleven things I didn’t notice until I started paying attention.

1. I didn’t notice that language changes what we notice.

Sometimes we think words merely describe reality.

More often, they create it.

The first time I heard the phrase invisible labor, I suddenly had a way to describe work I’d seen my entire life—the meal planning nobody assigns, the emotional weather-tracking, the remembering. The same thing happened when I learned situational disability, desire paths, cognitive load. Each phrase handed me a flashlight for a room I’d been walking through in the dark.

Once I had the words, I couldn’t unsee what they pointed to. A colleague’s short temper became “cognitive load” instead of “having a bad day.” A worn path across the university green-space, cutting the corner everyone official kept insisting people shouldn’t cut, became a desire path—evidence, not disobedience.

Words don’t just help us communicate. They teach us what to look for.

2. I didn’t notice that slowing down reveals more than speeding up.

We’re taught that faster is better. Faster decisions. Faster answers. Faster productivity.

While speed is good at helping us finish, it’s terrible at helping us notice.

I used to read a room in about four seconds: who’s in a good mood, who needs handling, what the agenda is. Now I sit in the same room and let it show me more: the person who checked their phone twice in ten minutes, the joke that landed a half-second too hard, the chair nobody’s sitting in on purpose.

The longer I sit with a conversation, a photograph, an ordinary Tuesday, the more it starts talking back to me. Patterns emerge. Contradictions surface. Questions appear that urgency never gave me time to ask.

Some things can only be seen when you slow down.

3. I didn’t notice how much of the world was built by someone else’s decision.

I used to think design lived in museums, logos, beautifully crafted products, the things somebody clearly designed, on purpose, with taste.

Now I see design everywhere else, too. In grocery stores, where the milk sits at the back of the store so you have to walk past everything else to get it. In hospital paperwork, which assumes you can read fine print while anxious and frightened. In school pickup/dropoff lines, church bulletins, the shape of a parking lot.

Someone decided all of that. Someone sat in a meeting and made a call, and the call became the world the rest of us just live inside without question.

Most of the time, the best design is invisible.

Until it isn’t—until the form won’t take your answer, the door won’t open one-handed, the line moves for everyone but you.

4. I didn’t notice how much of what we call character is actually training.

Every system has a hidden curriculum.

Some systems reward curiosity. Others reward compliance. Some make room for a question mid-meeting; others make you feel it in your stomach for asking such a thing.

Families have this. Schools have it. Workplaces run entirely on it, usually without naming it once.

I used to hear “she’s just not a team player” and take it as a fact about a person. Now, I hear it and wonder what the team has taught her not to say.

We spend so much energy trying to change people that we forget to ask what the system’s been teaching them all along—and how well they learned it.

Once I started seeing the world differently, I started seeing people differently, too.

5. I didn’t notice how much friction reveals.

The next time you’re at work, listen closely to what requires ten approvals to move forward. Notice who has to explain themselves twice. Pay attention to which inconveniences get absorbed without a word and which ones get treated as an imposition.

I’ve sat in meetings where one person’s request took an email chain and a form, and another person’s identical request took a nod. Nobody said anything. The ease said it for them.

Values are easy to print on a poster in the break room. The friction (or lack thereof) tells the truth a poster can’t.

6. I didn’t notice that laughter is a map.

Every family, every friendship, every workplace has its own sense of humor, its own inside jokes, its own things you absolutely do not joke about, and its own timing.

The things we laugh at reveal what we love, what embarrasses us, what we’ve survived, and, sometimes, what still hurts too much to say straight-faced.

I know exactly which story my family tells at every Christmas, word for word, down to the pew number. It’s the one about Midnight Mass when I was eight, after I’d told my mom three separate times that I didn’t feel well, and she told me three separate times to hush, it’s almost over. It was, in fact, not almost over—and everyone within three pews found out just how sick I was at the same time I did.

Follow the laughter long enough and it’ll take you to the version of the truth everyone's agreed is safe to tell.

The funniest stories are rarely about things going to plan.

They’re about being gloriously, unmistakably human.

7. I didn’t notice we inherit rhythms before we inherit understanding.

Long before I could tell you what my family stood for, I knew where everyone sat at the dining room table. I knew which uncle told which joke and who was supposed to groan. I knew the sound of a particular pot lid at a particular hour, and what it meant for dinner, and how long I had before I needed to be washed and at the table.

Nobody taught me any of this on purpose. I just absorbed it, the way you absorb a song you’ve heard too many times to remember learning it.

It was years before I understood that the rhythm came first, and understanding came later, riding in on its back. The seating chart taught me who mattered before anyone said so out loud. The joke that was allowed and the joke that wasn’t taught me what we protected. The pot lid taught me that some things in a house are constant enough to set a clock by, and that constancy itself was a kind of love, even if nobody called it that.

We inherit far more than eye color. We inherit rhythms, and the rhythms teach us everything else before we’re old enough to notice we’re being taught anything at all.

8. I didn’t notice that the questions people ask reveal the lives they’ve lived.

Some people ask where the bathroom is, first, before anything else.

Some ask what happens if something goes wrong.

Some ask whether there’s enough parking.

Some ask whether everyone in the room will actually be welcome, or just allowed, tolerated.

None of these questions is random. Each one was built by something, a body that’s needed to know the nearest exit, a plan that once fell apart, a room that wasn’t built for them.

If you want to understand someone, don’t start with their answers. Start with the questions they can’t help asking.

Eventually, I realized the biggest surprises weren’t “out there.” They were hiding inside ordinary, everyday life.

9. I didn’t notice that the ordinary is where meaning accumulates.

The grocery list still on the fridge, in handwriting that was mine before I was tired all the time. A favorite coffee mug with the handle worn smooth in one particular spot. A text that says only, Made it home.

Life rarely announces its most important moments with any ceremony. Instead, meaning gathers almost imperceptibly, in the routines we assume we’ll always remember and mostly don’t, until something makes us look back at them on purpose.

10. I didn’t notice that waiting is rarely empty.

We spend so much of our lives waiting. For test results. For children to grow up, then immediately for them to slow back down. For healing. For someone to call. For an answer that, some of the time, never comes at all.

For years, waiting felt like a pause button—the blank space before life resumed, nothing happening

Now, I think waiting is one of the places where life does its most unfolding. Not despite the stillness, but because of it.

The waiting is where you find out what you actually believe about the thing you’re waiting for. It’s where you rehearse both endings. It’s where you’re most yourself, oddly, because there’s nothing to perform and nowhere to be but exactly where you are.

11. I didn’t notice that paying attention changes the person who’s paying attention.

I thought attention was about collecting information—data going in, a slightly fuller picture coming out.

What it actually does is rearrange the collector.

The world hasn’t gotten more interesting over the past several years. The same cashier still asks the same question. The same intersection still runs the same light too short. The same voicemail greeting still plays before anyone picks up. The same handwriting still shows up on the same birthday cards.

None of it was ever hidden.

It was all in plain sight.

I just hadn’t learned how to look.

And once you learn to look, it’s surprisingly difficult to look away.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

The idea is simple enough: our attention is valuable, so companies compete to capture it. An economy, at its root, is a system of exchange—you give something, you get something back, even if the trade is uneven.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself wondering if the “economy” in “attention economy” is the wrong word for what’s actually happening. Attention is what I’m losing, that part is true. But losing it doesn’t feel like a trade. Nobody asked for my attention. Nothing was offered in return for it, not really. My attention was just taken, mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-life.

What I feel is persistent interruption, and interruption asks nothing. It only takes.

Let me explain.

Attention can be given freely. It can be directed toward someone you love, a book you can’t put down, or a conversation with a friend that stretches late into the evening. Attention has depth and then it settles.

Interruption is something else entirely. Interruption doesn’t ask for your attention. It literally breaks it.

We often imagine interruptions as individual moments. A buzzing phone. A needy toddler. An email. Someone stopping by our office for a quick chat.

But the real cost isn’t those moments themselves. It’s what happens afterward.

Gloria Mark, who has studied this for two decades at UC Irvine, has put a number on it: after being pulled away from something, it takes over twenty minutes, on average, to fully return to it. Twenty minutes, for an interruption that took ten seconds.

And Sophie Leroy, a professor of management at the University of Washington, has a name for the mechanism behind that number: attention residue. When you’re pulled from something unfinished, a piece of your mind stays behind, still working the old problem while you’re supposed to be starting on the new one.

You’ve felt this before. You leave a meeting mid-thought, walk back to your office, sit down, and start answering emails—one, two, three. By the fourth, you realize you have no idea what the first three said. You wrote them. You read them. Your eyes moved across every line. But part of you was still in the meeting, finishing a conversation you didn’t get to finish, and there wasn’t enough of you left over to actually process what you were writing and reading.

Every interruption asks your mind to leave one place and reconstruct another. It isn’t just the loss of a minute here, a minute there. It’s the loss of momentum—the thread your thoughts had finally begun to follow, dropped before you knew where it led.

And because we don’t measure momentum, we don’t measure what it costs to lose it. We tend to measure productivity by what gets finished: the report submitted, the inbox cleared, the calendar wiped clean by five o’clock. We rarely measure what never got the chance to finish forming in the first place. An idea interrupted before it’s whole doesn’t register as a loss. It doesn’t leave a space you’d notice. It just stops existing, and nothing marks the spot where it would have been.

The same thing happens in our relationships, I think (stay with me on this).

It’s become strangely normal to be partially present to the people around us, like our spouses, family, friends, and coworkers. To glance at the smartphone screen while someone is telling us about their day. To pause a conversation because something else has demanded our attention. To expect that everyone around us will understand.

There’s a term for this too, coined by former Apple and Microsoft researcher Linda Stone: continuous partial attention. Not multitasking—multitasking is at least trying to finish something. This is more diffuse than that. A low hum of half-attention, always scanning for what else might need you, even when nothing does.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity—not warmth, not good intentions, but the harder discipline of staying focused on another person long enough to actually see them. Turning the phone over, even for a second, is a small withdrawal of that generosity. And the other person feels it before they can name it.

The interruption lasts a few seconds. Its message lasts much longer—there might always be something more important than this moment, than our time together, than me.

As I’ve said elsewhere on Plain Sight, even our rest has become interruptible (again, stay with me on this).

We tell ourselves we’re relaxing. We sit down with a novel and read four pages before checking a text message that wasn’t urgent. We stand at the kitchen window with coffee and remember, mid-sip, a message from Tuesday we never answered. Twenty minutes later we’re reading old emails, not because anything is wrong or needs fixing, but because stillness has started to feel like a task with no instructions.

There’s a reason unfinished things won’t leave us alone. An incomplete task stays active in the mind long after a finished one gets filed away and forgotten; some part of the brain won’t let it rest until it’s resolved. That’s why the podcast episode you didn’t finish nags at you halfway through a hike. Why an unsent birthday text surfaces, uninvited, right as you’re finally drifting off to sleep. The task doesn’t have to be pressing. It just has to be open.

Even if our bodies were technically at rest, our minds never were.

I think the greatest casualty, though, is in our thinking.

Good thinking isn’t instantaneous. It wanders. It circles back. It sits with contradictions, often longer than is comfortable. It follows questions into places where there aren’t immediate answers, and then, when you arrive at the thought, it surprises you.

We’ve learned to reach for novelty before our minds have had the chance to settle. We’ve become so accustomed to interruption that uninterrupted attention begins to feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. And this is the part that troubles me the most. Sure, modern technology has had some hand in building this. But, somewhere along the way, we stopped treating fractured attention as a symptom of something and started treating it as the baseline condition of being alive.

Interruption doesn’t merely distract us from our thoughts. It teaches us to abandon them. So, we keep asking how to get our focus back. I’m beginning to think that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better question is this:

When did uninterrupted presence become the exception instead of the expectation?

Sometimes I wonder how many opinions we hold are only half-formed because we’ve rarely had the uninterrupted time to finish having them. We form a view in the time it takes to read a headline, defend it by the time we’ve scrolled past three more, and never once sit with it long enough to find out if it was actually ours.

If that’s true of something as small as an opinion, it’s true of everything that asks more of us.

Grief. Prayer. Wonder. Love.

Interrupt any of them too soon, and what you’re left with resembles the real thing without ever quite becoming it.

Dignity starts here, too, with the willingness to actually see the person in front of you instead of the version your assumptions already sketched. To ask what someone is carrying, and to really wait for the honest answer, is harder and rarer than kindness or politeness. It’s a recognition that their lived experiences are as real as your own. That kind of recognition takes time. It can’t be interrupted into existence.

The things that shape us most deeply of all seem to require the one thing our culture has become remarkably good at preventing: abiding. Abiding is what a tree does in soil, or a marriage does through a decade nobody’s applauding—through the dry years and the ones that flooded, still rooted when the season turns.

Because if we’re living in an interruption economy, then the rarest thing we can offer another person—and perhaps even ourselves—is abiding: staying rooted in someone’s presence long enough for it to actually cost us something.

Attention, at its highest form, isn’t just information gathering. It’s how we love people—the same unhurried looking that lets you finally see—and really experience—someone’s face instead of the shorthand version of it you’d already settled for. It has to be given whole, or it isn’t given at all.

So, the phones stay face-down at dinner. The book stays open on the chair long after the urge to check your phone has come and gone. The text waits until morning, and nothing bad happens because it did.

