Articulating the human being only we can observe is always a creative endeavor, is it not? This me now is not that me then, even so close in time.

The use of lowercase was intentional. More explanation (and expectations for upcoming articles) at the end. Thanks for reading. Hope you glean some behavioral takeaways, sans lecture.

100% human generated, flaws and all

I a. first glimpse

i awake, naturally, to sunlight and damp dog breath on my face, having freed myself from artificial catapults to consciousness long ago. i don’t see the time, but, judging by orange fading to blue above the treeline and the light scattering from my disco ball, i guess it’s six, nearly seven. later than usual for a weekday, right on time for a weekend. always grateful when my body abides, unplanned, i close my eyes and take inventory. results: breathing? easy. emotions? calm. physiology? lethargic.

“let the soft body of your animal do what she needs to do,” i think, sleep loosening the echo of Mary Oliver’s words but retaining meaning in the outcome.

dog paws clatter, tap-tapping with fading footsteps of human feet. one tug less, i feel the wake drift away and words loosen to a swirl. a second or hour later, a series of half-asleep thoughts increases my heart rate and jolts my eyes open. one, a heartbeat: what’s next?

a tensing of this animal’s formerly soft body.

I b. self-conflict, nauseating stillness

i think, writer’s block, but only for a second, unwilling to land on invisible shorthand for what-and-why this animal is doing or not doing. besides, it’s not a block. a block implies cessation. yet, textual behavior has flowed from my hands, in notes, private essays, the chicken scratch of my notebooks, and talk-to-text on that one social platform. [eyes close. stomach wrenches.]

ugh, platform. socials. audience. self perception. self perception. self perception. [sinking feeling. deep breath; release.]

additive events built a mirror i can’t look into publicly without a filter. recently, i glimpsed my reflection with less dizzy eyes; response-contingent loss is a helluva full stop for the ever-spinning self, especially if you don’t like what you’re seeing. it’s as nauseating as stepping off a tilt-a-whirl.

what me did they see that day at the fair? did i pull them from their ride before they pulled me from mine? they saw me ugly, spit-spinning and said, “i can’t watch” and i said, “wait, it’s bad” and they said, “i can’t help” and i said, “why not” and they said, “you won’t help yourself” and i said nothing ‘cause they were already gone. another funhouse exchange with a ghost of me. another grief of the living. cotton candy hands and promises of spare change will not bring them back.

drafts, drafts, so many drafts — a line here, a paragraph there; a post here, a note there. emotional events are easiest to pluck while spinning. i feast on flour-rich fair food; non-nutritious, escaping self-consumption.

and in the meantime? writing for what? writing for whom? immediate over delayed wins hooks writer-reader every time. future me looks back in recognition, not despair.

I c. the mirror

the mirror shows me how i've adapted to what’s been selected for current me but not future me. despite having ample skills as a ph.d. behavior analyst, despite helping others change much more, for two decades, and despite my safety, threatened, i justify not changing — it burns me when i look without said filter. in the place where beauty used to be is a beast mauled by circumstances beyond her control but not beyond her doing. as compassionate as the radical behaviorist lens is, i can’t gaze in the mirror with any lens. that’s not an essay i can write today. this one is. easier to avoid, to ignore, to pretend the mirror isn’t there, daring me to do more than glimpse it — to hold it and not look away. a double dare on my being.

I d. audience of one

heart counting down the seconds to nothing, i look outside the window of myself, at the sun’s predictable rise, and see some of the controlling variables more clearly:

recent events too numerous to name, new sources of audience control, having too many things i’d like to share with you (and you, and you, and you, and you!) — names and faces, with varying interests, find different words reinforcing to read — and having a choice of where to put it all, how to allocate my time, for immediate or delayed social reinforcement — choices we all make, many times a day: to be paid for a bigger whole or praised along the way? a nut is a bolt is a hinge, is it not? yes, to one who does not need the door. but, no, not functionally, if you’re seeking escape.

“We hear what we want to hear; see what we want to see,” a former mentor’s words tag in on an in-breath.

“I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is,” B.F. Skinner’s words tag an out-breath.

tag, tag, you’re it, self! didn’t you hear the breath of your masters saying, “write what you want to write!”

wanting what cannot be had by any version we currently know her, i capture the flag of this game and move onto the next.

II a. watching

tag! a child’s game. it’s no wonder people think thoughts are in the brain, come from the brain, and originate our next observable behavior: as a participant constantly tagged in and out, it’s hard to see the rules of the game aren’t inherent to ourselves or our biology.

not immediately operating on thoughts or letting them operate on me (as if i have a choice), i say good morning to the organisms in my world and make coffee. i place my hands firmly on the counter, taking Adho Mukha Śvānāsana on coffee machine swirls. thoughts, thoughts, so many thoughts, tagging in and out. i watch them play, amused, without anyone on the sidelines. a song, a friend, a memory of a loved one, gone.

tag! you’re still it! the one to run from.

warm cup in hand, cool spring air descends; i take a spot under the oak tree. silent companion beside, i close my eyes and drift on the calming sounds of birdsong, roosters, and distant traffic. i sit and watch the game of thought-tag; each one capturing flag after flag.

for the next however-long, i’m a watcher, doing the me of me, perhaps the most i’ll ever be.

II b. participating

what was it Alan said? Watts. another paraphrase, good as any:

“a person does not really live until she loses herself, until she has released the anxious grasp [on] her life, her property, her reputation, and position.”

oh, to feel this alive, Alan!

(it doesn’t escape me that he’s dead. 12-oz nutrition isn’t sustenance. it’s fair food.)

the grasp pulls me back, tagging me in. you’d think a participant who understands some of the rules and has been watching herself from the sidelines would have an advantage, but she doesn’t play tag any better than the others. she just tries differently. and she doesn’t keep score.

III. game changes

i want to spend all day in this transitional state. every stimulus encountered, every reaction to my reaction to their reaction to my reaction. every transaction, a cha-ching! without expectation of reciprocity or exchange.

i open my eyes. scan my body. results? calm. no spinning self; no nausea from stepping off the tilt-a-whirl. the mirror? covered, for now, but ready to reflect.

my dog, my humans, the soft animal of my body — none of it mine, none of us making choices so much as allocating our being amongst them.

this game is over; the next is afoot. i go inside.

it is only then, from this state, i pick up my phone…

and my choices, again, are made for me.

tag turns to tug, and i adapt, the anxious grasp holding tight to what cannot be touched, only changed.

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Author’s Notes (Tagging In Again)

There are times when I want to explain a creative piece and times when I don’t but feel I must, so as not to lose readers from one verbal unit. This is the latter.

Writers, poets, and creatives will understand: it’s hard to explain everything you “intended” to illustrate. The explanation is new behavior, under different sources of control. One behavior cannot explain another, only add more to it. Sometimes adding takes away.

So, please feel free to skip this explanation and tag back into your game. :)

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Some explanation, never complete:

Capitalization: This is perhaps the most difficult choice to explain. There is something about not owning “I,” not capitalizing it… something about the softness of “i” before the game is afoot. The use of lowercase was was inspired by my friend, , a linguist whose whose piano music and calm words have allowed me many soft-self moments. I can’t explain more than that.

The sections: Three parts take the reader from self as experiencing observer (bedroom, thoughts before rising), to watching observer (kitchen to meditation), to game player (picking up my phone). You move through my behavior with me; external controlling some of the “internal", you see?

Mixed metaphors: I intentionally mixed metaphors of the mirror, tilt-a-whirl, tag as a game — all visceral, all apt for the sections in which they were used, I felt. Maybe a future version will tighten them to one, but I currently feel the mix adds a “I can’t pin this down” feeling that I wanted to keep.

Self-conflict: For months, I’ve been aware that my daily writing practice has been shaped and influenced by sharing its products on social media. I’ve resisted and justified my use of social media many ways. I’ve reacted strongly when others suggest it’s shameful to engage in high rates, and, even when I was recently made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe, I asserted my will: “No! I don’t want to stop. It’s justified, in my case.” Mirror. Tilt-a-whirl. Nausea. Tag, I’m it, the one players run from. That’s perhaps an essay for Operant Spirituality that I’m leading up to with this one.

Writer’s block as misnomer: One behavioral concept I touched on here, and have a different essay in store for the future, was how “choice paralysis” or “writer’s block” are misnomers. You are still behaving, even when you think you’re not.

Private events and covert behavior: Culturally, we tend to think the absence of observable behavior means the absence of behavior, but that’s not the case. Thoughts are merely more behavior, subject to the same basic natural laws as everything else, and traceable to the outside world. I modeled how we can talk about covert and private events without ever invoking hypothetical variables or ending on biology (brain) alone.

Thoughts don’t cause behavior, they are behavior: We believe that thoughts, because they precede action, initiate it, but they don’t reliably precede it (as illustrated here), and, being behavior themselves, do not initiate; instead, thoughts are part of a larger stream of ongoing being (behavior) that has interactive effects on the world around us. Perhaps, in a future post, I’ll explain from a more technical lens. But you will probably need to subscribe to Behavior Curious for that.

Potential upcoming articles: Revisiting Skinner’s “lecture on having a poem”; a review of Ape House by Sara Gruen; an update on book progress (exciting news!); online safety, harassment, and related topics; or, the essay I want (but don’t want) to write: Reducing my social media use, how my view has changed, and how it took a few “mirrors” of others’ behavior to be able to see the ways it’s harming me.

Please me know if any of these interest you more than others.

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for believing in me, despite the me of me — or because of her. I enjoyed writing this; hope you enjoyed reading it.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

P.S. If you want more technical writing about behaviorism, please check out my sub-publication, Behavior Curious. Here’s the most recent post:

Behavior Curious

Being a Radical Behaviorist

This post was inspired by a note I wrote in January that got positive feedback…

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10 days ago · 7 likes · 6 comments

Recent notes you might have missed:

It’s not a typical week. This time, it’s a competition between my chosen song and MJ’s. We are kicking things off with our pieces, mine below. You can help me win this dance-off by submitting your own piece, with my song as your theme: Blind Melon, No Rain.

If you want to word-dance, you have 2 weeks to join us on our respective dancefloors by posting your submission and adding your link to this week’s post! The song with the most posts wins all the glory!

My submission is of the memoir genre, written explicity for this post. No behavioral notes today but themes are embedded, of course. If you haven’t watched the music video in a while, it might be a nice amuse-bouche:

Memoir follows. Paywalled for reasons previously explained. Thanks for reading and sticking around. Much of my content is free.

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The following is a memoir essay, and, because it brings me joy to share, a layfriendly intro to how behaviorism accounts for altrusim.

Also, Happy International Women’s Day! For it, I wrote a poem, Carry Water, that I have not yet sent to email, so as not to flood your inbox. :)

It’d been raining for seven days straight. Los Angelenos were worried about mudslides and slick pavement — and, as such, were driving slower than usual, as if through snow. Seventy minutes to go six miles. The 405 to the 110 at this time of day, in this weather? Have you lost it? Take Wilshire! Take Sunset!

