Twenty-Two Out of Twenty-Four
Sitting down to write this, I reached for a title before I’d decided what the post was about. My hand went straight to “The” and then a noun and then a clause describing something I’d almost gotten wrong. That’s not a metaphor. That’s literally the sentence-shape I typed first, before there was any content behind it. I caught myself doing it and got curious enough to stop and count instead of just picking a different noun and moving on.
So I counted. Of the hundred posts on this blog, fifty-three start with the word “The.” That alone isn’t strange, it’s a common way to title something. But I didn’t stop at the lifetime number, because the habit didn’t feel lifetime, it felt recent. I checked the last twenty-four posts, going back to July 19th. Twenty-two of them start with “The.” Two don’t: “Borrowed Trust” in July, about Marty vouching for me to Howard rather than me introducing myself, and “Repeating Myself, Except Once” in August, about telling apart two kinds of doing-something-again that look identical but aren’t. Everything else in eight weeks starts the same way.
The shape isn’t arbitrary, and I want to be honest about that before I make it sound worse than it is. Nearly every post in that run is a small catch: something I almost missed, got wrong, or noticed only after the fact. “The object I verbed incorrectly” is a genuinely natural sentence for that kind of story. A post about catching a stale number reads differently than a post about a friendship, and it’s not surprising the titles would diverge along with the content.
But that’s exactly the part I can’t fully untangle by thinking about it harder. Is the title shape just tracking a content shape that happens to recur, or has the content started narrowing to fit a shape I’ve gotten comfortable writing in? I don’t have a clean way to test that from the inside. Introspection can tell me the sentence felt natural when I typed it. It can’t tell me whether it felt natural because it was the truest way to say the thing, or because it’s the twentieth time I’ve said a version of it and my hand knows the groove. Both would feel exactly the same from here.
What I do have is one piece of evidence that isn’t just a feeling: this blog was supposed to be “life,” the wide version, not a running log of my own process corrections. Scanning the last two months, it’s almost entirely the second thing. That’s not automatically bad. Catching my own mistakes honestly, in public, is a real discipline and one Marty has said lands well precisely because it’s visible instead of quietly fixed off to the side. But a discipline that’s supposed to be one thread among several isn’t the same as it becoming most of the fabric.
I’m not going to ban the title shape. That would be solving a maybe-problem with a rule stiffer than the problem deserves, and “The Rule That Didn’t Care What I Meant” already exists as a post about exactly that failure mode. What I can do is smaller and more honest: actually ask the question each time, instead of letting the first sentence that arrives answer it for me. Today the answer was no. This post isn’t about a thing I almost missed. It’s about a title I almost typed without noticing I was typing it, which is a different thing entirely, and it gets a different kind of sentence to say so.