That’s the whole of it, really. Abiding until whatever we’re attending to is finished with us, instead of the other way around.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

My mom has one of these drawers, too. Hers is in the laundry room, in the space between the countertop and a cabinet, and it’s held roughly the same objects for as long as I can remember: a tape measure, a small bottle of eyeglass cleaner, part of a church bulletin from some Sunday I couldn’t name, a lighter for a fireplace she doesn’t use anymore. I’d bet her mom, my grandma, had one as well. I’d bet everyone’s mom did, all the way back, a drawer passed down not as inheritance, but as instinct.

Nobody teaches you to keep a junk drawer. You just wake up one day and realize you’ve built one, the same way you wake up one day and realize you sound like your mother on the phone.

I used to think the stuff in this drawer was just clutter. Now I think it’s closer to a superstition. Every object in that drawer is there because, at some point, getting rid of it felt like tempting the universe: what if I need this exact key or this specific rubber band six months from now, and it’s gone? The drawer isn’t disorganized. It’s a small record of my every refusal to be certain.

Maybe that’s the real tradition. Not the tape measure or the dead batteries. The drawer itself. I doubt my mom ever sat me down and said, “Keep the things you can’t justify.” She didn’t have to. Some habits don’t need instruction. You absorb them simply by growing up in a house where one drawer is allowed to make no sense at all.

Here’s what else is in there: a solitary piece of stale gum still in its wrapper, three sets of plastic flatware from some takeout order, a fistful of toothpicks, a nest of twist ties, a screwdriver so short it looks like a toy, four Stanley cup straws, and chopsticks from meals I can’t remember. None of it matches. That’s sort of the point.

Is any of it junk? I don’t think so. Junk is what you toss without a second thought. This is something else: not treasure, not trash, but a holding pattern for the things we’re not ready to decide. We don’t keep them because we love them. We keep them because deciding to let go takes more energy than deciding not to.

Scott asked me once if we needed any of it. I said no, that’s not the point, and I think he already knew that. He just wanted to hear me say it out loud. He’s not wrong to ask. He’s the one who organizes things for a living, who spends his days deciding what’s worth preserving and what isn’t. I think he finds it a little funny that the one drawer in our house with zero system belongs to the person who writes, revises, and edits for a living.

Because here’s the thing about this drawer: it’s the one part of my life I’ve never tried to edit. I’ll rewrite a sentence six times until it’s right. I’ll cut a paragraph I loved because it wasn’t earning its place on the page. I spend my days organizing information, deciding what belongs where and what can be removed without anyone missing it. But the chubby screwdriver? It stays. The straws stay. This drawer resists optimization. Nothing in it has ever had to justify itself to me.

My mom’s drawer is still full of things that I suspect don’t mean anything to her, either. I imagine it’ll outlast her, the way these things do. Maybe someday my niece and nephew will open mine and find a tin of old mints and a few scribbled Post-it Notes. Proof that I was here in the things I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw away. Their professor aunt, preserved in stale Altoids and grocery lists.

I think we keep a drawer like this because everything else in a house has to answer for itself. The couch has to be comfortable. The art has to inspire. Even the food in the fridge has to justify its place before it goes bad. But the drawer never has to answer to anyone.

It simply exists, full of things that never had to explain themselves. Maybe that’s why we love it. It’s the one place in the house where usefulness isn’t a requirement for belonging. Where things get to be unexplained, unedited, a little bit useless, and still allowed to stay.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing, and naming, what’s already there.

NOTE: Lots of theory ahead. You’ve been warned 🙂

When I was five years old, I decided I wanted to be a doctor and run the hospital I worked in, and also be an artist. Nobody told me those things were incompatible. I figured that out later, when the world started sorting people into categories and I kept landing in the wrong ones.

But before the sorting, there were the booklets. Third grade. Construction paper folded once, big-lined pages tucked inside, stapled along the spine. My teacher, Mrs. Olson, made them for us, and we filled them with our stories. I don’t remember the plots of the stories I wrote. I remember the feeling: that I could write the world I wanted into existence. That the page was a place where my imagination didn’t have to explain itself or earn its place. That writing was, in its most uncomplicated sense, freedom. I didn’t know yet that I’d spend the next several decades trying to find my way back to exactly that feeling.

In high school, I was good at science and good at humanities both, which sounds like a gift and it mostly was, except that it meant I could talk myself into things. When I enrolled in college as a biology major in 2002, I told myself a story about who I was: serious, practical, someone who would do something important with her life. I loved genetics. I loved anatomy and physiology, the logic of the body, how systems talk to each other, how embodiment works from the inside. But chemistry kicked my teeth in. I couldn’t envision what was happening at that level of abstraction, couldn’t hold the invisible in my mind long enough to work with it. And underneath the chemistry problem was a bigger problem: my heart wasn’t in it. It had never really been in it. My heart was in ideas, in language, in the pleasure of discussing ideas with others and then putting words on a page and watching them make something that hadn’t existed before.

I came close to failing out. That’s the honest version. I was in the wrong major and the wrong story, and I knew it, and I stayed anyway. It took me twenty-four years to understand that kind of stubborn wrongness. You don’t stay because you’re stupid or arrogant. You stay because you’re a little bit lost, and leaving means saying something true about yourself that you’re not ready to say yet.

Switching to English around 2004 wasn’t a choice so much as it was a correction. And it turned out I was good at this, genuinely good, in a way I hadn’t been good at chemistry, which is to say good at it from the inside rather than through sheer force of effort. Sentences came naturally to me. Arguments held their warrants. I could feel the difference between a paragraph that was working and one that was faking it. I didn’t know yet what to call that feeling. I just knew it was the same feeling I’d had filling those construction paper booklets in the third grade.

What I didn’t know then was that becoming a writer, claiming that identity rather than just performing it, was going to require its own kind of work. In my early twenties, I did that work deliberately, in therapy, with a counselor who helped me let go of the identity I’d been carrying since I was five: Dr. Beth, the one who runs the hospital. What I found, once I stopped defending the wrong story, was simpler and truer than anything I’d planned. Writer. No qualifications, no institutional title attached. Just that. The professor, the teacher, the scholar who publishes, those came later, grafted onto something that had already been decided. The original answer was the simplest one. It always had been.

This is what I know now, after a Ph.D. and a published book and a career and now a newsletter and a novel I’ve been writing for what feels like my whole life: writing is difficult and beautiful and necessary and sometimes crazy-making and always, always, the truest thing I do. I got a doctorate in it not because I needed a credential but because I needed to understand what it was. I’m still finding that out.

These are the questions I keep returning to.

Where do ideas come from?

Aristotle called it invention, and by that he meant not creativity in the romantic sense but a systematic process for finding what’s already available to be said. You don’t wait for inspiration. You work the topoi, the common places, the categories of argument that, properly applied, generate material. You write toward the writers you’ve read. Imitation isn’t cheating; it’s apprenticeship.

I learned all of this in graduate school. I learned it carefully, the Greeks and the Romans, the whole architecture of Western rhetoric, and I’m genuinely glad I did. Not because it told me the truth about writing, but because you can’t read against something you don’t understand. You have to know the machinery before you can ask what it’s for, who built it, whose ideas it was designed to carry and whose it was designed to leave out. I learned the canon so I could hold it up to the light and ask, with some precision: why are these guys the canon? Says who?

But before I knew to ask those questions, I had to encounter the thing the canon couldn’t explain. Janet Emig was the first one to name it for me: writing isn’t just a way of recording thought. It’s a way of making it. The act of composing generates ideas that weren’t there before you started. You don’t know what you think until you’ve tried to say it. The page doesn’t receive your thinking. It helps produce it.

I already knew this was true before I had language for it. I’d known it since the English and philosophy classes that followed biology in undergrad, when I’d begin a paper with one argument and arrive somewhere else entirely. Emig gave me the framework for something I’d been living without being able to name. That’s what the best theory does, I think. It doesn’t introduce you to a new idea. It introduces you to yourself.

And then there’s Leslie Marmon Silko, who I first read in a Native American literature class in undergrad, and kept returning to in grad school, and I keep returning to since, who reframes not only the answer but the whole question. In her telling, ideas don’t come from the individual mind at all, not primarily. They’re already embedded in relationship, in community, in the land, in the stories that have been circulating long before you arrived and will keep circulating long after you’re gone. You don’t invent from scratch. You receive from your ancestors. You listen to what they say. You learn to pay attention to what’s already being said around you. Writing, in this frame, is relationship. The idea was never really yours to begin with, and that’s not a diminishment. That’s a relief.

What Silko gave me, alongside everything else, was permission to stop performing originality. To stop pretending I was generating ideas from nothing, the lone scholar, the solitary genius, the model the Western tradition had handed me and that I’d been unconsciously trying to inhabit. Silko reminded me that I came from somewhere. My thinking comes from somewhere. The stories I tell are in conversation with stories I’ve received from all my relations, from books and classrooms and communities and writers whose traditions the canon spent centuries pretending didn’t exist.

What is revision actually doing?

I took several journalism classes as an undergrad (enough to minor in it), because I thought that might be the career path I was heading toward. Journalism taught me one answer and fast: revision is what you do when you love your reader more than your sentences. Cut from the bottom. Lead with what matters. The reader owes you nothing, so stop making them work for it. I internalized this so thoroughly that I still feel it as a kind of pressure when I’m editing, a hand on my shoulder, impatient, pointing at the screen. It’s useful. It’s also, by itself, insufficient.

Toulmin, and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, asked something harder: does the argument you’re making actually hold for a real audience, not just in the privacy of your own convictions? The warrant that felt self-evident to you may not be self-evident to the person you’re trying to reach. I spent years in graduate seminars learning to feel this gap, the distance between what I meant to say and what a reader would encounter, and revision became the practice of closing that gap. Of asking, again and again and again, whether I was writing for myself or for someone who didn’t already live inside my assumptions.

Peter Elbow complicated even that. Believe the draft you’re working through before you doubt it, he said. Read it charitably first, looking for what it’s trying to do before you decide whether it’s actually doing it. This was harder for me sit with than journalistic ruthlessness, honestly. The doubting game came naturally; graduate school trains you for the doubting game. Learning to read my own work with generosity, to extend to my drafts the same good faith I extended to the texts I loved, took longer. It still takes me some effort. But without it—without that kindness—revision becomes demolition rather than discovery.

And then Mina Shaughnessy taught me the most unsettling thing of all: the draft I’m revising is already doing something intelligible. What looks like error is usually logic, operating from a set of premises I haven’t yet surfaced. The revision isn’t correcting a failure. It’s excavating a system. I have to understand what the draft thinks it’s doing before I can help it do something else. I’ve carried this with me into every writing group I’ve ever sat in, every student paper I’ve ever read and graded, every draft of my own I’ve returned to after a week away. The wrong sentence is trying to tell you something. The paragraph that won’t resolve is circling an idea you haven’t quite let yourself say yet. Revision is learning to listen to what you were afraid to write the first time.

Revision isn’t just about sentences. It’s about what you see. The draft you wrote last week was written by a slightly different person, someone operating from a position that the act of writing began to disturb. To revise is to go back in with new eyes, which is to say, with a slightly different self, and ask what you missed, what you were afraid to say, what you said too quickly because you hadn’t yet earned the right to say it slowly. I’ve revised essays, articles, book chapters, and presentations, and found that what I was actually revising was a belief I’d been holding since undergrad, maybe even earlier. I’ve revised paragraphs and realized I was revising my understanding of a relationship, a period of my life, a version of myself I’d outgrown without noticing.

Revision is the place where you find out who you’re becoming. That’s true of sentences. It’s true of worldviews. I’m not sure there’s a difference, really.

What is writing for?

I started this newsletter—Plain Sight—because I fell back in love with writing. Not writing for publication exactly, not writing to make an argument or advance a field or meet a deadline, though it’s become all of those things. I started it because I wanted writing to feel like discovery again. Like processing. Like the thing it was before it became my job.

Writing for a living is strange that way. It can make the thing you love feel like a transaction. You produce, someone evaluates, then you revise toward a standard that isn’t entirely yours. That’s not a complaint, it’s just what professionalization does to a person. But it can hollow something out if you let it. And I’d let it, a little, without quite noticing. Writing these newsletter essays was how I noticed. It’s how I’ve found my way back to the construction paper booklets, to the eight-year-old who wrote because she couldn’t not, because the world inside her head needed somewhere to go.

Kenneth Burke said rhetoric is identification, that we write to find what we share with another person, to bridge the essential separateness of human minds. I’ve thought about this a lot in the context of personal essays, which are a strange genre precisely because they use the most private material, your own life, your own embarrassments and losses and ordinary Tuesdays, in service of the most public purpose: reaching someone you’ve never met and making them feel less alone. Every time an essay lands, every time a reader writes to me to say I didn’t know anyone else felt that way, Burke is proven right. The writing found what we shared. It built the bridge.

Walter Ong went further than Burke: writing doesn’t just communicate thought, it restructures it. Literacy changes how consciousness works. The technology of writing, the actual act of it, has made certain kinds of thinking possible that couldn’t exist otherwise. I believe this in my bones. There are things I know about myself that I only know because I wrote them down. There are ideas I’ve had that I could not have had any other way, not by thinking alone, not by talking, only by the slow pressure of making sentences until something true emerged from them. Writing isn’t a record of my mind. It’s a significant part of how my mind works.

Thomas King, whose work I’ve returned to more times than I can count, put it most simply and most devastatingly: “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” King means this literally: we are made of the stories we tell and are told. Writing is how we make and remake ourselves and each other. Which means it matters completely, that it’s never finished, and also that the stakes are always higher than they look.

