“Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see” (Edgar Allen Poe)

We all like to believe we know the people who share our world. Spend enough years with someone, share a home, a bed, the significant events and the ordinary rituals of daily life, and surely we come to know that person. But do we? Perhaps we only know the version of them they allow us to see. The Chris Watts tragedy is an especially chilling reminder that the person sleeping beside us can carry an entire hidden life we know nothing about. We can share our existence with someone for years and still, in some profound way, be living with a stranger.

Maybe part of the problem is that we’re moving targets, constantly evolving through the inevitable changes of life. The person you married twenty years ago isn’t necessarily the same person sitting across from you today. And neither are you. We spend so much time looking toward others that we can neglect to consider how difficult it is to keep up with ourselves—or, more importantly, to align our lives with the person we’ve become. When we fail to do so, there can be casualties in the aftermath.

And sometimes the people who have known us the longest are the ones who have the hardest time accepting the person we’ve become. They remember our earlier versions, the person who recited the expected lines. When we stop playing our familiar role, they may wonder what happened to us. From their perspective, we’ve simply gone off-script.

I see life as a collection of before-and-after moments, the turning points that reshape us into versions of ourselves we, and others, may not recognize at first glance. Sometimes it’s the before-and-after of a heart-wrenching divorce, the residual grief from a death, a debilitating illness or a hard-fought financial collapse; other times, it can be as simple as reaching a certain age and realizing that the life you’re living isn’t quite what you ordered. Somewhere within those currents that carry us elsewhere, we find ourselves changed in ways we never anticipated.

Not all change requires a seismic event to be invited. Sometimes we simply recognize that our usual way of doing things isn’t working. Which brings me, somewhat inexplicably, to George Costanza, who may have stumbled upon one of the more unconventional methods of personal transformation ever conceived.

Convinced that his instincts were responsible for virtually every bad decision he’d ever made, George decided to do the opposite of whatever his instincts told him to do. If his gut said yes, he’d say no. If he wanted to turn left, he’d go right. And, remarkably, it began to work. For perhaps the first time in his life, George was making good decisions simply by doing the opposite of what he would normally do.

I’m not suggesting we all adopt the George Costanza Method. Still, there is something to be said for occasionally questioning our instincts, particularly when they’ve led us down the wrong road to change more than once.

As for my own questionable decisions, some things are best taken to the grave.