Misunderstood A personal essay that thinks through television. Every writer's job is to show us why a character does what they do — give an audience the reasons and even a cruel act becomes understandable. I turn that lens on ordinary life and the asymmetry it reveals: the grace we hand fictional strangers, we withhold from the people right in front of us. It starts from a private failure — that whatever I feel rarely lands intact on the other side — and follows it out to what's lost when reaching and being reached keep missing.