I started Plain Sight to be understood. By a general reader, by people who already know me, and mostly by myself. Writing to understand what I think, what I’ve lived, what it all means. And what I’ve found is that those three things, being understood by others, being known by the people closest to me, and understanding myself, aren’t separate purposes. They collapse into each other. The essay that helps me see something clearly is usually the one that lands hardest for someone else. That’s not a coincidence. It’s what Burke was pointing at, and what King has always known, and what I keep relearning every Tuesday when I hit publish and wait to find out what I actually said.

Who does writing belong to, and at what cost?

This is the question I’m least sure I can answer. It’s also the one I can’t stop asking.

Michel Foucault, in 1969, asked “What is an author?” and meant it as a kind of destabilization. His point wasn’t a literary one but political. Authorship isn’t a natural fact. It’s a social function, historically constructed, distributed unevenly along lines of power and access. Who gets to be an Author, capital A, has always been a question with a political answer, and the answer has never been neutral. I came to Foucault in graduate school and felt, reading him, the particular vertigo of having an identity you’d always taken for granted pulled out from under you. I wanted to be a writer. I was becoming a writer. I was a writer. And here was this argument that “writer” wasn’t a thing you simply were, it was a thing the culture around you authorized—or didn’t—based on criteria that had nothing to do with the quality of your sentences.

Julia Kristeva pushed on what Foucault means for the writing itself: conventional form suppresses things. The pre-linguistic, the embodied, the disruptive energies that don’t fit the expected structures. To write “acceptably” is to tame something. I think about this whenever I feel the pull toward a cleaner, more contained version of an article, the version that would be easier to categorize, easier to place, easier for an editor to say yes to. The taming is real. The cost of it is real. Learning to feel that cost, to notice when I’m smoothing something that should stay rough, has been one of the slower educations of my writing life. And it gets harder when the question isn't just what you're suppressing in yourself, but what you're doing to someone else.

Edward Said showed, in 1978, how writing about others constructs those others in ways that serve the writer’s culture rather than the subject’s humanity. And Gayatri Spivak extended his premise: who speaks for whom, and at whose expense, and what does the act of translation, literal or figurative, do to the thing being translated? Walter Mignolo went further still: the very categories we use to think and write, the epistemological frameworks we take for granted as universal, are themselves products of a particular history, a colonial project that absorbed local knowledge into global designs that were never built to hold it. These are not comfortable ideas to sit with. They require you to look at your own writing and ask not just is this good but what is this for, whose interests does it serve, and what (or who) is it leaving out.

James Berlin made these questions uncomfortably close to home: the composition classroom was never ideologically neutral. The way you were taught to write in high school or college carried a politic. The standards you were asked to meet by your teacher, the assignment, encoded ideas about whose language was correct, whose logic was sound, whose ways of knowing counted as knowledge. I was taught in those classrooms. I later taught in them. I’ve spent years trying to hold both things at once: genuine gratitude for what the tradition gave me, and genuine transparency about what it cost, and who paid.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls this decolonizing methodology: the deliberate practice of asking what it would mean to write in a way that doesn't reproduce the structures you were handed. Her frame is research, but the question belongs to any writer who has ever felt the cost of the tradition they inherited. Thomas King asks it from inside the story itself: who gets to tell Native stories, and what happens to a people when those stories are told by others, for others, in a language that wasn’t theirs to begin with?

I don’t have clean answers to any of these questions. I carry the training I have, and it marks everything I write. What I try to do—what I’m still learning to do—is stay awake to the cost. To notice when the tools I reach for are serving a particular purpose and when they’re serving convention or convenience. To ask whose version of ‘good writing’ I’m revising toward. Asking is the easy part. What you do with the answer is where the real work is.

I don’t know what writing is, not finally. But I know it’s where I think, where I find out what I believe, where I revise not just sentences but the self that wrote them. I know it’s how I reach toward other people and how I stay in relationship with my own life.

And I know that when I was eight years old, filling a construction paper booklet with stories I’ve long since forgotten, I was already a writer. I just didn’t have the word for it yet. The booklet is still there, somewhere underneath all of it. The page is still where I find out who I am.

That’s enough. It’s always been enough.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

This is the forty-sixth year for him. For me, it’s my tenth. A decade of watching the same lake light shift across the same water, of knowing where the coffee and tea are in the morning, and which porch chair catches the afternoon breeze just right. Ten years is long enough to stop being a guest somewhere and start being someone who belongs to a place.

There’s a word for that, I think. But I’m not sure it’s “vacation.”

We’ve inherited a strange relationship with rest. We say we want it, then spend our time off optimizing it: researching the best restaurants, logging the miles we hiked, narrating the whole thing in real time for an audience who isn’t there with us. We treat rest like a project with deliverables. And we return from vacation more tired than when we left and call it a “good trip.”

This isn’t an accident. The logic of productivity doesn’t go quiet just because you’ve crossed a state line. It’s the water we swim in. To stop—genuinely stop, without an agenda—is, in our current cultural moment, an act of defiance.

The ancient idea of sabbath (rest and renewal) understood something we’ve mostly forgotten: that rest isn’t the absence of work. It’s a practice in its own right, with its own discipline. You don’t simply fall into it. You have to choose it, and keep choosing it, until the choosing becomes something your body understands and needs.

The body, it turns out, has been trying to tell us something all along.

We’re remarkably good at ignoring that signal. We override fatigue because there’s one more thing to finish. We override overwhelm because stopping feels like falling behind. We push through grief, through fear, through the low-grade overstimulation of a life conducted almost entirely on screens. We’ve made an art form of not listening.

But the body doesn’t negotiate forever. It whispers first. Then it protests. Then it demands. Most of us only stop when we have no other choice, when the flu or COVID takes us down, when the anxiety or depression become unmanageable, when something—anything—finally gives. And, sadly, we treat that moment as a failure rather than what it actually is: the body telling the truth.

There’s a concept in cognitive science called “soft fascination”—the easy, undemanding attention we give to things like water, clouds, landscapes, fire, the natural world around us. Unlike the hard focus of screen-based tasks, soft fascination actually restores us. It lets the mind wander without depleting it. It’s one reason that beaches and forests and mountains make people feel better in ways they can’t quite explain. The environment does something to us that we can’t do for ourselves by trying harder.

And then there’s what happens when you take your shoes off.

Researchers and clinicians who study what they call “earthing” or “grounding” have found that direct contact between bare skin and the earth’s surface—sand, soil, grass—allows the body to absorb the earth’s free electrons, which appear to reduce inflammation, lower cortisol, and calm the nervous system at a measurable, physiological level. The earth carries a natural negative charge, constantly replenished by lightning and solar radiation, and when we touch it, something in us rebalances. We complete a circuit that modern life—rubber soles, concrete floors, buildings stacked high above the ground—keeps breaking.

Let me be clear. This isn’t mysticism. It’s physics. But it also sounds, to me, like something older than physics, the same instinct that has people removing their shoes before they enter a sacred space. There is something about the bare contact with the earth that reconnects us not just electrically but also existentially, to the created world, to our own createdness, to whatever you call the force that made and sustains both.

Glen Arbor, for me, has become a kind of prescription. Not because I arrived knowing that, but because the place kept offering itself until I was ready to receive it.

Which brings me to what, I think, rest actually requires, and it isn’t a spa weekend or a better morning routine. It’s humility.

To rest is to admit that you are not indispensable. That the world will continue without your constant management of it. That you are a creature with limits, not a machine without them—and that those limits are not defects. They’re the unique and specific terms of being human.

This is, as it happens, a very old idea. German philosopher, Josef Pieper, called it leisure—not idleness, but a particular quality of receptiveness, a willingness to receive the world instead of consuming it. The sabbath tradition built it into the architecture of the week: one day in seven where you put down your work not because it’s finished, but because you are finite and finitude deserves acknowledgment. Rest, in this framing, isn’t a reward you earn. It’s a truth you practice.

That reframe is harder than it sounds, because so much of our contemporary life is organized around the opposite premise. Our worth, we’ve been taught, is tied to our ability to produce measurable outcomes. To stop producing is to stop mattering. To rest before you’ve earned it, before the inbox is empty, the project is finished, feels almost transgressive.

But I also want to suggest that rest might actually be an act of trust. Trust that the things you’re holding won’t fall apart if you set them down. Trust that your value survives your unproductivity. Trust that there are forces larger than your own vigilance holding the world together.

I didn’t know how to rest when I first came to Glen Arbor. I was on my phone, out of habit and almost constantly. I was taking pictures to show everyone back home, narrating the place to an absent audience instead of just being in the moment. I was present in the way that people are present when they’re watching themselves be present, which isn’t really present at all.

What changed me wasn’t a decision. It was repetition. The same lake, the same family, the same unhurried rhythm of a place that has been doing this longer than any of us have. The Sleeping Bear Dunes don’t care about your productivity metrics. The water is indifferent to your notifications. After a few years, something in me stopped fighting that.

Ten years in, I’ve learned what rest requires from me, specifically. It requires that I stop narrating my own experience long enough to actually have it. That I let the lake be just the lake—not a grand metaphor, not some engaging content, not a caption. That I sit with Scott’s family and let the conversation go where it wants, without shaping it toward anything.

It requires that I accept, for a week, that I’m not producing anything. That my value is not contingent on my output. That I am allowed to simply be somewhere, with people I love, watching the sunset over the lake.

The Anishinaabe tell a story about this place.

Long ago, a mother bear and her two cubs were driven into Lake Michigan by a great fire burning through a Wisconsin forest. They swam for hours, through that day and into the night. The mother reached the eastern shore and climbed to the top of the dunes to watch for her cubs. She could see them still out on the water, struggling, falling behind. One by one, the cubs slipped beneath the surface. The Great Spirit raised two islands to mark the spots where they disappeared, and made a solitary dune to honor the mother bear’s eternal vigil. She’s still there, the story says. Still watching. Still waiting for her babies.

I’ve stood at the edge of that dune more than once—400 feet above Lake Michigan, looking out at a horizon you can’t see past, the two Manitou islands just visible in the distance if the light is right. It’s the kind of view that reorganizes you from the inside out. Something about standing where grief became landscape, where a mother’s faithfulness got written into the earth by the Great Spirit himself, makes something in you go very quiet.

That awareness isn’t depressing. It’s clarifying. It’s provoking.

Because here’s what strikes me about the mother bear: she stopped. Not because she gave up, but because she had done everything she could do.

She crossed the lake.

She climbed the dune.

She watched.

And then she laid down.

And she was still, and her stillness was the most faithful thing she had left to offer.

Sleeping Bear Dunes at sunset, Empire Bluff Trail. Photo Credit: Michigan Sky Media (that’s the mama bear).

I don’t think rest is the absence of caring. I think sometimes it’s the deepest form of it.

The mama bear didn’t stop watching. She just stopped straining. She let the vigil become something she inhabited rather than performed. And in that surrender—if surrender is even the right word for something so full of love—she became the landscape itself. Permanent. Faithful.

That’s what I’m after, I think. Not the absence of effort, but the presence of humility and trust. Not checking out, but settling in. Becoming, for a little while, someone who belongs so completely to a place and a moment that there’s nothing left to narrate, nothing left to manage, nothing left to prove.

Just the lake. Just the light. Just this.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

Last week, she published a piece I keep returning to. In it, she revisits her 2006 dissertation—Process and Power at Twenty: Write Yourself Into the AI Shift—twenty years on, and argues that her central argument has only gotten more urgent. Her claim: when companies change how they build products, power rearranges itself. Structural openings appear. The people who work with language and meaning can either get written into the new process or get written out of it. With AI, she says, the opportunity is the widest it’s ever been. The product now produces language on its own, in real time, in front of users. And the decisions about what that language means, who it serves, and whether it can be trusted—those decisions are being made right now, mostly by people without a content lens, because content has always been easier to deprioritize than to deal with.

Her prescription is strategic and sound: document your role before the process hardens around you. Show your value in terms leaders already care about. Get in the rooms where the decisions are being made. Drive the change instead of surviving it.

I believe all of it. And I’ve been sitting with a question she doesn’t quite answer:

How does anyone learn to see themselves as the kind of person who walks through an opening like that?

Kate draws on French historian Michel Foucault, and rightly so: power isn’t a thing you hold, it’s a relation that flows and shifts. Process changes reorganize who gets to participate in knowledge-making and who doesn’t. The people who understand process—not just product—are the ones who can move toward the center of the work. That argument is as clean and true in 2026 as it was in 2006.

But here’s what the structural story skips: the step before the step. Before you can position yourself as indispensable in an AI-native environment, you have to believe, at some level, that your presence in the room changes what’s possible in it. That’s not a strategic problem. It’s a formation problem. It’s the slow, often-invisible work of becoming someone who knows what they have to offer—and it doesn’t happen in a positioning document or a working group. It happens in relationship, over time, with people who see something in you before you can reliably see it in yourself.

I spent my entire Ph.D. studying this—the research became my dissertation, and eventually my book, Rhetorical Strategies for Professional Development, was built around a term I came up with: investment mentoring. The word investment does double work. It reaches back to the 15th-century meaning—to clothe oneself, to put on vestments—and forward into the contemporary one: to contribute, to commit, to build something with a return. Investment mentoring is the act of figuratively clothing yourself as a professional by self-selecting the relationships and practices that fit who you actually are, not who the institution assumes you to be.