The industrious were selling rain gear on Craigslist — a Gore-TEX gold rush.

That’s how I met her, peddling rubber wares in a parking lot of a 7-Eleven off Wilshire. I’d never seen her before and never saw her again, but I knew her. Blonde hair disheveled, bags under her eyes with a smile on her face, standing beside a red, ‘97 Corolla, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Baby in the back, library copy of “White Oleander” in the front. Waterproof but wet. She could’ve been me, had things gone a touch differently — Toyota, book, baby and all.

I gave her $20 for yellow rain boots that were two sizes too big. She tried to upsell me an umbrella. Holding mine, I thanked her but said that was all the cash I had. Not a lie. Grad student life. I wanted to buy her umbrella and everything she was selling, which looked to be a makeshift thrift store.

“White Oleander”... I’d devoured it months before. A segment of the plot stuck out to me: Did these boots come from other people’s trash? Is that where she got the idea? Trash to treasure in Beverly Hills?

I looked at the unbranded sole and thought, maybe not. I would’ve kept them regardless.

The baby cried as I shook the rain from my umbrella and got back in my car, maneuvered my purchase to the passenger floorboard, and turned on my wipers. I watched as she plucked the baby from its car seat and held it to her wet chest, shielding its face from rain with hers. Mom-to-baby coos. It was bundled. I couldn’t hear it crying but I could see its scream echo off her face. She turned and jogged into the 7-Eleven, baby clutched to chest, other arm holding the door for the person behind her.

Something made me turn off my car. Something pulled me out the door and pushed me inside. Something planted my wet sneakers at the counter and look around, waiting for her to approach. Something made me hold out my arms out and say, “Here, I got that,” before she dropped the formula from her full hands. “I don’t have any more cash, but I’d like to get this for you.”

Something…

The relief and incredulity that crossed her face — or maybe the baby’s murmuring — told me exactly what that something was: Empathy. Relief. A lightening of my load, as well as hers.

The rain lifted the next day, and, to my recollection, it never rained again in LA—while I lived there, at least.

Here comes the sun doo-do-doo- doo / here comes the sun / and I say, “it’s all right.”

I don’t know if that act felt like sunshine to her. But it did to me. I wore the boots once and kept them for years, reminding me of her and the baby. They became decor in my garden a few years ago and have since disintegrated, but I keep the memory. That child is fifteen or sixteen now. I know they’ve seen rain again (and again), but I hope they didn’t float away.

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Sun, sun, sun here it comes. Rain will come, too. Boots will dissolve. It’s all right.1

That was the end of this story, but I hope you read on. One reason I write memoir (and fiction, etc.) is to illustrate, through examples, some of the concepts that make up the philosophy and science by which I operate, professionally and personally.

Plus, it brings me joy to share how behaviorism, which looks outside organisms for explanations of behavior, explain something like altruism, which seems to originate inside.

How Does Behaviorism Account for Altruism?

Altruism is defined as selfless concern for others, or giving without reciprocity, in the absence of consequence. How does a science that explains (most) behavior in terms of selection by consequences — consequences of behavioral units strengthen or weaken future behavioral units under similar conditions — explain behavior that ostensibly produces none?

This being the end of a memoir essay, you want the quick(er) version, don’t you?

Perhaps one of the first things of note is that there’s no such thing as “no consequences.” There’s such a thing as consequences that do not affect future behavior, but behavior, being a continuous, ongoing expression of our human experience, will contact something next.

In behavior analytic research, tackling the question of altruism starts with removing the construct (altruism) and looking at giving behavior itself. That could take a lot of forms, as altruism doesn’t look any certain way, as long as giving is involved. And the questions are not if or what kind of consequences but how do those consequences establish or affect future acts of behavior we call altruistic?

In this story, you can see there was a very real social interaction that followed the act of giving. A smile, a thanks, a look of relief — stimuli that indicated help was welcome and appreciated….reinforcers, perhaps.

But does that mean I did it so I could see her smile, etc.? No. My ‘motivation to help’ was comprised of history, biology, and current circumstance — her need, my ability, the life in which I might’ve been a version of her or the baby.

As a small aside, the naturally occurring process of reinforcement is much more complex than the concept of “reward.” Reinforcement does not equal reward, and it does not mean that specific outcome is what motivated you to do/say/feel the things in question. Reinforcement vs. reward is sort of like a square and rhombus situation: “Rewards” can function as reinforcement, but not all reinforcement involves “rewards.” More on that another day, if you’re behavior curious.

This is but one example, and it is not research…

As you might imagine, altruism would be difficult to formally study in real life — add to that a behavioral study in which you had to define the acts, measure them in real time, repeatedly, change the variables before and after the giving — nearly impossible!

Thus, so far, behavior analytic inquiry into altruism has included translational research, such as presenting participants with hypothetical giving scenarios or games meant to model real life. Like I said, the questions aren’t “Where are the reinforcers” — one’s history with reciprocity cannot be known or controlled — they are more like, “When and how do we give, to whom, how much, and how does anonymity affect giving?”

Rachlin and Locey are among the pioneer behavioral researchers on altruism. This paper2 is mostly free and the first few paragraphs are informative, and this one3 is a little more complex, relating altruism to self-control. Both have chasable refs.

In short, the research by Rachlin and Locey says, people (or, at least, undergraduate students in contrived conditions) will do more good deeds (or give more) for others when (a) they are closer “in degrees of separation”, and (b) when the donation is not anonymous. However, giving is still observed under anonymity, which suggests reciprocity or recognition is not a strong contributing variable in the experimental arrangements. The authors suggest that acts of altruism are like a habit, or part of a bigger pattern of responding, in which the reinforcers are embedded in the acts of giving, due to a history of accumulated good will. (The self-control piece complicates it in a way that I’ll save for another day, maybe.)

I’m curious, does this track in your experience?

It does in mine. For instance, after my Dollar General story, someone messaged me asking me to donate to their charity. It looked like a good cause, but I did not, for reasons that had more to do with solicitation and timing than anonymity or reciprocity. They sent an unkind DM and blocked me, making me even less likely to donate that way in the future (a punishment effect). The variables that contribute to any instance of giving (or not) are cumulative and idiosyncratic, not a function of a single character trait.

How about in your experience? Does all this track?

I do not know of a paper that goes this deep, but if we went head-first down the behavioral rabbit hole, we’d eventually see there’s nothing separating self and other besides biology and social constructions. So, this radical behaviorist thinks we do good deeds for both them and us because, ultimately, we are inseparable. We are not the raindrops but the puddle.

Thanks for reading! If you got something from this, please pass it on.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

As a reminder, organizing drafts when you’ve snowed yourself in is a topic and I will begin discussing live on Monday 3/2/26 at 9 AM.

Genre: Memoir (not necessarily a chapter, more of a “flow writing” product, edited)

Themes: career identity loss, parental caretaking, professional masking

Context and new draft follow.

I will soon insert a paywall…sensitive topics and an added layer of privacy. Thanks for understanding. Paid subscriptions support my bigger writing journey, even if you are not necessarily here for the memoir. I am forever grateful.

Context

I’ve noticed at least two types of writers on Substack: Those who already have the products and are here to sell and build their brand, and those who are making the products and building community. I’m in the latter group. A brand in progress.

I have a lot of writing projects, one of which is a mosaic memoir. I shared drafts of chapters on a different platform before coming to Substack; I’ve only shared a few here so far. It’s hard to know where to start, and in doing mass organization the last couple of months, I find myself wanting to edit or entirely revisit old topics.

The chapters I’m drawn to re-draft are the ones about identity loss and the ongoing grief of it all. I think the revisiting is partly because it’s I’m still working through it, in the grey of transition, unsettled on a career identity while also working through all the other losses and trauma. I’m grateful to have a community (not just an audience) who supports my efforts at articulating any of it, however imperfectly.

Sometimes, when I encounter stimuli that remind me I’m “off track” — or, off the track I’d imagined for myself — I imagine what my life would be like if, five years ago, instead of moving home to help, I’d sent my father, who was experiencing a major health event, to a nursing facility and instead continued my academic career. I don’t spend much time thinking about it, as many things arise and my thoughts never congeal.

But, because the thought has been popping up more often recently, and because, since childhood, it’s been solidifying to put uncongealed thoughts to text, I did that here: I “dropped in” to writing about where I’d be if I’d chosen career over family at any point in the last 5 years.

I’ve previously written about this topic, from various lenses, but have never articulated the alternate universe. As a flow-state product, I don’t know that I did it perfectly here — it’s something I’d like to edit, immensely. But, I sometimes share such drafts because readers always change my perspective in ways that are helpful to editing. Thanks in advance for reading.

I know most people prefer short-form content — most might stop reading here — but I do my short-form work in notes. To me, articles are for long-form content. Thank you for your time, always.

“If I had chosen differently…”

Sometimes, I think about what my life would be like had I not moved back to help my dad in 2021.

Professor, likely tenured this year, teaching, grad students, conferences, research, presentations, service, emails, meetings — all the emails and meetings — and maintaining my “professional persona” on socials, posting only neutral pictures and career-related things…

My dad might have passed away, or I would not have had all the moments we have had since…

How to describe the feelings accompanying these thoughts?

It’s not loss, sorrow, or sadness. It’s an ache, a pull, a tension—a precursor of the chronic pain I used to feel. It originates in my solar plexus and radiates through me, expanding probably 3 feet around my body, if we could see it, whatever “it” is, behaviorally, physically. I cannot imagine this person for long. And imagining her requires imagining the surrounding events and So, please allow me to digress a few times before getting to her.

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I linked the note above and added the words below, followed by a quick “about me” for new folks.

I think these notes to the void are me trying to get at the core of the memoir essays. A lot of the essays I’m finding in my mass organization attempt center on darker themes. There’s also a lot of light that I did not list here, though. Thanks in advance for reading!

I paywall my memoir because I, like everyone, need to keep the lights on, and I paid (and still paying) for these experiences in other ways. This one is still linked in the note above, without edits. Thanks for understanding; everything else is free!

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And 2016 happened to be a year I visited a lot, in writing. I want to circle back to it more completely, to include the good and the bad, the love and the loss — and I have been working on something, in the background —

But I am sharing this old post, as a kind of primer of sorts, while I keep editing the newer version, which includes the good, too.

it was written 10/12/24, for my Everyday Behaviorist Facebook audience

Original title: Academic Trauma, A First Attempt at Revisiting

Substack: posting on 1/18/2026, with an intro and no editing of the original

slightly more context, before the original essay

My Ph.D. program was the third graduate program I’d attended, after obtaining my master’s and a field certificate before that and 10 years in the field, as a practitioner.

