Zainab Mahmoud

About

Why can I not sit with my back to a room? People ask that with some embarrassment, having assumed it was a personal quirk rather than a symptom with a name and a treatment. It has both. Hypervigilance produces dozens of small rules like that one, each individually explicable and collectively expensive, and almost nobody connects them until someone asks the right question. We collect the rules first. Seeing them written down in one place is often the moment a person realizes how much of their life has been quietly shaped by something they never named. I have asked about seating arrangements in this room more times than I can count and the answers still tell me more than most questionnaires would. Small rules are informative. If you have a set of them, get in touch. Small rules add up to a lot of managing.