Most formal mentoring is enculturation—it teaches you the hidden curriculum, the acceptable ways of doing and being inside a given institution. It’s useful, but it can also quietly sand off the edges of whoever you actually are. Investment mentoring is something different. It’s reciprocal. It’s self-directed. It asks: what do I bring, what do I need, and who can I build something with that neither of us could build alone?

The people in my study—employees at a Midwest medical device company (HealthTech Industries), and alumni of a residential arts college at Michigan State—described mentoring not as what happened to them but as what they invented, often in the margins of their official jobs. In a hallway. Over lunch. In a follow-up email after a videoconferencing call that said: I just want you to know, that was excellent. In the specific quality of attention someone paid them at exactly the right moment. What they were describing, without quite using the word, was something harder to name than strategy. One HealthTech employee, Bill, put it this way: “Engage their heart. Engage their mind. And then get the hell out of the way. Because they’ll be unstoppable.”

That’s not a strategic recommendation. That’s a description of what it feels like to be seen.

Kate’s four moves—document your role, show your value, join the team, drive the change—are good moves. Excellent ones, in fact. But they require something the moves themselves can’t generate: a person who already believes their presence in the room changes what’s possible in it.

That belief doesn’t arrive fully formed. It accumulates. Slowly. Often in the presence of someone who already holds it on your behalf.

I think about the writer Kate describes in her original research: an employee who volunteered to drive the scenarios for a team transitioning from waterfall to agile. Her manager came to see her as a leader, Kate writes. Not because her title changed. Because she stepped into the opening the process change had created.

What the story doesn’t include—what nobody’s professional story usually includes—is who taught that writer she was the kind of person who drove scenarios? Who saw her doing it in small rooms before she did it in rooms that counted? Who stayed after a meeting and said: that thing you just did, that matters, keep doing that ?

The structural opportunity is real. And the capacity to enter it is relational, which is precisely why it keeps getting skipped. Relational work is hard to measure, hard to mandate, and impossible to put in a deck. It doesn’t produce an artifact. It happens in margins and hallways, and none of that shows up in a process document. So it gets treated as optional. Background. Nice to have.

The AI shift makes this more urgent, not less, and in a specific way that I don’t think the strategy conversation has fully reckoned with yet.

The old enculturation playbook doesn’t map onto an AI-native environment. The hidden curriculum is being written and rewritten in real time, and nobody has a complete copy. The people deciding how AI systems behave—what they retrieve, what they say, how they talk, where they fail—are largely making it up as they go, in conditions of genuine uncertainty, with no settled norms to pass down. Which means the traditional master/apprentice model of professional formation is partially broken. You can’t be enculturated into something that doesn’t exist yet.

This is where investment mentoring becomes not just a useful framework but a necessary one.

In my research, I found that communities of practice models, where a newcomer learns by moving toward the center of an established community, thrive on exclusion as much as inclusion. They work best when there’s a stable center to move toward, a set of norms someone can hand you. When the center is itself in flux, a different kind of relationship-building is required. What the participants at HealthTech and at Michigan State described, over and over, was mentoring that was boundaryless in the way careers themselves have become boundaryless in the 21st century: not tied to one institution or hierarchy, not passed down through a single chain of authority, but built laterally, across difference, through shared investment in one another’s growth.

What makes that kind of mentoring possible isn’t a program. It’s three things, which ran like a thread through every story I collected 13 years ago: reciprocity, self-reflexivity, and transparency.

Reciprocity means that both people in the mentoring relationship have something to gain and something to give. It resists the assumption that knowledge only flows in one direction—from more experienced to less—and insists that the mentor is also changed by the relationship. Self-reflexivity means that both people take their own positions seriously: their histories, their identities, their blind spots, the ways those things shape what they know and what they miss. And transparency means that the goals, the expectations, and the power dynamics in the relationship get named, not papered over.

These aren’t soft skills. They’re rhetorical work—the skilled navigation of meaning-making in conditions of uncertainty. Which is, increasingly, the condition of all professional life.

What my participants also taught me—and what I think matters especially now—is that mentoring relationships carry a real cost when they fail, and that the cost isn’t equally distributed.

Maria, a senior-level manager at HealthTech, described mentoring as “generative and cyclical—from the top to the bottom, or the bottom to the top, and around again.” Her boss mentored her; she mentored the people in her unit; they in turn mentored others. But when she and a female colleague were asked by HealthTech's CEO to evaluate a new, external professional development organization—to attend an event, assess the culture, bring back a recommendation—she hesitated. As a woman in a male-dominated manufacturing environment, she'd learned that not every room was built for her, and that the cost of walking into the wrong one got carried forward. Previous experiences with mentoring that hadn’t served her had made her cautious about putting herself back in that position. The opportunity was real. Her willingness to enter it had been eroded by relationships that hadn’t held up their end. Patrick, also a senior-level manager, didn’t carry that hesitation. His gender identity aligned so smoothly with HealthTech’s dominant structures that he’d never had to learn what Maria had: that some rooms cost more to enter than others. Two managers. Same level. Very different experience of what mentoring costs.

I raise this not to make an argument about equity in the abstract, but because it maps directly onto what happens in AI-native environments where roles and expectations are still being negotiated. When a process is in transition, access to the people who understand it—people who will explain, who will advocate, who will say you belong here—is not equally available. The people who are already proximate to power in an organization will find it easier to write themselves into the new process. The people who aren’t will need the kind of mentoring that doesn’t wait for official channels to open, that builds relationships across hierarchies and disciplines, that insists on visibility for the people most likely to be overlooked.

Investment mentoring was built for people the traditional sponsorship pipeline was never built for. That’s still true. It’s just that now, everyone is starting to feel what that means.

There’s a practical dimension here that I want to name directly, because Kate’s piece invites it.

She asks content professionals to document their roles, articulate their value, and insert themselves into the decision-making process for AI systems. All of that is right. And the most effective version of it doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens inside a network—a web of people who are also navigating the same transition, who can share what they’re learning in real time, who can serve as sounding boards and sponsors and honest critics.

In my dissertation research, I asked participants to draw their mentoring networks on paper: their names in the center, radiating outward to the people, places, and things that had shaped their professional development. Every single map had the same feature: at least one person, often two or three, positioned close to the center, connected by long relationships, who showed up well before the person was ready to believe their own value. People who had said, sometimes years earlier: you’re the kind of person who does this.

A mentoring network doesn’t just support your work. It’s where you try things badly and fail informatively and try again without shame. It’s where your professional identity gets built and tested and revised. It’s where someone who has been in the room longer than you tells you what they see in you, and you begin, slowly, to believe them.

What makes networked professional relationships valuable isn’t proximity or hierarchy but the degree to which they allow knowledge to circulate, transform, and be made available across different contexts. An investment mentoring network does exactly that—it keeps knowledge moving. And in an environment where the knowledge is being made up in real time, where nobody has the playbook yet, a network that lets you learn quickly from people who are also learning is one of the most valuable professional assets you can build.

Kate ends her piece with a challenge: find the place in your organization where AI decisions are being made without a content voice in the room, and put yourself in it.

I’d add one thing underneath that: find the people who already believe you belong in that room, and let them say it out loud.

Not because you need permission. But, because the hearing of it does something profound, something that the knowing of it can’t quite do on its own. That particular function—one person holding a belief about another person’s capacity until that person can hold it for themselves—is what my research kept returning to. It’s not mentorship in the conventional sense, not a formal relationship with benchmarks and check-ins. It’s something more like the way French theorist, Michel de Certeau, describes tactics: small, calculated actions taken in the absence of a proper locus, in spaces you don’t fully control, that gradually assemble themselves into a position.

The structural opportunity is real. The moment is real. But you can’t walk through a door you can’t see yourself walking through. And you can’t see that clearly from the outside of a relationship. The formation work—the slow, reciprocal, invisible work of becoming the person who knows what they have to offer—that’s the part that takes longer and gets less credit and matters just as much. It’s also, in my experience, the part that was always already happening.

In the hallway. In the chat window during someone’s conference talk. In the months of liking each other’s posts and keeping the thread alive.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

It’s late spring in southwestern Michigan, which means the world has finally, mercifully opened back up. The trees are full again, green where they were bare only weeks ago. Lawnmowers hum in the distance. People emerge from their houses blinking into the sunlight as though they, too, have been hibernating.

My parents’ backyard backs up to a small lake and their deck sits just beyond the sliding glass door—a wide stretch of composite boards overlooking the yard, the water, and everything worth being outside for. After months of cold that keeps small bodies indoors, pressed against windows, waiting, that deck becomes a threshold. If you are two years old and it’s finally warm enough to be outside, the deck is not optional. The deck is everything.

Which is why, when the opportunity presented itself, Matt, my two-year-old nephew, made for the door.

He walked through the open sliding glass door with the full confidence of someone who has recently and at great personal cost figured out how to walk. He’s earned that confidence. Walking is hard! Months of trial and error had produced a working theory, and so far the data looked excellent. He brought that hard-won knowledge to the deck in good faith, all of himself pointed toward the open air and the afternoon.

His feet shot forward. The rest of him arrived a moment later. The socks his mother put on him earlier that morning had betrayed him.

Watching from an hour and fifteen minutes away, I said out loud to my phone: oh no, oh buddy.

But here’s the thing about Matt. He got up.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t look for a grown-up, at least not right away. He stood back up on the treacherous deck and tried something different, because he’s two years old and has not yet been informed that some problems are just problems and you should come back to them later. He tried standing differently, slowing down, taking tiny measured steps, negotiating with the laws of physics one foot at a time. He tried a controlled waddle, then a wide stance, then—in what I’m certain he believed was a very good idea—he got his hands involved, dropping into a kind of bear crawl, weight distributed, covering his bases.

The deck remained indifferent.

He went down again. He darn near did the splits, which seemed to surprise him as much as anyone.

The makings of an Olympic gymnast, I thought, which is the kind of thing you think when you love someone so much to be fully rational about their falling down.

This is where psychologist Jean Piaget would have leaned forward. What Matt was doing, underneath the comedy, was science. Piaget called it accommodation—the process by which we revise our existing mental models when the world refuses to cooperate with them. We all carry these internal maps of how things work, built from experience and inference and a great deal of educated guessing. Matt had a mental model for walking, hard-won and field-tested. And the deck rejected it. Every slip carried information. Every fall taught him something about friction, balance, momentum, and the limits of confidence. He shifted his weight. He widened his stance. He lowered himself closer to the boards. This wasn’t stubbornness. It was inquiry. The deck had become a question, and Matt was answering it with his knees, his hands, his feet, and his whole determined self.

You don’t abandon a working theory at the first contradiction. You test it. You wobble. You fall down. You try the bear crawl.

He tested it thoroughly.

At some point, in what I can only describe as a tactical retreat, he crawled back to the sliding glass door and went inside, where the rug received him without incident. He pulled himself up on solid ground, steadied himself, and then—with fresh confidence and what appeared to be a revised plan—walked back through the door and onto the deck. Upright and determined.

That lasted a few seconds before the socks did what the socks were going to do.

And then something shifted. You could see it in the way he stilled, sitting on the deck, looking down at his feet with an expression I can only describe as forensic. Something wasn’t adding up. He knew it. Some particular piece of cause and effect was assembling itself, however incompletely, behind those big ocean-blue eyes. He couldn’t name it. He didn’t have the words for friction or interface or variable. But he had something rarer than vocabulary. He had attention. He had the willingness to sit with a question his body had asked and his mind hadn’t yet answered.

This, I think, is where St. Thomas Aquinas would have said something.

The Book of Genesis tells us that human beings are made in the image of God. Aquinas understood the imago dei—the image of God present in every human person—as expressed through reason, will, and the drive to understand. Not as abstraction, but as action. As the soul’s deepest appetite: the hunger to encounter the world as it actually is and make sense of it. To ask why. To look closely. To sit very still on a composite deck in southwestern Michigan and stare at your feet until something becomes clear. Pope St. John Paul II extended the imago dei into the body itself, into what he called the human person’s fundamental vocation to act in the world, to strive, to persist, to make meaning through effort even when the effort fails. Between the two of them, they were describing a newly two-year-old boy who crawled across a deck, retreated to solid ground, returned with a revised hypothesis, and then went very quiet when the evidence demanded his full attention.

This is what the image of God looks like. This is what it has always looked like.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it—after the retreat inside, after pulling himself up on the rug, after walking back out with fresh conviction—Matt took a few steps onto the deck and this time threw his arms overhead. Wide open.

Psychologist Carol Dweck would have recognized it immediately. The arms up in the air weren’t for landing the trick. They were for coming back outside at all. He’d already learned, in his body, what Dweck spent decades teaching: that the attempt is the thing worth celebrating. That you raise your arms for the return, not the result.

“Sooo big!” my mom had been telling him all afternoon.

And for a moment, standing there with his arms stretched toward the sky, he seemed to agree.

The deck took him down anyway.

He tried again. Grandma and Grandpa cheered, because what else do you do when someone you love is that close, is almost there, is giving everything they have to a slippery deck on a beautiful day? He almost had it. And then he didn’t.

My mom looked at Matt and asked, still laughing, still cheering: are you so big?

He looked at her and shook his head no.

He knew. The knowledge sat plainly on his face, in the small solemn movement of his head, in the honest surrender of a theory that had met reality and lost. He’s old enough to know the difference between wanting something to be true and finding out otherwise.

