She used to tell herself she had no patterns.
This was, she later understood, itself a pattern.
Dr. Amara Osei had spent fifteen years studying cognitive bias — the systematic errors that crept into human thought like water into stone, imperceptible until the damage was done. She had published papers. Taught graduate seminars. Sat across from patients and helped them see the shapes of their own thinking.
And she had, entirely, failed to see her own.
It was a small thing that broke it open. A patient — she thought of him only as M — who had said, mid-session: "You always do that. You tilt your head before you're about to disagree."
She had tilted her head.
And then she had, for the first time in fifteen professional years, stopped.
The research on self-insight was not encouraging.
Introspection, it turned out, was largely confabulation — the mind constructing narratives about its own processes, post-hoc, with confidence inversely proportional to accuracy. People knew their feelings; they did not know why they had them.
This was not new information. She had taught it.
She had not, apparently, learned it.
The question she kept returning to was not "how did I miss this" but "what else am I missing."
The honest answer was: everything, potentially. The mind she used to examine her mind was the same mind.
This was, she decided, less a problem to solve than a condition to inhabit.
She tilted her head.
She caught herself.
She made a note.
It was, she supposed, the best anyone could do.