TranceBreakers Newsletter

  Something came up enough times this year that I finally sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Two people you love stop talking to each other and start talking through you. She tells you what he said. He tells you what she meant. You explain each of them to the other, the temperature comes down, and everyone feels a little better. It works. So you keep doing it. Here is what I did not see for years. You are not passing messages. You are explaining motive. She did not mean it that way. He is just tired. That is just how she talks. And to explain somebody, you have to make them smaller. You cannot hand over the whole person. You hand over a version that fits in a sentence. And a shorter version of a person is much easier to be angry at than the real one. So you build a small character out of someone you love, and you hand it to someone else you love. Then you do it in the other direction, because you are fair. Two villains. One in each house. Built entirely out of kindness. That i...