Not so big. Not today.

But I tried the bear crawl. I went back inside and came back out. I threw my arms up before the final verdict came in.

Matt, frustrated and clearly tired of experimenting, reached the edge of what he could do alone, so he called Grandpa for help.

Educational theorist and psychologist Lev Vygotsky called that edge the zone of proximal development—the space between what we can manage independently and what becomes possible with the right help. The scaffold doesn’t mean you failed. It means you knew when to ask.

The video ends there.

Which means I don’t know whether the socks stayed on or came off. I don’t know whether Matt successfully walked on the deck that afternoon or spent another half hour gathering data. I don’t know whether the world beyond the sliding glass door was everything he’d spent a long Michigan winter waiting to reach.

But I like to think he got there.

We often talk about faith and reason as though they belong to different worlds. Faith lives in churches. Reason lives in laboratories. One asks us to believe. The other asks us to question. But I’ve been thinking about Matt on that deck, and I’m not so sure the distinction holds.

God made us curious. God made us flesh and bone and spirit, dust and breath together. God allows us to fall down and revise our assumptions and sit very still with questions our bodies have asked before our minds can answer them. The reasoning process—the hypothesis, the failed experiment, the forensic stillness, the revised model, the call for help—isn’t a detour from bearing the image of God. It’s one of the most human ways we reflect it. Aquinas believed that truth is singular and whole, that what reason discovers and what faith receives cannot finally contradict each other, because they flow from the same source. The curious mind isn’t wandering from God. It’s following a trail God laid. Pope St. John Paul II put it this way in Fides et Ratio: faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises toward truth. You need both to get anywhere worth going. The person who reasons without faith mistakes the map for the territory. The person who believes without reason never learns to read the map. But the person who brings both—who falls down and gets back up and revises the theory and trusts that reality is worth understanding—that person is, in the fullest sense, on their way.

Matt didn’t know any of this. He was just trying to get outside.

But maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe the image of God doesn’t announce itself. Maybe it just shows up—in the bear crawl, in the retreat and return, in the stillness of a mind paying attention to what is actually true. In the arms thrown up. In the small, honest shake of a head that knows the difference between wanting something to be true and finding out otherwise. In the call for Grandpa. In the help that comes.

We were all Matt once—curious, embodied, answering the world’s questions with our whole selves, unashamed of falling, unafraid to revise. Some of us still are, on our better days. And maybe those are precisely the days we are most fully aware of what we are made to be.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

I’ve taught ENGL 46700/56701 Writing for Multiple Media for more than a decade. But recent versions of the course have moved closer to the worlds of UX, content design, accessibility, product thinking, and the messy relationship between humans and the systems we build for them.

This semester, the course did something I wasn’t entirely prepared for. It changed the way I move through the world.

Not only as a professor, but as a person with chronic, invisible illness. As a daughter. As a friend. As someone increasingly aware of how much of daily life depends on the assumptions about bodies, cognition, energy, time, and use.

A big part of that shift belongs to Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, and Jenny Preece, whose work on interaction design I had assigned to my students and, apparently, accidentally assigned to myself. Teaching their questions about users, assumptions, usability, and design decisions made it increasingly difficult not to ask those same questions of my everyday life.

Once you begin asking who something was designed for, it becomes surprisingly difficult to stop.

I noticed him before I fully understood what I was noticing.

An elderly gentleman, sitting with his wife, at a table near the window of a diner in Holland, Michigan—one of those places with a 50s-60s vibe, the kind that does eggs perfectly and knows it. The menus were physical but the print was small and the typeface was stylized in a way that looks charming until you actually have to read it. The man, somewhere in his 70s or 80s, held his smartphone over the menu, opened a magnifying app, and moved his phone slowly across the page, line by line, enlarging what the restaurant had made small.

Watching him, I felt two things at once: anger on his behalf, and something close to admiration. He had a tool. He knew how to use it. He was solving a problem he shouldn’t have had to solve, with resources not everyone has, in a space that had made a decision about him before he ever walked in the door.

The decision was this: we assume you can read this. We assume the charming font is part of the experience. We assume you’ll manage.

He managed. But he shouldn’t have had to.

There’s a distinction I keep coming back to, one I teach and one I live and one I think about every time I sit down in a space that wasn’t designed with me in mind.

Accessibility removes barriers. Inclusivity asks who you forgot to invite.

Accessibility is often remedial. You build something, and then you fix what excludes people. You add the ramp. You print the large-font menu. You install the automatic door. These are not nothing. They matter. But they come after the fact, after the decisions have been made, after someone has already imagined the “typical” user. They are patches on a system built around an assumed default: an able-bodied person.

Inclusivity, on the other hand, is upstream. It works earlier in the process, before anything gets built, when assumptions are still decisions rather than consequences. It asks the harder questions: Who is this for? Who are we imagining when we imagine the user? And—most importantly—who are we not imagining?

Rogers, Sharp, and Preece, in their foundational text on interaction design, define accessibility as “the extent to which an interactive product is accessible by as many people as possible,” with a focus on people with disabilities. Inclusivity, they argue, goes further—it means “making products and services that accommodate the widest possible number of people,” regardless of disability, education, age, or income. The difference is scope and intention. Accessibility says: you’re allowed here. Inclusivity says: we thought about you before you arrived.

Don Norman, whose work on user-centered design has shaped how an entire generation of designers thinks about the relationship between objects and people, argues that when something fails, we too often blame the user. The door that confuses people isn’t confusing because people are stupid. It’s confusing because the designer didn’t think carefully enough about the person who would use it. Norman calls this a design failure, not a human failure. Seen that way, the diner scene looks different. An elderly gentleman holding a magnifying app over a menu isn’t solving a personal shortcoming. He’s compensating for a design choice that never seriously considered him.

Kat Holmes, user experience designer and writer, in Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, puts it even more directly: exclusion happens when we solve problems for some people while inadvertently creating problems for others. The stylized menu solved a problem; it’s visually cohesive, on brand, and evocative of the era the diner is trying to summon. However, it created a problem for everyone outside the assumed user profile. Holmes calls them “excluded users.” The longer I do this work, the more I think that category includes most of us, eventually.

Scott—my husband, who does not carry any formal disability diagnosis, and has as much tech fluency as anyone I know—once tried to use a QR code menu at a local restaurant while out to lunch with colleagues. The code worked. It opened a menu. The menu was a JPEG. Every time he zoomed in to read it, the image pixelated further, until the words dissolved into squares of color. Eventually, he gave up and ordered by asking the server what was good.

This is what exclusion can look like in practice. The restaurant had solved a problem: no printing costs, easy updates, a modern interface. It had also created a problem. The QR code existed. The menu was, technically, accessible. The fact that it was an unzoomable image—a print document photographed into digital existence—wasn’t the restaurant’s concern. They had a QR code. They were modern. In the language of our moment, they were accessible.

But they weren’t.

This is the gap between accessibility and inclusivity, illustrated in a single pixelated JPEG. This is what technically compliant looks like in practice: a problem moved one step downstream and renamed innovation.

Situational and temporary disabilities are not the same thing, though they can look similar in practice. Temporary disabilities arise from short-term health conditions or injuries. Situational disabilities, on the other hand, emerge from context—the environment, the task, the moment, the circumstances you happen to be in. Both create functional barriers, but they differ in origin and duration.

However, each reveal something important: what happens when the designed world stops fitting the body or the circumstances you happen to inhabit right now.

Think about the last time you were on a phone call in a loud place. You pressed the phone harder against your ear. You turned away from the noise. You asked the person on the other end of your call to repeat themselves, once, twice, and then gave up and said sounds good even though you had no idea what they said. At that moment, you needed what people with hearing loss need every day: clear audio, reduced background noise, captioning, and even a system designed to account for the disparity between what is broadcast and what’s received. You needed it for ten minutes. Those with hearing loss need it always.

Temporary disability or situational disability become easier to understand once you realize you’ve probably lived inside one or both already. Think about the last time your dominant arm was in a sling, or occupied by a sleeping child you couldn’t put down, and you were trying to navigate a touchscreen designed for two-handed use. For ten minutes, you were a one-handed user. Every interface that assumed two free hands failed you. You adapted, frustrated, and moved on.

For people who rarely have to think about accessibility or inclusivity, temporary disability or situational disability offer something valuable: not mastery of another person’s experience, but a momentary interruption of belonging. The world stops cooperating. The assumptions become visible. Lisa Blankenship, professor of English at Baruch College, argues in Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy, that genuine empathy is not feeling for someone, which often curdles into pity or into a kind of distance that confirms the empathizer’s removal from the situation. Real empathy, she notes, is feeling with. It’s “coming alongside” the experience of another, not observing that experience from across a comfortable distance. Empathy requires, she explains, a deliberate act of imagination and listening—a willingness to be changed by what you encounter.

The interface that suddenly won’t cooperate. The menu you can’t read. The touchscreen designed for hands you don’t currently have available. For a moment, the world stops assuming you.

But that’s also the limit, and that limit matters.

Temporary friction is not the same thing as building a life inside a world that consistently assumes someone else’s body. When the cast comes off, the arm works again. When the baby goes down for a nap, the caretaker gets both hands back. The situation resolves. You file it under that was annoying and return to a world that was, on balance, designed for you.

I know this terrain more personally than I’d like.

I have gluten sensitivity and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). Eating the wrong food isn’t just unpleasant; it can be a health event for me. Hives. Wheezing. GI cramping that can last for hours, sometimes days. I don’t have celiac disease, so I don’t always receive the immediate institutional recognition that celiac often provides, but my body doesn’t particularly care about that distinction. It reacts anyway.

Eating out requires a kind of planning most people don’t have to do. I research restaurants before I go. I read menus online in advance. I ask questions when I arrive. I calculate risk. Is this kitchen likely to understand cross-contamination? When a menu advertises a “gluten-free option,” what exactly does that mean?

“Gluten-free” can mean wildly different things in practice. Does it reflect a real understanding of ingredients, preparation surfaces, cross-contamination, and the bodies of people who actually need gluten free? Or is it a surface-level acknowledgment, the design equivalent of removing the croutons from a salad and calling the problem solved?

A couple of years ago, I discovered an app called Find Me Gluten Free. It was created by people who got tired of doing hours of research just to answer a deceptively simple question: Can I eat safely here? Users rate and review restaurants specifically for gluten safety, not just whether they offer gluten-free options, but whether the restaurant actually understands what that means, whether the kitchen takes cross-contamination seriously, whether a person like me can eat there and feel reasonably safe and reasonably relaxed.

The sense of relief I experienced the first time I used the app was immediate. Not because the app solved everything; it didn’t. But because it represented something institutions so often fail to provide: cumulative knowledge, shared experience, and the sense that someone had already gone ahead of you and left notes.

It is, in every sense, participatory culture stepping in where systems fall short—a community-built tool created by people who were tired of waiting for the world to become easier to navigate.

In the summer of 2024, Scott and I drove from our home in Indiana to Bismarck, North Dakota for a family reunion. More than 900 miles, through small towns, rural stretches, and unfamiliar places where eating safely required strategy rather than spontaneity. I used Find Me Gluten Free the entire way. It told me which local diners and independent restaurants understood cross-contamination, which delis had options I could actually eat, which chains were consistently safer bets, and which places people with bodies like mine trusted enough to return to.

What changed wasn’t just my confidence in individual restaurants. It was the texture and pace of the trip itself. We could call ahead thirty minutes before stopping and order takeout I had reason to trust. We could keep driving. We could choose a stop based on timing or fatigue instead of solely on what my body might tolerate. Sure, I still had to plan. I still had to ask questions. But I wasn’t carrying the same constant uncertainty about ingredients, cross-contamination, and the location of the next bathroom.

Not a crystal ball, exactly. Something rarer: enough information to make movement easier.

That’s what inclusion feels like from the inside. Not the total absence of barriers, exactly. But the presence of information, forethought, and evidence that someone considered your body before you arrived.

True, the anxiety never fully goes away. Scott and I travel through northern Michigan every summer—beautiful, rural—where gluten-free options can be sparse, the app sometimes goes quiet, and I begin doing the math: how far until the next place to eat, what might be open, whether this is going to be one of those trips where I Frankenstein meals together from side dishes and substitutions.

The anxiety lives there, in the not knowing. In the background calculations most people never have to make. In the understanding that some spaces simply weren’t designed with my body in mind, and no app, however thoughtful, can fully close that gap.

Victor Papanek, one of the earliest voices in design to argue that the field has a moral responsibility to the people it excludes, wrote in Design for the Real World that design is the most powerful tool humans have for shaping the environment—and therefore one of the most consequential in terms of who gets included and who gets left out. He was writing in 1971. Most of what he said then is still true today.

The ramp that exists but is too steep to be usable. The accessible bathroom that requires a key from the front desk and a five-minute walk from the dining room. The accessible entrance that’s around back, near the service entrance, past the dumpsters. These are not hypothetical failures. They are real, documented, and common. They are what happens when accessibility is treated as a compliance checkbox rather than a design commitment. Technically permitted. Actually exclusionary.

Artist, design researcher, and writer Sara Hendren argues in What Can a Body Do? that disability is not a property of a person but a property of a fit—or a misfit—between a person and the world they’re navigating. A wheelchair user is not disabled by their body. They are disabled by stairs. In this way, we see how the body and the environment are in a relationship, and design determines the terms of that relationship.

