Between every trigger and every surge sits an appraisal — a fast, automatic read of what just happened. You never experience the read itself; you experience its output. The lane-cutter through one lens: *"they didn't see me"* — curve goes to two. Through another: *"they did that deliberately"* — curve goes to eight. Same event, different bill.
Any of the three can be accurate. The alarm isn't malfunctioning — it's answering, honestly, the read it was handed.
Decades of research show that people who struggle with anger tend to read ambiguous behavior as deliberate. It has a name: *hostile attribution bias*. The neutral face reads as contempt. The slow reply reads as a message. Not because you're foolish — because a threat-detection system shaped by hard experience would rather ring falsely than miss once. But watch what that one word costs: "deliberate" turns an inconvenience into an insult, and insults go straight up the curve. The same late reply lands at three as *"they're overloaded"* and at eight as *"they're ignoring me on purpose."*
We're not calling your reads false, and we're not arguing the alarm down. Some reads are right. The point is only that a read is a *claim* — and in week four we'll learn to check claims properly, with a procedure. For now, it's enough to see there's a lens at all.
One new line in the log: the read. When you note an episode, note what you took the event to *mean*. Seeing your own lens in writing is the first step to loosening it. Don't fix it yet — just be a good reporter: event, number, read.