Cancer

The pattern you keep running into only shows itself after you have run into it enough times to stop calling it coincidence. It lives in the space between what you think you are choosing and what keeps happening anyway, in the gap between your reasons and your results. You can see it now in the way you handle conflict, or money, or the end of conversations, but only because you have done the same thing in slightly different rooms often enough to recognize your own fingerprints on the outcome. What you thought was responding to each situation as it came was actually one response, repeated, dressed up in different circumstances.