Case Study 01 — Chapter 40: Building Your Psychological Toolkit — A Life in Practice

Jordan: The Work, Revised

October — Year Three of the Initiative

It is eighteen months since the end of the second phase of the CJC initiative. Jordan is now in the third year of something that was originally a one-year project. The CEO has twice referred to it as the company's "evidence infrastructure." Rivera is Jordan's deputy director with a team of four analysts including Song, who leads the segmentation work.

Jordan's title is Senior Director, Customer Intelligence. Not what he expected to arrive at. Not the founder-adjacent role that lived in the stalled business proposal from Chapter 9, before the proposal was unstalled, before the proposal became this. But the gap between what he imagined and what is — that gap has narrowed.

This is not resolution. It is something more interesting: the recognition that the life he is living was not predictable from any of the futures he imagined for himself, and that this is fine. That the shape of a meaningful life does not need to have been envisioned in advance.

The Therapy Ending

Jordan has been seeing Dr. Nalini for two and a half years. Weekly at first, then biweekly for the last year. In October, they have the conversation that therapists call "termination" and that Jordan, characteristically, has been approaching with both genuine readiness and mild resistance.

Dr. Nalini: "What do you want to take with you?"

Jordan thinks about this carefully, because it is the right question.

"The ability to sit with not knowing," he says. "I came here because I thought I needed to manage my anxiety better. What I actually learned was that managing was the wrong verb."

Dr. Nalini: "What's the right verb?"

"Tolerating, maybe. Or — inhabiting. Being in the anxiety rather than administering it."

A pause.

"The first session I came in with a list of what I wanted to work on. Four items, color-coded."

Dr. Nalini laughs — genuinely, the kind she rarely allows herself. "I remember."

"I couldn't have told you then that what I actually needed to learn was that I don't get certainty before I commit. I thought certainty was the goal. The whole compulsive work behavior, the anxiety management, the over-preparation — it was all in service of arriving at certainty before I had to risk anything. And certainty is not available. It's just not available." He pauses. "I think you knew that in the first session."

"I knew it was probably somewhere in the picture. I didn't know how long the road would be."

Jordan: "Was it longer than usual?"

Dr. Nalini, with a slight smile: "About average."

What Has Changed — A Genuine Accounting

Jordan builds a list, not for Dr. Nalini but for himself, in the learning journal he has kept since Chapter 26.

What has actually changed in 3 years:

The anxiety pattern. Named as subclinical GAD (Chapter 32). Still present. Quieter. The worst-case scanning that used to run continuously has been interrupted often enough that it no longer runs by default. The first thought in a difficult situation is now occasionally let me find out what's actually true rather than let me construct the full taxonomy of what could go wrong.
The relationship with Dev. The children conversation has moved from abstract dread to concrete planning. They have been in contact with an adoption agency for four months. Nothing is certain; the process is long; Jordan's anxiety about the uncertainty is real and not paralyzing. Dev says the apartment feels different since Jordan started leaving the phone in the kitchen at night. Jordan says the apartment feels different since Dev started telling him about the independent work pivot rather than managing whether Jordan was ready to hear about it.
The team. Rivera runs the analytical work. Song is the best data scientist Jordan has worked with. Priya is elsewhere — a VP role at a competitor, which Jordan has processed as exactly the right outcome for the investment in her development. The team's psychological safety scores (measured in the annual culture survey) have been among the highest in the company for two years running.
The friendship network. Leon and Chen have become, over three years of Saturday runs, the people Jordan calls when something is hard — not to be fixed, but to be heard. This seems ordinary from the outside. Jordan knows what it represents. He spent the better part of his adult life without it.
The physical infrastructure. Sleep: consistent 7.2 hours average. Exercise: four runs per week, unchanged. The CRP level at last year's physical: back in normal range.

What has not changed:

The perfectionist impulse. Still present. Somewhat less likely to reach all the way to paralysis, but the first draft of anything still produces the visceral sense that it is inadequate.
The impostor-adjacent attribution (Chapter 10). Still more likely to externalize success than failure. Still catches himself in the thought they'll figure out I don't actually know what I'm doing and has to deliberately interrogate it.
The deflection-of-care pattern (Chapter 21). Significantly reduced. Not gone. Dev called it out last month — Jordan had converted a moment of genuine care into a problem-solving response. Jordan caught it mid-sentence, stopped, said "Let me try that again." Dev: "You don't need to try again. I just wanted you to notice."

Jordan adds a fourth item:

The ability to receive correction without experiencing it as an attack. Getting better. Still the hardest one.

The Saturday Run — Year Three

November. The three of them are running in the cold, which they have done in every season now for almost three years. Leon's daughter plays club soccer. Chen's hospital project finished; the next one has already started. Jordan's and Dev's adoption process has moved into the home study phase.

"Dev's terrified," Jordan says. Not complaining, reporting.

Leon: "Are you?"

"Yes. Differently."

Chen: "What's different about your terror versus Dev's?"

Jordan has thought about this. "Dev is terrified that we won't get matched or that something will go wrong. I'm terrified of what it means if it goes right. If we actually become parents. What that requires of me."

Leon: "What does it require?"

"Showing up for someone who can't take care of themselves. Consistently. Without my performance of showing up being the main event." He pauses. "The thing I've always been worst at."

They run a quarter mile.

"You're better at it than you used to be," Chen says.

"I am."

"Give yourself some credit."

Jordan: "Working on it."

Leon, dryly: "Still working on it."

"Still working on it."

The Integration Insight

In the final Dr. Nalini session, Jordan says something that surprises him by being the truest thing he has said in two and a half years of trying to say true things.

"I think I came in here believing that the goal was to become a person who had solved their psychology. Who had worked through the anxiety, repaired the attachment patterns, aligned the behaviors with the values, built the practices, and was now operating efficiently from a healed platform. And I think I've learned that's not what this is."

Dr. Nalini: "What is it?"

"It's more like — I've built a better relationship with myself. The anxiety is still there. The perfectionism is still there. The deflection thing is still there. But I know them now. I can see them when they're running. I have a choice about what to do. And the choice, most of the time, is better than it used to be."

Dr. Nalini: "That's it exactly."

Jordan: "I wish it had been faster."

Dr. Nalini: "Everyone does."

Postscript: A Year Later

Fourteen months after the final therapy session, Jordan and Dev bring home a daughter named Maya. She is fourteen months old. She arrived from foster care through the domestic adoption process.

Jordan holds her on the night she arrives and feels, simultaneously: complete terror, complete inadequacy, and something he will not be able to name precisely until much later — a sense of being exactly where he is supposed to be. Not ready. Present.

Dev finds Jordan in the hallway at 2 AM, holding Maya who is awake and uncertain.

Dev: "You're doing fine."

Jordan: "I have no idea what I'm doing."

Dev: "Neither do I. Come on. Let's do it together."

Jordan, in the learning journal the following morning, writes one sentence:

"I thought this was about becoming. It turns out it was always about belonging."

End of Jordan's arc.