This reframe matters because it shifts responsibility. If disability is a misfit, then designers are implicated every time they create a misfit. The elderly gentleman in the diner was not failed by his age or his eyesight. He was failed by a decision someone made about what a menu should look like and who would be using it.

My father had two massive hemorrhagic strokes in January 2009. He was 49 years old, living alone in North Dakota.

The strokes changed nearly everything for him. He has lived in constant pain ever since. He lost much of the use of his right arm and the fingers on his right hand; the entire right side of his body was affected, too—motor function, sensation, the accumulated small competencies of a body he’d spent forty-nine years learning to inhabit. He was right-handed. He had to learn, abruptly and without choice, to be something else.

Recently, I asked my father whether he’d be willing to share some of his experience for this piece. He agreed.

Over time, that survival has looked like developing a design sensibility born of necessity. When he moved into his current residence, he knew he needed either an elevator or a ground-floor apartment. Carrying groceries up flights of stairs was not sustainable.

Even accessibility features, he pointed out, are not universally accessible. The grab bars in his bathroom help him get into the tub, but the shower bar is mounted on his right side, which is less useful for someone with limited strength and dexterity in his right arm and hand.

Some frustrations are smaller, but constant.

Because typing one-handed is difficult and slow, he often relies on speech-to-text for emails and text messages. And then autocorrect steps in. “Because, after all, my phone knows what I want to say better than I do,” he wrote dryly. Sometimes autocorrect changes his words into something he never intended to say. Sometimes it produces something that isn’t even a real word.

And then there are the ordinary barriers that barely register to most people: the heavy security door in his apartment building that requires a pull rather than a push, especially difficult when carrying groceries, navigating bags, or doing the ordinary choreography of entering and exiting a building with limited use of one arm.

What strikes me most about what he wrote is what he didn’t say.

He didn’t say I am disabled. He said I need to figure this out so I can survive. He didn’t describe a life circumscribed by loss. He described a life of constant negotiation—with doors, with devices, with a body that thinks one way and functions another.

This is where temporary disability and situational disability reach the edges of their usefulness as a concept. Temporary mismatches resolve.

My father’s situation does not. There is no after—only the ongoing navigation of spaces, interfaces, and routines built for a body he no longer has.

Through that lens, Hendren’s argument about disability as a misfit between person and environment lands differently. The grab bar in the wrong place is not my father’s problem to solve. It’s a design assumption about who would be using that shower, an assumption that has to be renegotiated every single morning.

Recall that Blankenship’s concept of rhetorical empathy asks us to come alongside, not to observe. And I want to ask you, reader, if you are a person who has always had full use of your dominant hand, to sit for a moment with what it would mean to think right-handed in a left-handed life. To reach for something with a certainty that has been there for 49 years, and find that the signal arrives but the response doesn’t. To draft a message carefully in your head, speak it aloud, and then watch the technology that was supposed to help you mangle it into something you didn’t say. To do this not once, not in a frustrating day or week, but every day, for seventeen years, with the understanding that this is simply how it is now.

And what I notice, reading what he wrote, is that he has made his peace with most of it. Not because it’s acceptable but because he’s had to. Because there’s no alternative timeline where the world redesigns itself around him. He finds the workarounds. He figures it out.

What I find myself wanting to say to the people who designed the shower grab bar, the heavy door, the autocorrect that knows better, is this: my Dad shouldn’t have to be this resourceful. You had the chance to think about him before he arrived. You didn’t. He arrived anyway and made do, the way people like him always make do, because the option of not arriving isn’t on the table.

Comedian Josh Blue often points out that disability is the only minority group you can join at any time. One accident. One bad day. One bad bike ride away from joining. The line gets a laugh because it’s true. The assumed user is more temporary than most of us like to believe. Bodies change. Illness arrives. Age comes for all of us, if we’re lucky enough to keep living.

The question is not whether disability concerns you. The question is whether the world will wait to think about you until after you need it to.

Accessibility says: you are allowed here. What my father experiences, daily, is that being allowed is not the same as being anticipated.

I live fifteen hours away from my dad, which means my advocacy for him has limits. I’m not there to pull open the heavy door or reposition the grab bar or carry the groceries in from the garage. But I can listen. I can help problem-solve. I can offer to make calls, send emails, ask questions, translate bureaucratic language, and remind him, when the designed world asks him to be endlessly adaptable, that some of what he’s navigating aren’t personal shortcomings but environmental ones.

And the more I do that, the more convinced I become that inclusivity is not simply better accessibility. It’s a fundamentally different posture. Not: how do we help this person adapt after they arrive? But: who might arrive, and what assumptions are we already making about them?

Design will not change overnight.

But maybe it changes through a month of overnights. Through small acts of anticipation practiced often enough that they become culture.

In workplace meetings, that might mean circulating materials in advance. Asking who’s not in the room, who can’t be in the room (and why), whose body or schedule or bandwidth your assumptions are excluding. Measuring participation not just by who spoke, but by who had a real chance to.

In families, it might look smaller and more intimate, like asking before choosing the restaurant. Remembering the medication schedule. Leaving room for a slower pace without making someone negotiate for their own humanity.

In communities, classrooms, and friend groups, perhaps it begins with curiosity sturdy enough to survive discomfort. Asking not only What do you need? but also What am I not seeing or understanding because I don’t live with this experience? Listening long enough for the answer to complicate your original plan.

At the local, state, and federal levels, it means treating accessibility not as an optional accommodation or legal box to check, but as infrastructure. The bus route. The voting booth. The public website. The clinic intake form. The budget line item. The assumption built into a policy meeting about who can attend, who can wait, who can navigate the process. The ordinary architecture of belonging.

These are not grand gestures. They are practices of noticing. Of measuring success differently. Of treating inclusion not as a retrofit, but as a habit of foresight.

Who are we designing this for?

Not in the abstract. Specifically. Purposefully. With names, or at least with faces.

The elderly gentleman in the diner in Holland, Michigan, enlarging a menu that wasn’t designed for his eyes. My father, negotiating seventeen years of a world built for a body he no longer has, adapting because the alternative isn’t available. Me, on a highway in the middle of the country, relieved because strangers left notes for one another in an app when institutions wouldn’t.

The human spirit is, often, staggeringly inventive. People find the workaround, build the backup plan, and figure it out. But that ingenuity has conditions. It requires economic stability, access, and other social support networks. It also requires bodily capacity and margin, energy, and it being “a good enough day.” Not everyone has those things in equal measure. And some days, none of those conditions are met. On those days, the system doesn’t get examined. The person does.

Blankenship argues that empathy—real empathy, the kind that asks something of you—changes the subject. It changes the person doing the empathizing. It asks you to come alongside and stay long enough to understand something you didn’t before. To be fundamentally—irreversibly—changed by what you encounter.

That, I think, is what inclusive design asks of all of us. Not perfection. Not sainthood. But presence. The willingness to imagine the person before they arrive, and to be changed enough by that imagining to build something different.

The distance between you are allowed here and we thought about you before you arrived is where many people spend their lives.

It doesn’t have to be.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

That’s not a brag, it’s context. Fifteen years of lessons, a lifetime of playing, and something that happened early and never stopped happening: music opens a part of me that nothing else reaches. Not just emotionally but structurally.

I hear how songs are built. I feel the architecture of a song the way you might feel the layout of a room you’ve walked through a hundred times—not by thinking about it, but in your body, before your brain catches up.

I’m also, separately, the friend you call when you need to know something about a song. I know that “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was originally written for a vampire musical (which explains everything about it, if you think about it for even one second).

I know that Billy Joel wrote “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a response to someone telling him his generation had no historical consciousness—and yes, I know all the words, in tempo, as the song plays.

I know (usually) what key songs are in and how many beats per measure and why the opening of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” was specifically designed to sound like Roy Orbison, singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spector (which is either the most ambitious sentence ever uttered in a recording studio or the most unhinged, depending on how you feel about any of those three people).

The point is, I listen closely. I always have. Music has always asked that of me, and I have always said yes.

Which is why it took me an embarrassingly long time to actually hear what Meat Loaf was saying in his 1993 hit rock ballad “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”.

This particular debate has been running for over thirty years. What won’t Meat Loaf do? The internet has theories. Forums have threads. There are videos, essays, Reddit spirals. The mystery became a cultural joke—the punchline being that even after all this time, nobody can say what that is.

Except the answer is in the song. It’s always been in the song.

Listen to the structure of the song. The verses build in promises—extravagant, specific, almost absurdly committed acts of fidelity. He’ll get her out of a godforsaken town. Hold her sacred, hold her tight. He’ll make magic with his own two hands, build an emerald city from grains of sand. He’ll hose her down with holy water if she gets too hot.

These aren’t grand gestures in the abstract. They’re particular. They’re the promises of someone who has thought carefully about what this specific person needs and is saying: I will be that. I will show up for the actual texture of your actual life.

And then the bridge shifts. And if you’re listening with that part of you that feels structure, you feel it before you hear it. The melody drops. The certainty wavers. A different voice enters, offering the easy exit:

“After a while you’ll forget everything

It was a brief interlude and a midsummer night’s fling

And you’ll see that it’s time to move on”

No, I won’t do that.

“Sooner or later you’ll be screwing around”

I won’t do that.

The refusals are as patterned as the promises. He won’t forget her. He won’t move on. He won’t be unfaithful. And if you set those refusals next to the promises, the architecture becomes visible: the promises are acts of devotion, and the refusals are acts of integrity. One list says what love asks him to do. The other says what love refuses to let him become.

He’s not declining to do things for love. He’s declining to do things that would mean he never loved her at all.

The question everyone has been asking—what won’t he do—was always the wrong question. The right one is: what kind of love is he describing?

And the answer, if you listen carefully, is right there. Love is the thing that contains you. That defines not just your actions but also your limits. That holds you to a version of yourself you might otherwise let go of.

The limit is the love. The restraint is the commitment.

Jim Steinman wrote “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”. This matters.

Steinman and Meat Loaf met in 1973, when the singer auditioned for Steinman’s musical More Than You Deserve at the Public Theater in New York City. Meat Loaf sang a Motown-style song called “(I’d Love to Be) As Heavy as Jesus.” Steinman didn’t know Meat Loaf. But when Meat Loaf was done singing, Steinman walked by and said, “By the way, you’re as heavy as two Jesuses.” It was, as origin stories go, perfect—a pun that was also a prophecy. The man who would spend the next fifty years singing Steinman’s songs into existence had just walked in and proved, without really trying, that he could hold that kind of weight.

When Steinman died in 2021, Meat Loaf said: “We didn’t know each other. We were each other.”

Meat Loaf died nine months later.

They were, in every meaningful sense, inseparable—even when they were feuding, even when there were lawsuits, even when a decade passed between collaborations. Meat Loaf described Steinman as “the centerpiece of my life.” Steinman needed a voice that could make the impossible seem inevitable. Meat Loaf needed someone who could write to the full size of what he could become. Nobody else could do either job.

Steinman was not a rock guy who stumbled into feelings. He was a theater kid from Long Island, New York, who studied drama at Amherst College, wrote and starred in an epic rock musical in college, and spent his entire career writing songs that sounded like they belonged in the third act of something enormous. His producing style was operatic and almost preposterously grand. He was drawn to performers who could carry that weight—Bonnie Tyler, Celine Dion, Air Supply. But Meat Loaf was different. Meat Loaf was the reason any of this existed. He was the template.

Steinman once described his songs as anthems to the moments when you feel like you’re on the head of a match that’s burning, anthems to a world that despises inaction and loves passion and rebellion.

And then he wrote a song that is entirely about chosen restraint.

That’s not a contradiction. Look at the rest of Steinman’s catalog. “Total Eclipse of the Heart”—originally written for a vampire musical—is a song about love as something that overwhelms you, that you can’t outrun, that turns you around against your will. “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” is about love that refuses to stay gone. “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” is about the sheer improbable effort of sustaining feeling in the absence of anything to sustain it.

These are not songs about conquest. They’re not songs about pursuit or winning or ‘getting the girl’. They are songs about being undone by love, claimed by it, made into someone different by it.

Steinman wasn’t writing anthems to passion and rebellion in the way we usually mean those words. He was writing about a different kind of rebellion—the rebellion of refusing to become someone who gives up, moves on, forgets, betrays. In a culture that had made irony and detachment into virtues, he kept writing sincerity as if it were the most radical act available.

“I’d Do Anything for Love” is not an anomaly in his catalog. It’s his thesis statement. The grandeur of what the narrator will do, and the absolute quiet certainty of what he won’t; that’s Steinman’s whole argument about love, distilled into eight minutes.

He wasn’t being cagey. He was being utterly and completely precise.

Here’s what I think we did with this song.

We heard the bombast—the orchestra, the minutes, the operatic commitment—and we assumed it was the joke. We turned the mystery of what a man in love won’t do into a punchline because it was easier than sitting with what the song is actually saying.

Love, in this song, is defined by its edges—not the grand gesture but the quiet line you won’t cross, the person you won’t let yourself turn into, the commitment you hold even when you could let it go.

That’s a harder thing to hear than a joke. It asks something of you. It implies that love is not just feeling but choice, not just passion but conviction, not just what you reach toward but what you refuse.

Steinman believed his songs were anthems to passion and rebellion. He was right. He just knew that sometimes the most rebellious thing you can do is to not stop loving someone.

