The short email

At ten past two your manager replies to the report you sent this morning. Two lines. "Thanks. Let's discuss Thursday." No comment on the work, no thanks for the weekend you spent on it, no sign-off. You read it three times. By half past two you've decided the report is a problem, that Thursday is the meeting where you'll hear about it, and that the two lines were the sound of someone holding something back. The afternoon is gone.

At dinner your partner is quiet. Not hostile, just not there. They answer when spoken to and look at their plate. You run through the day for what you did. The thing you said this morning about the bins. The plan you changed without asking. You don't raise it, because raising it would be admitting you'd been counting, and the evening passes in a silence that you're sure is about you.

A friend takes a day to reply to a message that you'd have answered in a minute. When the reply comes it's fine, cheerful, ordinary, and you spend a further hour deciding whether it's a little too cheerful. And on the way in from the car, the neighbour at number four looks straight at you and doesn't wave.

These are invented, but I'd guess you recognised more than one, and I'd guess you recognised what they have in common. In each case there was a piece of behaviour, a two-line email, a quiet dinner, a slow reply, a look, and in each case you knew immediately what it was about. It was about you. You didn't decide that. It arrived as a fact, the way the colour of the wall arrives, and everything afterwards was working out the details.

Some words. I'll call the interpretation that it's about you the reading. The raw material, the email or the quiet or the look, I'll call the remark or the mood, depending on which it was. The explanation that has nothing to do with you, which you rarely reach, I'll call the other account, and what the other person has been through that day, which the other account is usually made of, the day behind it. The time you spend on the reading afterwards I'll call the evening, because that's usually when it happens. Asking, in one plain sentence, I'll call the check. Going through your week for the thing you must have done I'll call the search. And I'll call it leaving it when you put a reading down without checking, which is the right answer more often than you'd think.

Before you go on, do one thing. For a week, keep a list. Every time you take something personally, write down the remark or the mood in a few words, and the reading. Then, if you ever find out what it was actually about, write that down too. Most people who do this find that the list is long, that they find out in fewer than half the cases, and that in the cases where they do find out, the reading was wrong nearly every time. That gap is what the rest of the book is about.