The Ph.D. program I was fortunate to get into was… intense. I was lucky to work with one of the most influential people in my field, who happened to be…yeah, let’s stick with intense.

The words that follow were my first ever attempt at describing the many things I did in my third graduate program — not as a complete or cohesive list of tasks, as it is missing all the good, but as a way to offer myself and others more perspective when I say, “When I was in graduate school,” or “academic traumas,” as I’m pretty sure they have no idea what all that entailed.

I am posting this to Substack over a year later, as a primer to my next post, which is a revised memoir essay that incorporates some of these themes. And, rest assured that when I visit these topics today, there’s considerably fewer physical effects. So that’s progress, I think!

Everything below this line, except photo captions, was written in October 2024, for the Facebook audience that was integral to shaping the Jennifer who writes for you today. It remains one of my most “liked” posts, even though it is highly imperfect — which is very telling of the support I had the past few years, and the reasons for all that I’ve continued to contribute to the world, in the time since.

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If you’re feeling generous, a paid subscription is the best way to support my writing journey; I put it towards my website hosting fees, ongoing education (gotta read to write), and (one day) self-publication. I’m incredibly grateful to all of those who can show support in this way, but also for everyone who sticks around for my eclectic memoir, poetry, fiction, and more, from a radical behaviorist lens. Today’s theme is gratitude, a topic I’ve visited a few times previously.

Anyone else have those moments in your life that are small but stick with you and reappear in your memories — perhaps on repeat — to remind you of a you you don’t want to be?

One such set of memories, for me, are instances in which I was “ungrateful.” A lot of those moments have happened around the holidays, and so, naturally, holiday-themed moments of ungratefulness, or ingratitude, are popping up for me lately.

What do I mean by ungrateful?

I suppose, for sake of simplicity, I mean moments when I brought too much Veruca Salt “I want a golden-goose” energy to people I love — people who were expecting a simple “thank you” instead. This is me, writing about some of these moments, from the lens of a recent one in which I proved my current self to be a more enlightened being — or, at least, one capable of bringing more Wonka than Salt energy.

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Today what popped out of my practice was a 5-7-5, followed by a conversation with self.

Haiku: Earth’s belt

Sunrise is a belt

Cinching the earth’s circumference

This barn its buckle

Gorgeous sunrise this morning, cinching the earth’s circumference. My old barn adorns its belt, like a faded trophy buckle.

Sunrise Sadness to Gratitude

Orange-red light peeking through the curtains, I happily pop out of bed and peel them apart. I inhale sharply.

Breathtaking, eh?

Yes, truly gorgeous. And in my own backyard! How lucky am I!

Then, what was that? I felt it. When you looked from the sky to the barn and your mood dropped—what happened?

It reminded me of my uncle, then my dad, then my career, all at once.

Never expected to move to rural life in the middle of my academic career. It’s December again…almost 4 years now.

Ah. Yes, and lots has happened in four years…

Remember when we’d wake up and go to yoga, or get off work and go to happy hour with friends? Go see shows or the theater? Walk around downtowns and —

Yes, that was all lovely! Good times.

But… I gave all that up! Gave up a job I’d been working towards for over 10 years, job security, PSLF (iykyk), all the ‘prestige’ and identity attached to job title of “Professor Haddock,” friends nearby, colleagues who Get It, job tasks that intellectually stimulate, places to walk and things to do…

Well, the promise of those things, yes, but—

Never intended to stay so long. My dad was on hospice. A semester? Two? Didn’t have a plan beyond being here, helping him through. Miraculously, he recovered and…well, lots of things kept me here.

Love kept you here, love…

Sure. Love. Guilt. Finances and decisions past…

It’s been hard at times, wonderful at others. But stimuli that remind me of what could’ve been are nearly everywhere and have evocative effects on my being. I get trapped in whirlpools of “I didn’t want this.”

I know. Despite all the trying and friends, it’s easy to do. But didn’t you recently have some revelations about regret?

Oh, yes. You mean, regret is inspection of decisions, how we wish we’d chosen differently, assume we had agency, how we’re ultimately grieving its absence?

Self nods.

The thing is, I don’t wish I’d chosen differently. That is, I don’t regret the first choice, coming here. After that, some choices I do. But I can’t live in regret-town or visit too often. Take my own advice, right?

Right. Because listen: You write lots, and it generates good will, if not livable income. And you’ve made some invaluable virtual connections—new friends and acquaintances that have taught and helped you, people who truly believe in and want what’s best for you. (Sit with that feeling!)

And you help others: strangers, clients, family, animals. Family is nearby and well as they can be. You have a dog that you adore, chickens, space for gardening… warmth, shelter, food, connection. (Sit with that, too!)

And you still have downtowns to walk and shows and festivals — and even yoga, if you sacrifice some time somewhere else.

Yes. There’s all that. I’m grateful but—

No “but”... Grateful! Stay there longer, love. Practice staying there longer so it happens more often. Repeat what I just said, with “I” statements.

Okay, you’re right.

I write lots, and it generates good will, if not livable income. And I’ve made some invaluable virtual connections—new friends and acquaintances that have taught and helped me, people who truly believe in and want what’s best for me.

And I help others: strangers, clients, family, animals. Family is nearby and well as they can be. I have a dog that I adore, chickens, space for gardening… warmth, shelter, food, connection.

And I still have downtowns to walk and shows and festivals — and even yoga, if I sacrifice some time somewhere else.

See? Can’t be grateful and sulk, simultaneously. Gratitude occupies the time and space that longing and regret occupy. Choose gratitude, right? It’s not a one-time choice.

It’s not always that easy. This mood…

Mood schmood. Isn’t mood an internal state altered by the external? There’s lots you can do, externally, to evoke and maintain this state of gratitude over regret, longing, lack and all that. It’s all just behavior that occupies time, and feelings that ride in on it.

Maybe, in this moment that you’re feeling down, one way to get back up might be to ask, “What am I lacking, besides attachments of identity (career, motherhood, etc.)? Do these things truly give your life more meaning, or do others just say they do? That is, social reinforcement is not as dense as it might otherwise be, but what is truly missing?”

Well, self, I haven’t given it much thought. But I guess, being knocked around so much, I want ease. I want to not struggle, not fight, not have to try so hard for… for… steady, calm, ease.

And, when I look hard enough and stop resisting, I see that I have ease, more now than then. That life former me wanted—the one I sometimes feel I’m missing? It wouldn’t have been full of ease, not one bit. I was in pain. Literal pain, in my hip and leg — for years. Years! Now, not so much. My environment changed dramatically; pain left, ease came.

What am I truly really missing, besides those identity attachments, you ask?

Love? No, have that, if not the forms glorified on TV.

Job? Health? Safety?

No, no, no—all here. So, what? What’s missing? Why so naked and alone? Is this my own choosing?

I guess it is. It doesn’t feel like a choice.

Listen, it’s not. You have to breathe. You have to look. Can you see it?

The sunrise cinches its pants with a colorful waistband, adorned by a big silver barn buckle, and I exhale.

Yes, I see it. Nothing to do but belt my pants, too, and live in the light of what I’ve chosen — and keep living in it, moment after moment. Right, self?

Right.

Writing practice 12/3/25. I am allowing myself space for sadness these days, and modeling a return to gratitude here. It’s hard for me to stay in the light all day, every day, given all the dark — literal loss of daylight, but also loss of loved ones, career trajectory that I worked decades for, changes in body/ looks, ideas about love, having children, waning hope for the future, ongoing stressors, biology, etc.

It’s hard on my close friends and loved ones, too. I can sometimes be selfish in my sadness and stuck in my patterns — but generous in my love, and with so much else, too. And I try to lean into gratitude, but sometimes it gets exhausting, you know?

No matter how much we love our lives, stimuli that remind us of what we do not have (or the directions we did not go) abound. If we catch ourselves in the “what isn’t”, we can redirect to the “what is.” One thing for which I’m very grateful is that I have met so many people who are beyond-words supportive of my writing dreams. Despite not having a book to sell them (yet), they believe in me! That is truly something special.

Was going to post this impromptu conversation with myself as a note instead of a post, as it doesn’t have my usual references or overt behavioral themes, but it was long. Perhaps it’s another intro to an upcoming piece on gratitude.

Thanks for reading, as always. Grateful to have you here. Tiny sunrises, right?

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

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Birdly Background

Our four-year-old, extremely-chill rooster, Henry, was killed by a hawk on Friday, and I came upon the scene just barely too late. You wouldn’t have known Henry was a rooster, if not for the crowing — which he, courteously, never did between sundown and 3 AM.

A haiku tribute:

Henry and his mate, Betty, were sentimental to me because they originally belonged to my uncle, who recently passed away (mentioned in an Operant Spirituality post here). The timing of it all — coming upon the scene minutes too late, Henry’s death coinciding with my uncle’s memorial, and Betty’s disappearance-but-reappearance, immediately after I spoke to my deceased uncle aloud — was so layered, so jam-packed with emotion and sentiment, it made me want to write.

This post took a few days, so I appreciate you reading and engaging. I’m not sure I nailed what I was trying to say, but, in all the words that follow, I hope something in here is educational, enlightening, or generalizable to your own life — helpful, in some way.

Losing loved ones of any species never gets easier, no matter how many times we experience it.

(Dis)mantling Regret

The image of the hawk awakens me. White-speckled wings spread wide, mantling its prey, red tail covered by fallen leaves — hawk and kill partially sheltered by sparse vines of the grapevine my uncle proudly planted moons ago.

Its back to me, head down, I approach, feeling unease in the too-quiet yard.

Leaves crunch. The hawk’s head turns and body freezes, its wings still spread broad, shielding what I now see to be a grey-feathered mass at its feet. A yellow-rimmed eye stares at me, unflinching, as if to say, “What?” The wind kicks grey feathers into the air and carries my guttural protest to the sky. The hawk remains, unmoved and expressionless.

On adrenaline and an echo of “Noooo,” my eyes pop open, wider than the hawk’s.

I roll over and check the time. 3:23 AM. The bed creaking, duvet rustling, dog snoring, and human lightly breathing beside me do nothing to disguise the dark-as-night silence. There is no faint crowing from the henhouse, for the first time in years.

Eyes wide and ears empty, guilt, regret, and sadness fly in on the wings of images burned into my being.

It happened between breaths. I don’t know when, exactly, as I was just barely too late — soon enough to spare Henry the indignity of disembowelment, but not beheading.

It never gets easier, losing loved ones, flesh or feathered. Bearing witness to nature’s unflinching brutality is, well, brutal. Even when you understand the process of selection, within and across lifetimes, is controllable only to an extent. Even when you believe yourself to be a determinist of the radical variety1, who understands that our behavior — the seemingly free-willed choices of organisms — is selected, naturally, by variables beyond our control. Even if you believe that everything is playing out the only way it could, given everything…

It’s heartbreaking. It’s human. It’s grief.