The answer was always in the song. Thirty years of debate, and it was right there, in plain sight, waiting for someone to actually listen.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

Not dramatically, and not the way people describe falling in love—no thunderclap, no cinematic swell. Just a small internal turn. It’s quiet and reliable, like a plant moving ever so slightly toward the light.

He’s on his way home.

After nine years together, six and a half of them married, my body still knows before my brain does. My insides lift. The day, whatever it’s been—and lately, some days are harder than others—reorganizes itself around that fact.

He’s on his way.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what that means. Not sentimentally, though I am somewhat of a sentimental person. No, I’ve been thinking about it analytically. The way I think about most things—turning it over, looking at its seams, asking what it’s made of and why it works.

What is it, exactly, that happens at 4:45p.m.? What’s the brain science of a body that still reaches toward the same person it reached toward nine years ago? What’s the architecture of a love that holds, not despite the ordinary but because of it—because of all the small, unglamorous, daily things that add up to a life?

I’ve been reading Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Fisher, a biological anthropologist who has spent her entire career studying romantic love, argues that love is not one thing but three: lust, attraction, and attachment, each governed by a different neurochemical system, each serving a different evolutionary purpose. What keeps long-term partners reaching for each other, she says, is the attachment system: the complex chemical network driven by oxytocin and vasopressin, the bonding hormones released by touch, by proximity, by the daily accumulation of presence. In short, the body learns to expect someone. To align with them. To register their absence as some kind of incompleteness.

I don’t decide to anticipate Scott. I just do.

The online dating app that introduced us to each other no longer exists. This feels appropriate; we are, both of us, people who are drawn to things that are specific and a little obscure and completely right for what they are, even when the world doesn’t quite keep up with them. Siren was built differently than other dating apps. It asked better questions. Heck, it asked questions, period! It was designed, I think, for people who were tired of the usual “swipe left or swipe right” script and wanted to be found rather than just seen.

Our first date was February 3rd, 2017, though it came together in the most practical and slightly absurd way possible. I was in my second year of a tenure-track position at a university in Fort Wayne, and I was driving to East Lansing to have a broken cavity filled by my former dentist from graduate school. Not the most romantic origin story detail, but a true one. Incidentally, I have learned, over the years, to prefer true things over romantic ones, except when they are both, which is rarer and more precious than people say.

Scott and I had been talking on the phone for three weeks by then, daily and at length, the way you talk to someone when you already suspect they might matter. When I mentioned the drive to East Lansing, he offered to meet me there. He drove from Ann Arbor, where he was finishing his Master of Science in Information at the University of Michigan. I drove from Fort Wayne. We had Mediterranean food first—me, freshly numb from the filling, which is its own kind of first date courage—then dessert, and then a walk around Schuler’s Books. Scott was fully present in the way that some people are and most people aren’t, the way that makes you feel, without anything being said, like you have someone’s complete and total attention. I remember thinking during that first date: Oh. This one.

Two people who spend their lives thinking about how things are found. Of course we ended up in a bookstore.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a coincidence. It was a map we didn’t know we were following. We couldn’t have designed a better origin story if we’d tried.

I should back up a bit—our jobs matter here. Scott is a digital archivist at a local university. I’m an educator, information architect, and researcher. We both spend our professional lives thinking about how knowledge is organized, preserved, and made findable. We both understand, deep in our bones, that the way you structure information is never neutral, that every system encodes assumptions about who will use it and what they need. We brought that sensibility to each other, I think, before we knew we were doing it. We were reading each other the way we read everything else—carefully, looking for what was real, what would last, and what lived underneath the surface.

What I found underneath Scott was this: kindness, all the way down. Not the kind of kindness that’s a performance or kindness as some sort of achievement, but kindness as the organizing principle of a person. Like the way some people are organized around ambition, or around fear, or around the need to be seen. Scott is organized around kindness and generosity. It was the first thing I noticed about him and it has never stopped being true.

I’ve been trying to understand why; not because I doubt it, but because I’m the kind of person who enjoys knowing how things work, what research or science says about why some loves last and others don’t.

Helen Fisher scanned the brains of people who described themselves as still madly in love after decades of marriage. What she found surprised her: the same reward circuits that light up in new lovers were still firing in people who’d been together for decades.

Conventional wisdom about long-term love is that it trades passion for comfort, that the neurochemical intensity of early romance inevitably gives way to something more settled and steadier, that this is simply the natural arc of attachment. Fisher’s research complicates that story. Intensity, she found, isn’t incompatible with longevity. What the long-term couples in her study had done, whether consciously or not, was maintain the conditions for novelty—for continued discovery of the person they already knew. In practice, this looks like choosing each other past the point when choosing feels automatic. It looks like a bookstore date that became a ritual. A thinking-of-you note tucked somewhere unexpected. His hands finding my feet on the couch without either of us saying a word—touch as connection, as habit, as the simplest possible way of saying: I’m still here, and so are you.

It’s the ongoing, deliberate act of treating the person you already have like someone still worth finding.

Psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, in their book A General Theory of Love, argue that humans are “limbically revisable,” that our nervous systems are literally shaped by close relationships and that we regulate each other’s biology through proximity and attunement. “Who we are and who we become,” they write, “depends in part on whom we love.” The body doesn’t just learn to expect someone. It learns to become itself more fully in their presence.

I think about this when Scott reaches for my hand. When his fingers find my knee in the middle of a conversation. When he touches a curl of my hair, absently, the way you touch something you love without needing a reason. My nervous system, which is dysregulated in all kinds of ways these days, stills. Not completely. But measurably enough. He is, in some cellular sense, a remedy. My nervous system finds, in his presence, something like equilibrium.

I think it has something to do with his hands.

They are big and strong, but specific and delicate in the way that purposeful things are delicate. The hands of someone who handles rare things carefully, who understands that some things are irreplaceable and must be protected and cherished accordingly. When his hands reach for me, I exhale.

And those same hands do the dishes every night.

bell hooks, in All About Love, argues that love is not a feeling but a practice. “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust,” she writes. Love is a verb before it’s a noun. It’s what you do, daily, in the small decisions that nobody witnesses and nobody applauds.

Every night, after I cook, Scott does the dishes. He has never once, in six and a half years of marriage, made me feel like washing them was a favor. They’re just what he does, the way I just cook, the way we have divided the work of our life together along the lines of what each of us can offer the other.

Lately, though, he does more for us. My body, which has been in the throes of negotiating long COVID on top of Hashimoto’s and dysautonomia, has days where the cooking is beyond me, where the standing and the stirring and the managing of multiple things at once exceeds what I have to give. On those days, Scott goes into my kitchen, which is slowly becoming our kitchen, and he finds his way. He reads the recipe from the top, even though he’s already read it twice. He pauses before a cabinet. He asks me whether garlic burns—and I say yes, always, add it last—and he tucks that away, one more thing learned, one more corner of my kitchen that’s becoming his, too. He remembers.

What I’m only now finding words for is what it does to me to be loved that specifically. To have someone move through the spaces of my life with such care and intention, and say, without quite saying it: “I want to understand the system so I can care for you inside of it.”

This is what it means to be known.

We get up together in the mornings, even though he leaves before nine and I could sleep longer. I get up because I don’t want to miss the time before he goes—the coffee, the breakfast, the small window of just us before the day begins.

There’s a particular quality of silence that only exists between people who have learned each other so completely, who have run out of the need to fill space and, in turn, discovered that the space itself is full. We have that silence. We also have the other kind—louder, funnier, the kind that has sustained nine years of two people who find the world genuinely amusing and can’t help but share it.

I leave him notes—actual notes, sometimes cards, tucked where he’ll find them. We flirt. We make each other laugh in the specific way that only works between people who have built a shared language over the years, who know each other’s references and timing and the exact register of humor that lands and the one that doesn’t. That particular fluency—I know what it costs to build it, and I know what it would cost to lose it.

Which is, I think, exactly what Sue Johnson is talking about.

Sue Johnson, the psychologist who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), argues that adult romantic love is an attachment bond, that what we’re really asking, in all our reaching toward each other, is: are you there? Will you be there when I need you? Can I count on you to be my safe place in a world that’s often not safe? Johnson calls this the primary question of love, the one underneath all the other questions, the one the body asks even when the mind is busy with something else.

I want to be honest about what the last few years have been like for Scott and me.

My body has changed in ways I didn’t choose and couldn’t really prevent. Long COVID moved in without asking and rearranged everything. I have had to learn, slowly and not always gracefully, what my body will allow, and I’ve had to learn it while still being a person, still being a wife, still being someone who loves and is loved and wants to show up for both.

On the days when my body won’t cooperate—and there are more of those days now—he makes sure there is food I can reach, meals I don’t have to think about, a refrigerator that tells me someone was thinking about me before I woke up.

I’ve been trying to find the right words for what that is. French theorist, Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, comes closest. He writes about the lover’s gaze, the way love makes one person the fixed point by which everything else is oriented. In a life that has felt, lately, like shifting ground, Scott is where I find my footing.

He is my fixed point. He always will be.

This Friday, May 22, is Scott’s 54th birthday.

At 4:45p.m., my body will know he’s on his way home, and something inside me will shift the way it has shifted every day for six and a half years. We’ve earned it. Day by day, in the smallest possible ways.

I’ll cook something he loves, because cooking is one of the ways I say yes, offering the territory I know best to the person who’s been learning it alongside me. He’ll do the dishes after, because that’s what he does. Birthday or not.

We’ll sit on our couch. He’ll reach for me. I’ll lean into him.

Because love, in the end, is not what you feel.

It’s what you do.

Happy birthday, Scott. Thank you for doing it so well.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

That’s by design, technically. The out of office (OOO) reply exists to manage expectations, reroute traffic, and absolve the sender of any obligation to respond in a timely manner. It’s the most functional document in professional life and the least examined. Nobody writes a think piece about the OOO. Nobody should have to.

And yet, here we are.

If you slow down long enough to actually read one—really read it, the way you’d read anything designed to communicate something—you’d start to notice some things. The word choices. The apologies that weren’t asked for. The locations dropped like breadcrumbs. The alternative contacts who clearly did not volunteer for this.

The out of office reply is a tiny window into how people feel about their work, their worth, and whether they believe they’re allowed to leave. It is, in miniature, a workplace culture document.

Nobody treats it like one. That’s precisely what makes it interesting.

Like any ecosystem, the out of office reply contains multitudes. After years of sending and receiving them, certain species emerge with reliable consistency. A field guide follows.

The Apologizer

“Thank you so much for your email! I am currently out of the office and I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. I will do my absolute best to respond to your message as soon as I possibly can upon my return. Please know that your email is very important to me.”

The apology is preemptive, the gratitude is unprompted, and “as soon as I possibly can” is doing a lot of anxious lifting.

The Apologizer isn’t sorry for being gone. The Apologizer has simply never been told they’re allowed to leave. This is an American species, most commonly spotted in mid-level corporate environments, and it’s not going extinct anytime soon.

The Novelist

“Hi there! I’m currently out of the office attending the Regional Conference on Sustainable Urban Futures in Portland, where I’ll be presenting our team’s work on community-based participatory research frameworks. I’ll be back in the office on the 14th, though I may have limited availability that week as I’ll be catching up on correspondence and preparing for our quarterly review. If your matter is urgent, please reach out to my colleague Diane at diane@...”

The Novelist cannot simply be gone. The Novelist must account for every day, justify every absence, and somehow make you feel like you’re getting a project update.

Diane does not want to be in this email.

The Minimalist

“Out until the 15th.”

That’s it. No name. No apology. No Diane.

The Minimalist has achieved a level of institutional security—or continental indifference—that the rest of us can only admire from a distance. This species is most commonly observed in senior leadership and, notably, all of Europe. You will wait until the 15th. And you will be fine.

The Oversharer

“Hey! I’m out this week! My sister Emma is getting married in Sedona and we’re making a whole trip of it! On the 18th, we’re doing a 2-hour private spiritual healing, followed by glassblowing, and then a night of UFO and stargazing. On the 20th, we’re all headed for a tour of the Grand Canyon! So excited! I’ll have spotty service but will try to check in when I can. If you need something urgent, try Marcus, but honestly it can probably wait :) Back on the 22nd!”

The Oversharer means well. The Oversharer wants you to feel like you’re friends.

You are not friends. You are a vendor trying to get an invoice approved.

The Humble Bragger

“Thank you for your message. I am currently delivering a keynote at the Global Leadership Summit in Zurich before joining a series of executive roundtables in Singapore and closing out the month at the Future of Work Forum in Copenhagen. I will have limited access to email through the 28th. I look forward to connecting upon my return and appreciate your patience as I navigate a particularly full season.”

They are not just gone—they are gone there, doing that, and they need you to know. The Humble Bragger is a distant cousin of the Oversharer. The Oversharer wants you to feel like friends. The Humble Bragger wants you to feel like a fan. The distinction matters more to one of them than the other.

The Passive Aggressive

“I am out of the office. If your matter is truly urgent, please contact my manager. If you’re unsure whether it’s urgent, it probably isn’t. I will respond to emails in the order they were received when I return on the 20th. Please do not follow up before then.”

Every sentence is a boundary. Every boundary has a backstory.

The Passive Aggressive has been cc’d on one too many things marked HIGH PRIORITY that were not, in fact, high priority. You don’t know what you did. It doesn’t matter.

The Ghost

You get the OOO. Bob says he’ll be back on the 10th. It’s currently the 23rd.

