“Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
I flew in and pulled cash from an airport ATM. By morning, a fraud alert lit up my phone. Overnight someone tried a second withdrawal on my card. The bank caught it and froze the card. My money was safe. My only debit card was dead.
My first instinct was to make a rule. Avoid airport ATMs. I keep a short list of rules and rewrite them regularly, so this one would ride along for the rest of my life.
Then I stopped.
This happened once. Even if it happens a few more times this decade, is that rule worth carrying for good?
This is how trauma gets hard-coded. Something bad happens. The fear stays long after the threat is gone. You live by a rule no one wrote.
I’ve written about using pain as signal. Reflect on your losses. Pull the lesson. That part holds. This is the other side. The lesson hardens into a permanent rule whose cost outgrows the rare loss it guards against.
Fear-based rules are sticky. They feel necessary. You carry them because the memory is vivid, not because the risk is high.
The better fix was a second debit card. One dies, the other works. No rule required.
Some risks earn a permanent rule, the ones that could wipe you out. Most don’t. Lock in a rule for each bad thing that happens and you become the person with 47 rules about restaurants because of one bad meal. Keep your rules lean.
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What rule are you carrying that was written by a single bad experience?