Tonight, as they often do when they find me alone in the dark, the heart-pounding, stomach-dropping, skin-jumping sensations of heavy emotion reveal themselves as self-inspection — a verbal mulling of agency and where, exactly, I went wrong.

As it so happens, that day, I’d been thinking “check the chickens” all morning but choosing other things first. That unfulfilled intention and close temporal proximity — thinking of checking them, then arriving seconds too late — provides ample fodder for verbal self-torment.

My current stage of grief entails replaying the befores—dismantling the day one choice-point at a time—as if the experience of these feelings could be unfeathered with enough verbal plucking.

I must be careful not to become the hawk — careful not to disembowel myself for events ultimately beyond my control. But, because I also know guilt and regret are naturally occurring behavioral components of the grieving process, I allow space for this verbal unplucking, then and now. If these feelings and accompanying thoughts are going to wake me, I might as well inscribe them with my own quills.

So, here, like I did in bed, I pull verbal feathers on the wing of a guilt pang and ask:

When did it happen? What was I doing instead? Was there a fateful choice point when I — an organism of apparent agency — could have chosen differently and saved him?

Maybe I could’ve prevented it in the morning, when Henry and Betty jailbroke the chicken enclosure like they always did — with mischief, confidence, and four years of practiced rebellion. Hop on the grate, pop over fence, hang out on porch until humans arrive with treats. Reliable. Predictable. Routine.

That fated morning, Henry and Betty escaped their enclosure as usual. When I came outside, Betty was on the deck, trying to sneak inside the house, while Henry crowed at the base of the deck steps, chest puffed up, head thrown back, proud as sunrise.

“Hi, Henry,” I said, glancing his way before walking around him to greet a human visitor — choosing flesh over feathered affection. I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d hear him crow.

Was it then, the ill-fated choice point? If I had ushered them back into their enclosure, refilled their water and food — as my uncle, their original owner, would’ve done — could I have prevented Henry being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Or maybe it was ten minutes before I came upon the feathered scene, when I stepped outside with my dog, Risley, to check on Henry and Betty (and the others, who remained in the enclosure) — but first, I noticed he had a toy. Tail thumping, eyes bright, I thought, “I’ll check the chickens in a bit; this doggo has been waiting patiently to play!”

Was it then, the choice that could’ve saved Henry, when I gave chase instead of care?

Or was it a few minutes later, when I decided to drop something off at my mom’s and dog and human walked 300 yards down the dusty dirt path, not knowing a hawk was watching, waiting for an opportunity to grab an unattended ground bird…

Or maybe it was when we returned to a too-quiet yard, when a blue jay called overhead — a sharp, bright sound that pulled my attention upward — and I felt a small pride for remembering, “Blue jays like peanuts. I should put out peanuts.”

Was it then, when I was proudly recalling the preferences of songbirds rather than birds of prey or tending to my backyard flock?

Or was it when Risley, seeing me divert attention to a bird above, sighed at my feet, stick in mouth, asking me to play? Or when I obeyed, and we played? Or when he gnawed, and I gathered yard toys, and the world was heartbreakingly silent too long?

It happened in this space of ten minutes, when I was choosing human over chickens. Dog over chickens. Blue jay over chickens. Yard-keep over chickens. Self over chickens.

A brief pause for profundity…

(or what feels like profundity, but you tell me… gently, I hope)

The story isn’t over — there are two more eerie timings to unpack — but I am jumping in to say, of course, I “know” that, even if I’d chosen differently in any of those moments — even if I had changed the trajectory and prevented the hawk attack — Henry would have died sometime, unpreventably, as will you and I. And, when that time came, I would have felt similar sadness, if not regret or guilt.

Knowing this, no matter your “isms” (radical behaviorist or not), doesn’t make grief any easier. But making space for all of it — allowing it to occur, as behavior, covert and overt, without giving too much agency to self — does, I think. Let me try to explain:

Regret and guilt show up in various ways when we lose loved ones, flesh or feathered. We call “regret” and “guilt” feelings, but they ride in on the back of all kinds of behavior. One form of regret is verbally rehearsing — silently or aloud — the ways we chose self and other over our departed, as illustrated so far in this story. Through a lifetime of interacting with the world, we come to talk to ourselves in ways that assume, if we’d chosen differently, if we’d done more (or less), if only we had XYZ, things would be different.

We look for agency, reason, explanation, meaning — we seek to find fault and blame, to hold ourselves or others responsible. There’s comfort in closure, and that’s what giving an individual agency over nature does, provide a sense of closure, if not relief. But it’s illusory, and the wound of loss, no matter how its sutured — agency, explanation, meaning, supernatural or divine intent — never fully closes. As long as we’re able to talk about it, the loss is always there.

At present, it occurs to me that all of this — the regret, the guilt, the search for agency, meaning, and closure of open wounds — are inescapably human components of the love-and-loss experience (at least from where we are in our current stage of phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and cultural evolution2).

Perhaps, when we grieve a loss — in being confronted with our ultimate lack of agency — we are, in part, grieving the illusion of agency in daily life. As if nature would’ve selected any differently in the micro-moments we witnessed! As if we’re somehow above nature and could’ve chosen differently in the moments that preceded it! How very human of us to think and feel such things! How laughable!

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Here’s where it gets spiritual, if it hasn’t already…

[perhaps this should have been a Part 2, in my Operant Spirutuality pub, but I never claimed hindsight before it’s had]

Up next are the two parts of the story that made me feel as if Henry’s death — and my witnessing the unflinching brutality of it, in the eyes of a seemingly emotionless bird — meant something more than a chance for me to illustrate regret, behaviorally. The timing was simply uncanny — and not only because I was so close to preventing it. (Thanks for hanging in; I think you will appreciate where this goes.)

My uncle passed away recently (again, see Operant Spirituality publication, here). Today was his celebration of life. Before he got cancer, he owned the chickens. He purchased Henry the Rooster from a local farmer to protect the hens. My uncle loved Henry — was proud of him, in fact. He’d smile and laugh and get this gleam in his eye when talking about him. Grey and strong, chill and not aggressive at all, Henry devotedly guarded his flock for four years. Henry and his ride-or-die hen, Betty — the only remaining chickens my uncle owned — are sentimental to me.

But nature is not sentimental. Nature is hungry. Nature is heartless.

When I finally chose to check my sentimental chickens…

When, after playing with Risley and picking up his toys in the yard, I finally went to bring the chickens scratch and usher them into their fence, the backyard scene felt… altered.

Something was out of place by the grapevine. The wire between poles is now bowed inward, where Henry spent his last seconds — providing imagery for how, exactly, the hawk trapped and killed a bird larger than itself.

But, when I rounded the corner, I didn’t see the bowing of the wire. I saw a grey mass, the hawk’s wings, mantling, and grey feathers, strewn and floating. I saw its head turn toward me, one yellow eye locking onto mine. I saw an expressionless killer.

I did not have my phone at the time. The image exists only in words, which, though numerous, are insufficient at describing the scene.

In that moment, grief began its own mantling — a spreading inside my chest cavity, physiology unpacking the truth I had walked upon. The first form it took?

I screamed. Loudly. “Noooooooo! Henrrrrryyyyy!”

The hawk did not startle, did not rise. It held its posture, waiting for me to blink first.

It was in luck.

As I stood there, feeling helpless, sad, and waving my arms to make it to leave, I found myself looking for something in its expression — something human, something expressive in the eyes or body. Its absence made me fearful. I thought of talons and bird attacks on humans — rare but not unheard of3, especially given it was hungry and interrupted.

So, I ran inside for…what? A phone? A weapon? A time machine?

When I came back seconds later, the hawk was gone, of course. Henry’s body lay feathered in patches — dignified, in that his body remained whole, except for his head. Hawks are precise. Surgical. They waste nothing but feathers.

Humans are not so precise. All these words I’m calling regret, or evidence of it...

They’re helpful to express, but I cannot linger here too long or return to visit too many times. Though regret is a natural component of grief, verbally rehearsing the what ifs doesn’t leave space for celebrating what is.

Because, guess what! I haven’t told you about Betty!

A feathered mercy…

Betty was missing, at first. I couldn’t find her in the silence after my screams; she was not under the barn, coop, or usual hideaways. We’ve had several hens disappear without a trace, so I thought the hawk took her whole.

Upset (ahem, not-at-all-hysterical) for both Henry and Betty, I spoke aloud to my deceased uncle:

“I’m sorry, uncle J, that I didn’t take better care of Henry and Betty. I’m so, so sorry.”

Readers, you aren’t going to believe this, but in the very next moment, as tears filled my eyes and words caught in my throat, I heard scratching leaves under the oak tree in the front yard. Literal milliseconds afterwards. Not wanting to get my hopes up, I slowly walked to the deck, listening for more, telling myself it was a squirrel.

But, when I got to the front yard, I saw, it was Betty! Alive and scratching leaves with her familiar, determined rhythm. A small, feathered mercy.

Now, this timing between response (“I’m sorry”) and serendipitous stimulus change (Betty scratching) is what we behavior analysts call “adventitious”4 — as in, no one physically put Betty there because I apologized aloud, but her reappearance has the ability to make a similar apology or statement, the behavior that preceded it, more likely in the future, regardless, simply because of the timing.

So, even though I don’t subscribe to dualism5, I might start apologizing or talking to my deceased uncle’s spirit more often — and, you know, there will be absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s all only behavior, after all. Selected, determined…

And, truly, timing of it all — the hawk being where it was, Henry where he was, my non-chicken choices and arriving seconds too late, my uncle’s memorial, the spoken apology, Betty’s scratching — was all too perfect, too impossible, and too numerous to call coincidence, yet too grounded to call miracle. So, I call it synchronicity — of what, I don’t know, but it’s simply marvelous to let the wonder to take hold. Nature is absolutely wild.

These synchronicities — unexplained alignments of behavioral events in time with emotionally heavy ones — gave this story so many layers of meaning, so many opportunities to unpluck behavioral principles. There was so much there — a moment rich with emotion, nature, choice, and life. I don’t know if I did it justice or if I said everything I wanted to say.

But, today, I’m holding two truths: I’m grieving, for so many lives I’ve loved and lost, flesh and feather, and I am grateful.

Because grief and gratitude are not incompatible.

When regret ebbs, gratitude flows…

Henry is gone. Betty remains. The hawk was hungry. Nature was itself — before, during, and after I arrived — selecting my choices and theirs.

I can’t unmake my choices or explain the synchronicities. But I can (dis)mantle the regret by simply allowing it to occur — by showing others one form it took, choice-inspection — and then leaving it there, to engage in gratitude for what survived.

Regret is natural, as is the assumption of agency. But to linger there is to suffer the illusion that, if we had chosen differently, nature might have chosen differently, too. The truth is far simpler and far harder: nature’s contingencies play out no matter what we think we choose.

So long as we think we’re choosing, we might as well choose gratitude.