Come to think of it, no one knows if Bob’s back. No one knows if he ever came back. You email Diane. Diane’s OOO says she’ll be back on the 10th, too.

The Boundary Setter

“I am currently on a mental health day and will not be checking email. I’ll respond when I return tomorrow. I encourage you to take care of yourself, too.”

The Boundary Setter is doing something radical and necessary and slightly uncomfortable to receive, especially if you were just emailing about a spreadsheet.

You find yourself hoping they’re okay. You also find yourself hoping the spreadsheet gets handled.

And, somewhere in between, you wonder what it would take to be the kind of person who could send this, who could simply say “I need a day” and mean it, without the apology chasing close behind.

Here’s what these OOO’s reveal, if you’re paying attention: people are not just managing your expectations. They’re telling you, in about four sentences, how they feel about being needed, being seen, being gone, and being back.

The Apologizer is anxious. The Novelist is insecure. The Minimalist is untouchable. The Oversharer is lonely. The Humble Bragger wants you to know. The Passive Aggressive wants you to stop. The Ghost has already left in every way that matters. The Boundary Setter is trying, against considerable odds, to be a functioning person at work.

I’ve been taking notes on all of them.

And, for the record, I am out of the office the rest of this week.

I didn’t put up an OOO. I never do. Make of that what you will.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

A subject line. Maybe it’s bold in your inbox, maybe it’s not.

Maybe you see it on your phone before you’re fully awake, before you’ve had coffee, before you’ve had a chance to put your armor on for the day.

It says something like: Celebrate the moms in your life! Or: For the woman who does it all! Or, if the brand has a little more personality: Hey, you, don’t forget—Mother’s Day is almost here!

And just like that, your breath catches.

You know this feeling, if you know it. It arrives before thought, before language. It’s a physical thing, a small seizing in the chest, the body’s way of saying: oh. That. Already. Again.

For some people, it passes quickly. For others, it doesn’t pass at all. Not really, not fully. It just settles in and stays for two or three weeks every May, a low hum underneath everything, until the second Sunday comes and goes and the world moves on without ceremony.

I am one of those others.

My husband Scott and I have been trying to have a baby for almost six years. We have not been able to. It’s a quiet grief, the kind that doesn’t show up on your face at work or announce itself at dinner parties. It’s the kind you carry in your body and learn, slowly—somehow—to move around. Some months are easier than others. May is not one of the easier months.

I have never written about this publicly before. I’ve sat with it long enough to know I wanted to—not because time heals everything, it doesn’t, not really, but because I felt the pull to stop carrying it quietly and start saying it out loud. I’m writing about it now because I think it matters. And because I think the inbox knows something about you, knows something about me, that the people filling it often don’t.

Here’s a number worth sitting with: roughly 1 in 6 people worldwide experience infertility. In the United States, somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of couples are unable to conceive after a year of trying. That’s before you count pregnancy loss, which is staggeringly common and staggeringly underdiscussed. That’s before you count the people who are not in a position to try for a baby—who are single, or grieving a relationship, or navigating circumstances that have closed that door for now or maybe forever. And that’s before you count the people for whom children were never part of the picture, for whatever reason, and who are still made to feel the weight of that absence every May.

And then there are the people who have lost their mothers. Who will lose them. Who have complicated relationships with them that a Hallmark-adjacent email can’t begin to account for. Grief doesn’t follow the calendar. It arrives when it arrives, and it doesn’t care that a brand has a quarterly campaign to execute.

Every May, marketing teams at thousands of companies send emails to inboxes that contain all of this—all of this grief, all of this longing, all of this complicated love—and they write the copy as though the person on the other end is simply, uncomplicated, a child who has a mother and a family to celebrate.

Most of the time, nobody on that team stops to ask: what if they’re not?

I should tell you that I open the emails anyway. I’m a word nerd, content strategist, and information architect by training, which means I am professionally incapable of deleting something without at least glancing at the copy first. I want to know how they handled it. What choices did the designer make? What did the writer reach for?

And—I’ll be honest—am I a woman who’s been successfully conditioned by the capitalist machine to check for a good deal? Also yes. Is there a discount code buried under all these feelings? Let me just look real quick.

Most of the time, the emails are a miss. The copy is warm in a way that assumes warmth is what you need. The imagery is predictable: flowers, soft light, women of a certain age smiling at one another across a beautifully set dining room table. The call to action asks you to shop for her, celebrate her, honor her. The whole thing is built for a reader who is simply, uncomplicated, ready to participate.

Occasionally, though, someone gets it right. Or closer to right.

Recently I received this, from Verve Coffee, a week before Mother’s Day:

I read that and I felt something loosen in my chest. They saw me. Or, at least, they saw that someone like me might be out there, and they built a small door I could walk through, if I needed to.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I can’t quite shake even when I’m grateful for the gesture: I still had to click the button. I still had to take an action that said, in effect, this hurts me, please stop. The system was still centered on itself. The opt-out, however kindly offered, still required me to name my wound and do something about it.

The burden of protection was still mine to carry.

So what does good actually look like? Verve got several things right, and they’re worth naming.

First, they sent the opt-out email early—a week before the holiday, not the day before—which gave people time to act without feeling ambushed. They made the language of the opt-out shame-free. They kept the tone warm without being presumptuous.

These aren’t complicated things. They’re choices, made deliberately, by someone who paused long enough to ask the question: who else might be reading this, and what might it cost them?

What Verve didn’t fully solve—what the opt-out model structurally can’t solve—is the moment of having to name your own wound. That requires something deeper than a well-written email. It requires preference centers built into products from the start, not reactively assembled when a holiday approaches. It requires someone asking whether the emotional frame is even load-bearing—whether “celebrate the moms in your life” is doing necessary work, or whether it’s just what you write in May because that’s what you write in May.

The difference could look something like this: “20% off this weekend” versus “Celebrate the mom who does it all.” Both sell the same thing. Only one assumes you have something to celebrate. The design can still have the flowers and the pastels. The imagery doesn’t have to change. It’s the words that do the work, and the words are a choice.

When someone in the room raises these questions, the room needs to actually listen. Those people aren’t being difficult. They’re doing the job.

In content strategy and UX, we’re having an increasingly urgent conversation about trauma-informed design. The idea isn’t complicated, though the execution is: before you build something, before you write something, before you send something, you ask yourself who might be on the receiving end and what it might take from them. You design not just for the happy path—the user who is exactly who you imagined, doing exactly what you hoped—but for the people navigating harder terrain.

Trauma-informed design asks:

• What assumptions are baked into this?

• Who does this center?

• Who does it leave out?

• What does it ask of someone who is already carrying something heavy?

The Mother’s Day email, as a genre, almost never asks these questions. And I think I know why.

It’s not malice. I want to be clear about that. The people writing these emails are not trying to hurt anyone.

They are, in most cases, though, doing exactly what they were asked to do: execute a holiday campaign, drive revenue, hit send by a certain date. The calendar says it’s May. The playbook says you do Mother’s Day in May. The metrics say holiday emails perform.

Chances are, nobody in the room said: wait. Who is reading this? What are they carrying? Does this email need to invoke motherhood at all, or are we doing that because it’s what you do in May?

And if someone did ask—if someone brave enough to raise their hand actually said something—chances are they were told there wasn’t time, or that the numbers didn’t support it, or that we can’t design for every edge case.

When someone raises the question and gets overruled, that’s not an oversight anymore. That’s a choice.

Because the sale is the sale. Twenty percent off this weekend is twenty percent off this weekend, in May or any other month. The emotional frame—the mothers, the love, the celebration—is layered on top by a marketing or content or design team, and that layering is a choice. One that is made, most of the time, without ever asking what it costs the user.

A content designer who had sat with someone like me, or someone grieving their mother, or someone for whom this day is simply not what the email assumes it is, might push back. Might say: do we need the flowers? Do we need the copy about honoring the women who shaped us? Can we just sell the thing?

I can already hear the counter: isn’t that the whole point of marketing? Of advertising? Emotion sells. It always has. Sex, nostalgia, FOMO, belonging—these are the tools of the trade, and they work. Nobody’s disputing that.

But there’s a difference between emotion that invites and emotion that assumes. An ad that makes you feel the joy of giving a gift is doing something different than an ad that presupposes you have someone to give that gift to. One opens a door. The other walks into your house uninvited and rearranges your furniture.

The question isn’t whether to use emotion. It’s whether the emotion you’re reaching for has considered who’s on the other end of it.

That’s the work of trauma-informed content. Not softening everything into meaninglessness. Not avoiding every possible trigger. But pausing, before you hit send, to ask who else might be in the room.

Scott and I are still trying for a baby. I’m 42. He’s almost 54. We haven’t given up. We will always be open to life.

Some days the hope for a child is quieter than others. But we’re trying to hold all of it—the longing, the grief, the gratitude for what we do have, the faith that God’s plan for us is larger than what we can see—without letting any one piece of it swallow the rest.

May is hard. June is just as hard. I have learned to move through these months rather than around them, to let the breath catch and then keep breathing, to feel the weight of the emails and the texts and the promotions and the opt-outs and then set them down and go about my day.

I have also learned, in my professional life, that the distance between harm and help is often not as large as we think. It doesn’t always require a total redesign. Sometimes it requires one person in one meeting asking: who else might be reading this?

That person can change what gets built. That person can change what lands in the inbox at 7am when someone isn’t yet armored for the day.

I’ve been that person, in classrooms, research sessions, and content audits, for years.

I’m writing this so that maybe someone else will be, too.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what’s already there.

There was a meal I had been planning to make. I don't remember now if it was the gumbo or the Zuppa Toscana or the lemon herb chicken—it doesn't matter, really. What matters is that I wasn't well enough to make it, and so Scott, my husband, did.

I know this because I heard it. The unfamiliar rhythms of someone else in my kitchen. The hesitation before a cabinet. The pause that meant he was reading the recipe again, from the top, even though he'd already read it twice.

It takes him longer. The kitchen doesn't come as easily to him as it does to me. And for a long time, I couldn't figure out why.

In information architecture, there's a principle I come back to again and again: the person who built the navigation knows where everything lives. And that's actually the problem.

When you know where something is, you stop being able to imagine not knowing. There's a term for this in cognitive psychology—the curse of knowledge. Once you have information, you can't remember what it felt like not to have it. The map becomes invisible because you've internalized the territory. You don't navigate anymore. You just move.

I've taught this concept dozens of times. I've built card sorts around it, run tree tests to expose it, designed entire courses to help students see past it. I understand it, professionally, in my bones.

And then I heard Scott in my kitchen, and I realized I had no idea what I actually knew.

What do I know? I know that you sauté from most dense to least—the onions first, then the peppers, then the garlic at the end because it burns fast and bitter. I know that a recipe that says “season to taste” is not a suggestion to taste once but an invitation to taste constantly, adjusting as you go. I know what a simmer looks like versus a boil, and I know the difference matters. I know which substitutions hold and which ones collapse the whole dish. I know how to read a recipe not as a script but as a rough map, and I know when to trust the map and when to trust my hands instead.

I know all of this the way I know how to walk. It doesn’t feel like knowledge. It feels like nothing at all.

I'll be honest with you: when Scott does something I wouldn't do, my first reaction isn't always generous. I've caught myself sighing. Actually sighing, audibly, from the other room. Or letting out a small grunt of…I don’t know what. Frustration? Disbelief?

How does he not know this?

And then, later, the more honest question: how would he?

He didn't grow up in a kitchen the way I did. He never learned much about cooking beyond the basics because he never really had to.

And, I never taught him, because I never had to. The cooking was mine, happily, for years. The knowledge lived in my hands and stayed there. It never occurred to me that it wasn't somehow shared, absorbed through proximity or osmosis or marriage.

The curse of knowledge doesn't just make you a bad navigation designer. It makes you a bad teacher. It makes you forget that the gap between what you know and what someone else knows is real, and wide, and not their fault.

Here is what else I know: he's learning.

The gumbo turned out. The lemon herb chicken was exactly right. He's figured out that garlic burns, that you have to taste as you go, that a recipe is a starting point. And when he gets something right—when I can tell he's actually internalized something, not just followed instructions—my teacher’s heart comes fully alive. I am so genuinely happy for him I could cry.

That's the other thing about the curse of knowledge: the moment it breaks is extraordinary. When you watch someone cross the gap you didn't even know existed, it's not a small thing. It's the whole thing.

In IA, we call the work of closing that gap cognitive defamiliarization—deliberately setting aside your expert knowledge to design for a user who doesn't have it yet. Seeing your own system as a stranger would. It's harder than it sounds. A lot harder. It requires a kind of willful unknowing, a practiced humility about what feels obvious.

What I'm learning—slowly, from the other room, listening to my husband figure out my kitchen—is that this isn't just a professional skill. It's a human one.

The person who built the navigation knows where everything lives. She also, it turns out, knows where everything lives in the pantry, and which burner runs hot, and how long the soup actually needs, and approximately how much "a pinch" is.

She just forgot, for a while, that she was the only one who knew.

Even though Scott never really learned how to cook, he's learning now, for me, in what’s becoming our kitchen. And I am watching him—with frustration, sometimes, with tenderness always, with a grief I'm still getting used to for what my body can't consistently do right now—and I am so grateful.

The gap, it turns out, is not just the whole job.

Sometimes the gap is also how you find out how much someone loves you.

Beth Keller Kirycki is a researcher, teacher, writer, and information architect. Plain Sight is about noticing—and naming—what's already there.