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This publication is an act of naming.

For twenty years I worked inside mission-driven institutions: higher education, healthcare, youth development, and animal welfare. I watched the same patterns repeat across all of them, and for many of those years I had no language for what I was watching. Most people meet these patterns the way I did: as confusion, burnout, self-doubt. As personal failure. The premise here is different; what feels personal is often patterned, and naming the pattern is the first act of recovery. Notes from Practice is where the language gets built. Essay by essay, term by term. The governing question underneath all of it: how does a person recover the ability to know what they know?

If you arrived here from a single essay, here is the map:

For the the experience, start with I Didn’t Know. It is the prologue to everything here: Boylston Street, April 2013, the moment the fiction of the neutral narrator ended. The essays that follow it, like Inconvenient, show what the architecture produces in a body, a workday, a life.

For the language, start with The Translation. Each entry in the Translation Series names one mechanism that has operated for decades without a word for it. Structured Fog. Constructed Complicity. Argument Proliferation. If you have ever felt one of these without being able to say it, the term is the tool. Take it.

For the framework, read The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Continuum. It is the keystone of the project — five movements mapping the architecture of institutional confinement and extraction. Everything else here is either evidence for it or a tool derived from it.

These essays are drawn from She Was Right: Calling It What It Is, a completed collection currently on submission; some pieces are held back for that reason. What is published here is the practice.

New essays arrive roughly once a week. — Keira

Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.