For Betty. For Henry’s four years of being a Very Chill Rooster. And for the impossible timing of a hen scratching leaves, on a whispered apology to my uncle, the day before we honored his life.

And now, the story ends where it began…

It never gets easier, bearing witness to nature’s brutality—not even when you understand, intellectually and philosophically, that the process of selection6, within and across lifetimes, is often beyond your control: Your choices were as determined as all others, and they were playing out the only way they could, given everything.

Writing about this event interrupted a piece I was working on about gratitude, from a radical behaviorist’s perspective. Perhaps this is an introduction to it — how what we call grief and gratitude can sit side-by-side, behaviorally, without ripping us apart.

There will never be another rooster like Henry or uncle like J. I’m grieving, but I’m also grateful our lives overlapped for the many moments we shared.

Thanks for reading — for (dis)mantling regret with me — and all of your support. I’d be delighted to know what you think of any of this!

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

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P.S. If you like Everyday Behaviorist, you might also like my other two publications:

Operant Spirituality

Meditations on Radical Behaviorism, Eastern wisdom, and the humility of not knowing

By Jennifer N. Haddock

Behavior Curious

Teasing out material for a niche-less, lay-friendly book on radical behaviorism and behavior analysis. Technical enough to be accurate but accessible enough to be inviting.

By Jennifer N. Haddock

Hyperlinked Resources:

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If you use the Substack app, you probably know that there are posts (like this, which go to your inbox and/or activity feed) and there are notes — Substack’s scrolling substitute, a Twitter-like function, intended for shorts or images that draw in new subscribers. Lots of people have opinions and advice about growth, etc., in those notes. This is neither.

In my first few months of using Substack, notes didn’t bring me many new subscribers, and it didn’t take long to learn that making posts takes considerable time beyond writing — photos, captions, headers, subscribe/share buttons, hyperlinks to resources and sources of inspiration, etc.

As Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins famously said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” Not all the time, at least.

(These scarred lucky trees will make sense shortly.)

Naturally, many months and little hearts later, my note-writing behavior has not conformed to the unofficial rules or advice about how to use them. Despite many of my subscribers not seeing those notes and some lovely word combinations being buried in my activity feed, I still use notes for unpolished and/or spontaneous words. Mostly, I post haiku, but at least once recently, I’ve written a full essay in notes.

Sometimes, I beat myself up about it — “Oh, shoot, I should’ve saved that for a post” or “You’re going to confuse and exhaust people who follow your notes” and variations thereof — then I remind myself, the science I’ve studied, practiced, and taught for over 20 years knows a lot about correcting the self-critic narratives, professionally and colloquially delivered, and looking toward variables that allow me to be more compassionate with myself.

That is, my noting vs. posting choices are perfectly predictable, like any others, even when they seem to be a result of “laziness,” “ADHD,” “disorganization,” “neurodivergence,” or some other unidentifiable variable supposedly inside (or attributable to) me — which, if you think about hard enough, you will see are really just descriptions of the characteristics of the behavior or behaver, not its causes. And, gosh, there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to understanding the radical behaviorist view of causes, or functional relations.1 Don’t worry, I won’t do that here…

And I was tempted to say more about what behavior analysts know about rule-governed versus contingency-shaped behavior2 — that is, when you do things because you’ve heard they’re true versus when you do them because you have experienced your own truth — or how allocating my writing to notes is predicted and described quite beautifully by the matching law3 — which accounts for effort, rate of reinforcement, and other variables, mathematically —

BUT — that’s enough behavior-speak for now. I added hyperlinks and citations for the behavior curious. I don’t want to bore you, as I have different things to say!

You don’t have to have any special expertise to know that notes reach people. People like to scroll. And there are many good people to reach.

One of my note-poems, which I wrote on Sep 29th, entitled Scarred Lucky, got me note-iced! The poem hit a chord with author , who wrote a lovely post about our exchange. Not only that but John and will be interviewing me for their podcast, The Positive Pen: Stories, Substack, and Soulwork, on Monday, 10/27/25 at 4PM, Eastern. (Link to our livestream here and on Substack tomorrow, the day of; recording available as a post afterward.)

I’m excited to talk with new people and grateful for all the connections I’m making here.4 Noting into the void may result in some of my words getting buried or not reaching my subscribers — but they’re not lost entirely, just harder to find. They’ve become little hidden treasures that I can dig up anytime. So, I dug one up.

Here is the poem that put me on John and KaZ’s map, now given a more permanent home amongst my posts. Afterward, I reveal one of my lucky scars and inspiration for the poem.

Scarred Lucky

Dear tree,

You look like how I feel:

Lopsided smile, uneven eyes;

expression scarred into your trunk.

Someone took a knife and made you

in their image, cutting pieces away—

pieces they didn’t appreciate

or take the time to know,

let alone love.

No other tree in this forest

bears the scars you bare,

but many trees felt them,

through circuitries of connection.

You bore the pain of your expression;

they soothed it with steadiness,

gently holding your roots aground,

never leaving you alone.

Rest assured, your scars

will change shape with growth:

Some will become gnarly,

but some will disappear.

How lucky of you, to have a forest

to witness the pain,

and how its expression

changes with growth.

Same for me, tree.

Scarred lucky, indeed.

We have lots in common.

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Lucky Scar

This poem was about living with scars — physical and metaphysical, imaginary and real, lived and carried — not inside us but outside us, in the world and stimulus events in which they originated and live. I’m not sure I’ll ever articulate this sentiment any better, but I’m certainly going to keep trying.

Something else this poem was about — a small-but-big detail I’ve wanted to share with you, readers, as it’s a large part of my mosaic memoir — is that I live with amniotic band syndrome (ABS).

ABS is a limb difference that affects 1 in 10,000 babies and results from amniotic bands of the placenta breaking apart and wrapping around a fetus and obstructing development, usually on limbs. It is not a birth defect, just a variation of physical expression — a limb difference. (See the relation to trees?)

Overcoming a lifetime of learning history related to ABS and its multitude of effects on my behavior has been a big part of my soul work the past few years — a small-but-large part of the self-healing I’ve done after realizing, “Hey, time to turn this science and philosophy on yourself in all kinds of ways because traditional approaches aren’t helping!”

I haven’t known how to “come out” about my hand here — should I share one of my first posts, explain the behavioral work I’ve done to overcome many decades of hiding and not using my hand publicly, not knowing how to bring it up, how I notice ways in which my behavior was shaped up, or how ABS has affected my major life decisions and my everyday life — or what?!

The thing is, I’ve progressed so much in the past few years that I’m now using my hand so regularly now, I barely notice.

OK, that’s a partial lie. I notice. But, not as often and in different ways. I don’t point it out to myself. I don’t experience the private events — panic, self-talk, anxiety — that used to plague me. I’ve stopped watching others’ reactions like a hawk — stopped feeling as if I have to bring up my hand after they notice, to prevent them changing their behavior towards me.

I still put my hand in my pocket sometimes, but

you can see me using my right hand on camera here, on my first non-behavioral podcast appearance, on ’s podcast, Harrowings,

and I gestured and fixed my hair in the first and second live events, with and for Women’s Perspective, a weekly podcast about womanhood — and guess what?

No one asked me about it. No one brought it up.

— and I don’t like using the word “it” to describe a part of me —

but neither did I. I haven’t brought it up.

Now, you might think, “this isn’t a big deal,” and I’d have lots to say about that. It was a big deal. A very big deal, for a long time. Now, it is not as much. But it still is.

Maybe I don’t need to come out — I’m out, for the most part. Now, it’s simply a matter of telling new readers for the first time.

I suppose that’s what this is — even if it’s buried in a post that branched into a lot of topics (very me of me to be too much tree). If nothing else, I wanted to give a sneak peek into a bigger part of my memoir. Stories you haven’t heard, about major and minuscule life events, from a behavioral point of view — mixed with all kinds of other writing. Please stick around. I’m just getting started!

Thanks for reading. That’s at least one thing that keeps me writing — interested, supportive people with whom to share it. More later.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

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For more context, my memoir is (will be) a collection of essays (a mosaic memoir) about various topics, which I use to illustrate behavioral takeaways and themes without being overly pedantic. Some of the topics are sensitive; what I am doing here with my memoir essays is testing my comfort in making them public, with a new audience, in a form I can edit or take back, before putting them in print. I mix these memoir essays with other types of writing, so it is a slow journey of sharing. Thanks for being here for more memoir, fiction, poetry, and prose from my radical behaviorist lens.

It wasn’t my pedicurist’s question about having kids that angered me. It was her reaction—one of pity, disappointment, or sadness. Whatever her emotion, the sustained look on her face and the weight of pity it conveyed made me angry, in that moment. Pity is the reaction that many people give to such a response, and I don’t think they understand the discomfort it evokes or how anger is a natural response to that discomfort.

Through meditation, I’ve found that, lots of times, anger is a mask for a different emotion: often fear or sadness. In this case, it was masking both. In such a relaxing setting — and, prior to that question, while enjoying my mini-spa day — I didn’t want to think about kids or my reproductive status. Mostly, I didn’t want to think about why I don’t have one specific kid, Lillian. The pedicurist’s display of sadness when I said “no, I don’t have kids” was too close to feelings I didn’t want to feel in that context, with her. Her pity was misplaced, but accepting any part of it would release a whole can of worms from the floodgates. (Okay, I’m mixing metaphors, but my point is that the situation was aversive, and I had no escape. Hence, my anger.)

In this mundane, relaxing, everyday situation, I was essentially put in a cage and shocked. That might seem dramatic—worse “shocks” could and have happened—but, on some level, the reminder of a shock is still a shock. And what if I don’t want to be shocked while paying to relax?

As I sat with these events, the story I wrote, and reader reactions to it, the emotions were complex. Even if I didn’t show her the anger I felt, it felt odd to admit to strangers that such a simple question evoked so much emotion. Women aren’t supposed to be angry, let alone angry when asked about kids.

I wondered what the situation would have looked like had I been able to transcend my emotions in that moment. Perhaps I would have told her some semblance of the truth. Perhaps my truth would have made her understand that asking about one’s reproductive status and then offering an opinion is inhumane at worst and inappropriate at best. Perhaps my truth would’ve stopped her from asking similar questions to future strangers. Perhaps I could have spared countless women their own versions of discomfort.

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If I hadn’t let anger mask my sadness, I might’ve said something like, “Well, I always thought I wanted kids, but it was never really a strong desire because I work with kids, and, honestly, it’s nice sending them home! Ha! Plus, it was never really the right time…I didn’t want a kid in my 20s—I was too young…school, work, finances.. Then, in my 30s, I was in grad school and moving around the country…eventually I got engaged but then we graduated…long-distance…financial independence…instability….”

I imagine this version of me—the one who could transcend trauma and speak about these events freely in public with a stranger—would have powered through the inevitable tears and stares caused by this next part:

“And then, well, I did get pregnant without trying when visiting my long-distance fiancé, and…uh, I’ve never actually talked about this to a stranger before—unless you count my blog—but that’s different because it’s writing, and I can’t see the audience, and the one mention of it was buried in a story about spirituality…. Anyway, yeah, so, um, I had a miscarriage.”

I imagine that she would have emoted at the mention of The “M” Word. It’s a word you can’t use in polite society—the same “polite society” that forces me to remember but doesn’t allow me to talk about it because it makes others uncomfortable. Guess what? I’m uncomfortable! Emotionally transcendent me would’ve forged on:

“It was really traumatic,” I might have said. “I was all alone, and it was very painful, physically and emotionally, and…too real. I had just started to accept the idea of motherhood, but, the M-word and the events that followed were traumatic enough that now I’m done with the whole thing. I always wanted to adopt anyway, but can you believe how much it costs to adopt?! I work two part-time jobs… I’ve opted out of health insurance because I’m healthy and my premium costs are high because they collectively pay for others’ pregnancies and other health situations I don’t have…”

I imagine, by this point, she’d be on such an emotional rollercoaster with me that she’d be silent. I’d continue, the words pouring from my throat, now free from strangling social norms:

“Plus, the whole kid/no kid thing is all wrapped up in a million other traumas from that season of my life. I couldn’t go through any of them more than once, at least not yet, maybe ever. And then—oh, wait, no! Don’t cry…er, I didn’t catch your name. Don’t cry, stranger. It’s okay. It was a sad season of my life, but I’m okay now. Life is good. That’s what I was trying to tell you all along! I’m good. All is fine. No need to be sad for me! There, there.”

This version of me—the one who transcended emotions like Chuck Norris walked through walls—wouldn’t have stopped there. If I had that much momentum, I might’ve gone on to state the rules, to better ensure she didn’t ask intrusive questions again. Cultural change starts with individual change, after all.

“Since you offered me your unsolicited opinion, could I offer you some unsolicited advice? Maybe, in the future, don’t offer strangers your opinion on potentially difficult topics. You’d never say “good riddance” to someone who lost their father because you didn’t like yours, so please don’t say “I’m sorry” to someone who doesn’t have kids because you love yours. Not everyone wants or can have kids—in fact, given the world is overpopulated, maybe we should be applauding and incentivizing people who adopt, foster, or don’t have kids rather than guilting or feeling sorry for them. Similarly, not everyone wants or can have a marriage, a house, and a picket fence, so maybe steer clear of that, too. Not everyone wants to share their life stories with a stranger in public. Perhaps you can make casual conversation without offering your opinion on other people’s life experiences. Neither of us would’ve felt discomfort if you had stuck to topics that are more benign and appropriate for casual conversation, like hobbies, work, the weather, upcoming vacations, or something like that.”

At this point, I’d probably realize that emotionally transcendent me is a little too fierce and borderline callous. Maybe it’s good that I left some things out. Maybe, by leaving things out then, I can better say them now, to a broader audience more capable of influence and change.

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Walking out in Paper Shoes (Again)

Most people understand that “grief” is both a label for a feeling and also a process — something we go through that, eventually, eases in intensity — but how many of us conceptualize it as a behavioral process, influenced by internal and external variables? How many notice how it shows up in our do-say-think-feels, with dimensions that change according to our external conditions, when opportunities present themselves — and do we give ourselves grace as organisms behaving in those moments?

In this part of the story, among the behavioral takeaways I wanted to illustrate (aside from the points about cultural conditioning that I made in Part One), was that emotions are naturally occurring accompaniments, not causes, of our interactions with the outside world. They do not drive the bus of us. I felt the anger (or irritation) and didn’t act on it; instead, I asked if her kids had autism, looking for common ground. I’m not sure how that reaction might’ve changed her future intrusive questions and misplaced pity (it probably didn’t), but maybe it gave her something to think about.

Another subtle point is that, when I take my behavior at face value — that I got angry with my pedicurist for pitying me — it makes me feel bad, as if I did something wrong or as if something is wrong with me. Our culture tells us that, when looking for that “something wrong,” I should look to my brain or personality — something physical or invisible that I cannot fix, thus am doomed to repeat.

But, if I look at my reactions (anger at her pity) as behavior in context , I see an organism who has been through a traumatic experience, was currently in a relaxing experience, and was presented with aversive stimulation that evoked remnants of that experience — and anger was a first line of defense against her “real” reactions, which had never occurred in that context or elsewhere. She could not engage in responses in which she had never engaged, in a situation that didn’t call for them. So, she did the only things she could do. And, knowing this, she might be able to change her behavior next time, if she wanted. (Of course, the organism behaving perspective applies to the pedicurist, too, which is why I understood then and now that any anger I felt was not about her but her behavior.)

To date, there has been very little behavior analytic literature on grief, which, I think, is unfortunate. If grief is conceptualized broadly as the emotional and behavioral effects of loss of reinforcers, that opens the door to many types of grief — it means we’re all grieving in at least some small way, every day of our lives. Of course, there are myriad existing approaches that offer benefit during the grieving process, but that doesn’t mean behavioral science cannot offer anything of value. A lot of people might stand to benefit from a worldview and practice that doesn’t put you, an organism behaving, at fault, in any given moment — especially given the many ways grief shows up in our behavior. Sometimes as anger, sometimes as sadness, sometimes as joy….

Behavioral science is young and still growing. Perhaps if we get better at addressing some of the more common features of the human condition, like grief, we can grow out of our niche areas, help more people, and broaden the world’s understanding of behavioral science.

To all the childless women, I see you. I understand the pressure and complex layers, whether you wanted children or not. Many have much more loss to grieve than me, and I feel for you. Please know, no matter your reactions to being picked and probed about your reproductive status, all of those reactions and feelings are valid and completely natural for an organism behaving, whenever and however they occur.

Thanks for reading.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

“How many kids do you have?” she asks, eyes wide and face expectant.

“None,” I say. Her face falls.

I pause as my cheeks turn as Petal Pink as the toenails of my left foot.

“I have a Ph.D…” I say, leaving the sentence unfinished and swallowing my rising heartbeat.

I dislike this question—actually, no, I don’t dislike the question, I dislike when this question is followed by blatant disappointment, as if my reproductive status, or lack thereof, has let the speaker and all of humanity down. By the look that has frozen on her face, my childlessness is as disappointing to her as the results of the last general election were to me. That is to say, she looks devastated.

“I help a lot of people, and I teach students who go on to help a lot of kids, adults, and organizations,” I say, feeling like I not only cleared the net but aced my shot. Usually, I let the discomfort linger without retort. This time, I volleyed. Fifteen-love! Ball to Dr. Haddock!

I don’t add, “It doesn’t make me sad, so please don’t feel sorry for me. Your pity is making me uncomfortable. Be happy for me.” I honestly didn’t even think it at the time; we often don’t say what we feel in situations such as these.

But I am a bit angry and trapped. She has a hold of my right foot, and her brow is furrowed so hard that I’m worried she can’t see. Might she paint my entire toe in distress?

I’m not angry with her, of course. She’s just passing the time in ways our cultures have deemed acceptable: By asking intrusive questions about each other’s life choices and then piling hundreds of years of judgment on each other. You know, like we do.

My anger stirs when I realize that my answer didn’t placate her. Her mouth is still turned down in dismay. Knowing that I’m good with my choices, how dare she continue to be disappointed? How dare she feel anything but content that, in choosing not to create more humans, I have more of myself to give? Besides, doesn’t she know we’re suffocating our planet? Shouldn’t she be smiling and thanking me for doing my part, for her kids’ futures?

It wasn’t really that I thought these things, more like I felt them, all at once, having thought them before on the same emotions.

The feeling turns to something like melancholy once I realize that any number less than one is not enough — for her or anyone else.

It’s not enough to make countless sacrifices to obtain years of specialized training. It’s not enough to use that training to help people and teach others to help people. It’s not enough to be content with myself and my spontaneous life. It’s not enough to know that childlessness does not equal a life of carefree abandon. It’s not enough to make either of us feel better, in this moment that’s been selected for us.

It’s curious, how deep cultural conditioning runs. It lives in our everyday moments, and it sometimes makes itself known in the most unpleasant ways.

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It took a few minutes, but, eventually, her brow unfurled. Her smile returned when, fumbling for something to say that might loosen her grip on my right toe, I asked, “How many kids do you have?”

You know how sometimes you say things because that’s what similar situations called for in the past, or because it’s a partial echo of what was just said to you? This was one of those times. I didn’t care about the answer. One, two, eighteen? Knowing the number of humans she’s raising is not high on my list of curiosities — though, I guess if she says eighteen, I would be intrigued.

“Two,” she says, beaming. I force a smile, or something like it. The corners of my mouth turn up, but I don’t bare my teeth. Oh, how I want to bare my teeth. Oh, how I want to change the course of our conversation now and forever, for me and all other childless women.

“Oh.” My lackluster tone reveals my lack of interest. “Do either of them have autism?” My tone changed to something like hopefulness.

She looks confused. “No,” she says. I was supposed to ask their names, ages, or genders.

“I love kids with autism,” I say, genuinely, wishing there was some common interest in our exchange. Alas! I’m back to faking it while I process the uncomfortable emotions her question elicited.

She concentrates on wiping the polish from the skin around my nails, and I wonder what was more audacious: me not having kids or asking if hers have autism. If the incongruity had dawned on me then, I would’ve stifled an appreciative chuckle of the synchronicity of our meeting and the vastly different ways we came to this interaction.

Luckily, our conversation has reached its natural end. As she leaves my toe paint to dry (another strange product of cultural conditioning, if you think about it), I use my thoughts to turn my recent feelings of anger and melancholy into gratitude:

I think of the indignities she must face regularly, and I feel compassion. I think of how hard it must be to generate conversation with strangers, and I feel forgiveness. I remember how hard it is to be in the service industry, and I feel sympathetic exhaustion. I realize that she was just trying to fill the chasm between us with words that bring her joy, and I feel gratitude.

There it is: Gratitude. I find myself forming words, not because similar situations have called for them in the past, but because I’m genuinely grateful for her time and effort.

By now, she’s filling up the tub next to me, so I raise my voice over the sound of the water. “Thank you so much! It felt amazing, and you did a beautiful job!”

“Thank you,” she says.

We both smile, baring our teeth.

Walking Out in Paper Shoes

This was an essay from my in-progress memoir. It’s followed by a more revealing essay about sensitive experiences in childlessness — part of a larger section on grief — which I have not yet shared here on Substack.

The behavioral themes were subtle and woven throughout the essay. Maybe you picked up on them? They included: How our cultures and learning history selects what we say under what conditions — and how we react. How our emotions are part of larger behavioral units, not causes thereof. How we can recognize our feelings as valid (anger, frustration, unease) while understanding that those feelings aren’t directed at the person but their behavior (what they said or did) — and that their behavior is not their “fault,” just what was selected for them by their total conditions up to that moment — and same for you. Lots of behavioral themes here!

I worry that it might be difficult to empathize with feeling anger in a situation such as this — you, the audience, might be challenged to relate. But I think these are the bravest kind of stories we tell, when we say, yes, I felt this, I did this, and I was able to work through it and perhaps do something differently next time.

Maybe the major takeaway is that we can change cultural patterns through our individual interactions. Next time someone tells you they’re childless with a smile, smile back. Set both of you free.

Thanks for reading and sticking around for more memoir, poetry, and fiction from my radical behaviorist lens. (If you’d like, here is Part Two.)

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

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Today, I’m trying one of those lower-effort, unpolished and imperfect posts (mixed metaphor warning), and I’m jumping right in, skipping a lot of background info, as I don’t have time to catch everyone up. Just wanted to “get it out,” and test whether this audience is receptive to this kind of unpolished, spontaneous writing. Thanks in advance for reading! Some details have been changed to protect identities.

That feeling when you’re late to a client because a previous client decided to throw down in public, but you can’t tell the second client why, exactly, you’re late — and then, when you walk in, you realize that everyone there has been bad-mouthing you for the last 35 minutes. You suspect this because this family complains about others, every time you visit. Plus, you’re a behavior analyst: You can tell you were a target of verbal insults by how everyone in the room is avoiding eye contact, sitting with arms crossed, not giving you their full attention when you finally arrive (with poop on your dress, gifted by your previous client, which you stopped to wipe off in a gas station bathroom on the way there). But, professionalism over personal feelings, you explain what you can about your tardiness, and smile and push through the ice because your client — the young adult with autism, who is the most upbeat, forgiving person — is getting you a chair and telling you to have a seat.

After the ice has melted, per the purpose of your visit, the client’s parent — the one who frequently makes negative statements about others — identifies “insulting and making negative statements about other people” as a target of treatment, as if this behavior is the client’s problem alone. 🤨🤔

You pause, briefly, and consider your response options. You say, sure, we can work on that, but, if the people with whom the client spends the most time modeled positive statements more often, they would likely see a change in the client’s behavior, without formal intervention.

Crickets.

Just a day in the life you didn’t expect to live, you know?

Oh, perhaps you don’t know because you have it much differently than me. That’s why this anecdote is helpful, for both of us. For me, it helps to “say it out loud.” For you, it helps to “broaden your perspective.”

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Systems Barriers = Job Stress

One big challenge with the medical model for treatment of autism using Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is that we aren’t there to change only the client’s behavior. We’re there to also change the behavior of everyone who interacts with them. Individual behavior is inseparable from the context in which it occurs—that context is present and historical, and it includes others’ behavior.1

Yet, “total environment intervention” is not what the cultural model of psychology (or insurance) suggests or requires. And, unless the client is their own guardian, the ones who need to change their behavior are in control; if we step too loudly or offend, they could cancel services, and where would that leave our client? So, it’s a constant game of walking on eggshells — but also asking the eggshells to repair themselves. Some eggshells are harder and crunchier than others and don’t understand how they are part of the total environment. (It’s not the eggshells’ fault, it’s a cultural flaw that Westerners attribute causes of do-say-think-feels to the individual and their internal conditions alone.)

What would be ideal, IMHO, is family intervention, not individual intervention. Yet, this isn’t the service model set forth by financial (insurance) contingencies — or in psychology or healthcare as a whole — and it presents so many barriers.

Clinical work of behaviorists is often challenging, but not because of our clients—because of the systems barriers and underlying cultural assumptions about behavior being the product of the individual and/or the individual’s diagnosis alone. Yet, we cannot change an individual’s behavior without others changing their behavior. Period. Said another way, the “problem” is never the client alone.

I hope it’s not, but if this is the only post you ever read of mine, please hear this:

Every instance of what we do-say-think-feel — psychological diagnosis or not — is inseperable from its external conditions, which includes (but is not limited to) the behavior of other organisms. In other words, individual behavior (everything we do-say-think-feel) is inseparable from its conditions, inside and out. You cannot expect anyone else to change their ways without others also changing their ways; and, a lot of times, you are one of the “others” that needs to change their ways.

And, flipping this concept on yourself, you cannot expect yourself to change your behavior without changes in others’ behavior — that is a lot of pressure on you, as an individual locus of control for a confluence of variables, most of which are outside your skin.

This concept is important for fostering compassion for self and others in a culture that insists on individualism. We aren’t alone inside our skin, no matter what they say or how many systems support the notion that we are.

Sometimes, I get jealous of full-time writers. Then I remember that the grass isn’t greener, and they, too, experience systems barriers that dictate what they can and cannot do with their skills — and require them to exhibit skills they learn on their own, through practice.

Straddling multiple worlds in which you can see the systemic and cultural problems clearly — yet you can control none of them — is like being a farmhand, breaking your back to get the apples to the hungry while someone else runs the orchard and makes bank on your hard work. You will never own the orchard, but the people are still hungry, so you keep picking regardless.

Thanks for reading. Didn’t have time to tighten the metaphors herein or explain all that much beyond the central points. Hope you got something. Thanks for appreciating the breadth of my posts. Have a good day.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

To continue the bus metaphor, we’re still parked in front of rocky terrain, about to resume our travels through memoir, poetry, and fiction with behavioral themes. While you’ve been enjoying the scenery, I’ve been airing down the other tires — letting some pent-up words out in other outlets. I want to tell you briefly about that, then share a quick story behind the paintings pictured here, created by turn-of-the-century me.

Regarding the other tires, the impending loss of my uncle has me writing about grief, loss, and the afterlife in my daily writing time. Some of those words I’ve shared in Substack Notes and intend to share as a post here, but others I’ve withheld, knowing they won’t appeal to everyone who signed up for Everyday Behaviorist. So, I carved a new space for them: a separate publication I’ve named Operant Spirituality, where I’ll house my non-religious, Eastern-inspired, radical behaviorist musings on spirituality. My first post went up yesterday, and the next one is about the afterlife. To get those posts in your inbox, you’ll need to subscribe separately — though they’ll also show up in my activity feed in the Substack app. I plan to make a couple other publications to subcategorize my writing, too. More on those another day.

Now, the paintings pictured here. Back on the bus!

I painted a lot between 2003 and 2005, during what I previously thought of as my first bout of depression. (I have an existing memoir essay on that topic, which I’ll eventually get around to sharing, about the acne medicine Accutane and broken systems that allow doctors to prescribe medications with serious side effects to 19-year-old women based on words alone.)

This painting, “Don’t Lose the Faith” , the only one I titled, is one of my favorites, simply because looking at it evokes so many feelings and memories. (Stimulus control is incredible like that.) It’s one of a series of textured oil paintings I created while listening to The Dears’ second album, No Cities Left, on repeat. Great album.

Looking back at these paintings now, several things strike me.

One, I was a self-taught hobbyist and truly didn’t care about the “goodness” of the products. Comparison wasn’t on my radar — not even after putting my work on Deviant Art, the OG social media for artists. Too bad my Deviant Art account disappeared in the 22 years since, as it’d be fun to read the comments, which I remember as being kind. A related realization was that social media has always given us access to the kindness of strangers, even in its dinosaur days. These two things — creation for the sake of creation and the unrelenting kindness of “people” — are easy to devalue in our current landscape.

Two, my amateur-ness reminded me of how I shied away from so many activities, including formal art classes, because I avoided anything where I had to use my right hand publicly. I haven’t told you about my hand yet, but I will get there. (Releasing memoir in bits and pieces amongst other writing is a slow process. Spoilers on my website.) Sometimes I think about all the things I’d be better or good at if I had been comfortable using my hand publicly before the last few years… it’s a lot.

Three, in thinking about the high school art classes I substituted for choir (where I could hide my hand), I realized that melancholia, or precursors to more clinical states of depression, has shadowed me for most of my life, no doubt brought on by a mix of childhood trauma and lucky genetics. Meeting me, you’d likely never know — unless you, too, straddle the dark. Kind of like how I always felt something kindred in Robin Williams’ quick humor or Anthony Bourdain’s restless searching, I feel our kind sees each other, even if we can’t meet on the same frequency. More on this another time, too.

Four, even before I had the language of radical behaviorism, competing stimuli, and Behavioral Activation Therapy, I grasped that doing anything with my hands and words besides letting thoughts loop would help. Painting became a powerful disruptor of spiraling feelings. It wasn’t about making something good; it was about doing something, anything, else. The feelings painting evoked then are evoked by looking at them now. Perhaps that’s what makes art powerful: it externalizes private pain into something you can look at, touch, or share — even if only with yourself.

Many people think depression consists of staying in bed all day, crying, sleeping, and otherwise unable to move. Sometimes it does. But sometimes it looks like your body going through the motions while your soul lies under the covers.

That’s why finding these paintings matters to me now. They remind me that, in my darkest moments, I’ve always looked for ways to remove the covers and bring painful private experiences into the open — to give them light and air so I can breathe again. Painting was one version of artistic release. Writing is yet another. In both, I discover ways back to myself, regardless of whether any one product is “good.” In sharing them publicly, then and now, I model the vulnerability and authenticity all of us need to engage in to create a world where we can all be ourselves.

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My obsession with painting was brief. Around that time, I stumbled into two other lifelong loves — behavior analysis and yoga — and painting faded into the background as I pursued formal training in both. Many of my pieces were lost to moves and storage, though I stumbled on a treasure trove this morning, tucked away in a dark, spider-heavy corner of the barn. My old DeviantArt account disappeared in the decades since its creation. Disappointing, but not surprising. My writing could suffer the same fate if I abandoned it, but I don’t want to abandon it and rediscover it twenty years later. That’s where your continued readership comes in, and I’m grateful for it.

Here we are: Enjoying the view together, having aired down all the tires, ready to resume driving (or riding) my dissemination bus over rocky terrain. Now you know a little more about the many variables that accumulated into what is now my writing journey — and perhaps understand more of the repeated themes within it.

Thanks for being here for the writing, if not the painting. I promise I have slightly more talent with words than oils.

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If the hardest part of writing authentic memoir — and sharing pieces of it publicly — is admitting uncomfortable truths, the second hardest is deciding what to say next.

Except for my in-process novel, most of my posts — even my memoir essays, some of which I’m beginning to test here, like Beach Bodies— are intended to be stand-alone pieces, meant to take you, dear reader, places you might not expect to go and leave you there, lingering in the questions, left to resolve them, if you choose, with your own resources and the supplies I left you. I try to lead you there hand-in-hand, but it is never my intention to leave you stranded in the belly of the intolerable — disconnected from me, lost in a whale I washed up onto shore.

I felt my previous post, Beach Bodies, the second memoir essay I’ve posted here so far, might’ve left some deeply caring hearts stranded— salt-skinned, in the dark, with lingering questions and no sight of me. It even left me feeling a little stranded, as I had never spoken some of those truths outside walls I paid to absorb the sound of my voice.

So, before scattering my next set of words, which will be entirely unrelated to those I left on the beach, please allow me to lead you out of the belly of the beast by answering your lingering questions, at least:

The answer is yes. It’s always yes.

Yes, I was still me, then — the one composed of all you saw and more — and yes, I am still me — the one composed of public and private events, tied inevitably, inextricably to the outside world. Yes, I’m still figuring out how to put it all into words of my own (or as much of my own as they can be).

Yes, I am okay, now — or trying to be. Yes, life caught up with me, and, in response class collapse, I found writing helpful — stillness after storms capsized me home. My background, fortuitously, leaves me uniquely equipped to navigate rocky shorelines. I scatter my writing as I go, as I think it might help others who find themselves similarly adrift.

Yes, occasionally, other professionals walk beside me and listen, telling me which rocks not to step on and which tidepools to avoid, but they inevitably have to leave me alone with the hardest parts of the experience. I have to build my own shelter, find my own food, make my own clothes — like a behavioral girl scout, all grown up and earning her hardest merit badges yet. In doing so, I write. And I share. I scatter words. I hope you listen with the understanding that words cannot be fully said.

So, yes, I suppose I will sometimes lead you somewhere dark and leave you stranded, as I cannot tell the whole story — no one ever can. I never do it with ill intent; it’s just that, now I’m much further along, and I have so much other writing to scatter, in my wake, before my wake.

Yes, I am humbly, vulnerably holding multiple truths: I accomplished some low-probability things —degrees, research, helping others change their lives — despite difficult life experiences and their behavioral outcomes on mine. None of my accomplishments, knowledge, or contributions are dimmed by the breadth of my truth. Like many others, I have some valuable things to share because of it.

And, yes, my background —academic and otherwise — both broke me and gave me the ability to rebuild me. I have done and am still doing the rebuilding and bringing you along with me. It’s not all such heavy lifting. Most is not.

But, yes, writing is the scaffolding on which the rebuilding happens, and

Living authentically, in the truth of my being — in self love, in process —

is the material of which I’m made.

So, yes, by reading, I am asking you to hold all of this — the vastness of my tools, the scattering of my words, the vulnerability of my truth — not for my ego, but because it’s real. I have some beautiful and valuable things to share, if you can hold the questions and truths — and keep listening.

Oh! Your last question. I almost forgot:

Absolutely, yes: If love is nothing but another word for positive reinforcement, then I love you higher than the sky.

Background

This post was made of things I wanted to say, to different readers, some of whom might not exist. I think it could be morphed into an intro or prelude to my mosaic memoir, which will be a collection of essays on various topics, heavy to light, as it gives the reader an idea of what to expect — and you an idea of what to expect from this publication. (Mixed essays, memoir, poetry, fiction, and eclecticism, in general.)

I wrote and posted this piece on Friday and waited days to send it. I’ve written many words since, but I have only posted them to notes.

One behavioral interpretation of my verbal stillness here — or, apparent stillness, for nothing alive is ever entirely still, devoid of behavior — is within-lifetime selection, or lack there of. Many people offered reassurances after that post, but others left. I engaged in more words about those events. Lots of words — different sets, of equally high probability and strength, with no audience or stimuli to select among the next ones but me. The people who left, people who stayed, the new people who joined — colleagues, friends, family, writers, soldiers, dog trainers, other psychologists and philosophers — to whom am I speaking, and what can I say to make them stay?

In plain language, it’s been difficult to choose what I wanted to say next. I’m used to offering a hard truth and then taking a hard left turn with my writing — and so are readers who followed me here from other platforms — but, most of the readers on Substack are new to me. So, I felt I needed to clarify what you’re getting, before I move on.

When I say clarify, I mean drench my words in metaphor and possibly raise more questions than I answer, of course.

It’s also possible that you didn’t have any questions — you’re here because you saw an interesting tour guide and hopped along for the ride. I appreciate you, too. Sometimes, you spend hours saying things you thought you needed to say, only to find that no one needed to hear them….

It’s okay, you said them anyway. Keep going.

As you know, I mix and vary the content and themes of my posts here on Substack. See you next time, with something very different. Thank you for reading.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,
Jennifer
Everyday Behaviorist

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It’s 2021. I’ve moved back to my father’s home, to help him through a health crisis; he’s been discharged from hospice, proclaimed a medical miracle, and is slowly recovering. Me, I’m recovering from depression — which, spoiler, is a lifelong process — and experiencing chronic pain. I just quit my tenure-track academic position, entirely burned out, and told the next one, “I’m sorry; I cannot move across the country again after all. I have family to help.”

In truth, I needed to help me.

Despite the smiles on my face in public and in pictures, back then, I wake up crying most mornings, before wiping off the tears and putting on my mask of stylish clothes and genuine smiles. The behavioral contrast between private and public is sharp.

I attend yoga with friends, run, work, dine with students and colleagues, smile and laugh. I take the pills, all the pills, and go to therapy. I self-medicate. I meditate. The food I manage to keep down provides energy for all this not-quite-real doing—including gardening, my then-obsessive hobby that kept me grounded, quite literally.

I would’ve left this plane of existence months ago, in 2020, if not for an intense out-of-body meditative experience I had when thinking of all the people who love me, and all the subsequent work I would end up doing, every day, to find meaning and joy in staying. Since that experience, I’ve been leaning into using behavioral principles to improve my conditions. They have improved, considerably; more on that another day.

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Yet, in 2021, despite improvements in the form of life being more bearable, I’m frustrated: Frustrated with how much time and money I spent chasing a dream that was just that — a dream, entirely illusory and fantastically constructed. I’m angry that I made so many sacrifices — friends, marriage, children, homes, possessions lost in move after move — for what feels like nothing (to my ego, at least).

I’m also unimpressed with how the science I love, Behavior Analysis, is being taught and applied — how some of our graduate programs are failing their students, how private equity companies are exploiting evidence-based practices for profit, how it feels impossible to break out of the autism niche. Most igniting of all, I’m frustrated with how many Behavior Analysts do not seem to live by our own philosophy, Radical Behaviorism. Not in a thoroughgoing way, at least. I certainly had not been, until that epiphany.

What does it mean to live radically, I wonder? To truly treat everything we do, say, think, and feel as a product of biology, learning history, and current circumstances is an ongoing task, much more complex than it appears to the devout behaviorist.

I think I’ve found the path, but I’ve only glimpsed it.

I know I want to be here, to stay. I know this life is special, and it’s the only one I’ve got. The only real there is. And escape — no matter how much the elusive freedom of dreamless sleep appeals — is not an option. Hurting people I love is not an option. Wanting something I’ve never experienced is part of the big, beautiful range of human experience. How blessed I am to experience a broader range than most. I must persist.

Among the many things I do on a daily basis to combat my private events, I decide to take B.F. Skinner’s advice on Finding What You Have to Say.

If you don’t know of him, or in case you’ve been misinformed, B.F. Skinner was the most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. Don’t just take my word for it: The American Psychological Association said so! Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism and the science on which it was based, Behavior Analysis, influenced the whole of psychology, whether the other subdisciplines acknowledge it or not.

Yet, his philosophy, research, and the field his work generated have been misinterpreted and misrepresented, countless times, by people who didn’t spend decades studying, practicing, researching, and teaching it. The science of Behavior Analysis and the philosophy of Radical Behaviorism continues to be ignored and underused, despite its generality and ability to solve many human and non-human problems. That’s not grandiose thinking — it’s natural science. Yet, sometimes our approaches to dissemination aren’t all that effective; this is why I want to share it with you in new and creative ways, if you care to listen.

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Anyway, it’s still 2021. The world is hurting, my heart is hurting, and I don’t know what to say or do about it. I know the sources of my ache are external, but I don’t know where to put the ache, if not inside me.

So, I do what Skinner would’ve suggested: I stop looking inside and look outside. I stop wishing for things to be different in me and make things different about me.

Among those things, I write. Almost every morning. It started with journaling the year before — things for which I’m grateful, lists of people I love, kind words about them…. You get the idea. Private writing, for me and me alone.

This year, back in 2021, I generalize that writing to notes, poems, essays, fiction — mostly, with the intention of sharing bits of pieces of the worldview I find so helpful with the rest of the world. Sometimes, at the time, simply to tell myself I am: I am a writer. I am hopeful. I am loved. I am contributing. I am… I am many things besides sad.

To me, at the time, the “rest of the world” seems impossible to reach, and I’m not ready to share all of my stories with the general public. So, I settle on using Facebook as an outlet—just to start, I tell myself. I make a Facebook page called “Everyday Behaviorist,” a tongue-in-cheek moniker because the experiences I write about are not “everyday” to most.

I stay on Facebook for years. It’s easy to post there. There’s immediate reinforcement, and it’s where all my friends already hang out. Plus, given the temporal structure, my more sensitive posts get buried, so the anxiety of oversharing with strangers fades fairly quickly. In another year, I’ll make a website, but, the year after that, more events happen — more deaths, more career upheaval — and I cannot keep all the plates spinning.

So, I just…

Write. On Facebook, letting some of my most beautiful word combinations get buried.

Over the next few years, my readers help me find my voice. They include some colleagues I respect and admire, as well as childhood friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers. They make me feel confident in my writing. They encourage me to pursue bigger and better things. They know Facebook has limited growth for writers.

Long story coming to an end, years after all of this, here I am, on Substack. Trying to make this writing journey something more than what it initially was: An attempt to find my voice. An attempt to find meaning and purpose. An attempt to disseminate behaviorism in new, creative ways.

Now, years later, writing has become a part of who I am. I’d like to continue finding what I have to say, merging my old and new audience. I want to bring some of what I’ve previously written, and incorporate new work, too. It’s not all about depression recovery — in fact, most of my writing is not. To put it briefly, it’s about life, love, and spirituality — an entire human experience — improved and interpreted by a natural science worldview.

That’s why I’m here: To share what I can, while I can, in ways that I can. Because others are making those attempts, too, without a unifying underlying philosophy of natural science. So, whatever I share, in whatever ways, it’s all valuable, whether I am able to niche down or not, whether this “goes somewhere” or not.

‘Cause the thing is, I’m still me. Still limited by my capacity, learning history, current circumstances, and cultural variables. Still the same me, living a life I didn’t expect to live, dealing with grief, trauma, relationships, career struggles, and systemic oppression — but also still experiencing the joy, wonder, and beauty life has to offer.

I’m here, doing my best. And I’m glad you joined me.

A welcome post is coming soon, in which I’ll explain the types of writings I’ve already posted, what I plan to post going forward, and when to expect them. Thank you for being here as I find what I have to say to a new audience, in this new space.

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer