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Extrapped.
(2 minute read.)
The accumulated self?
The previous note featured a quote…
'If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'
I like that.
I'd inadvertently encountered the Toni Morrison quote while Googling about the musical track (the Springsteen cover 'Trapped') with which I closed the previous note. It and the song moved me to tears. Literally.
Anyway…
I'm free. And still have some remaining power.
So what can I do to help empower and free someone?
Having thought about it for perhaps four-and-a-half seconds: I can of course create a book.
So then, arising directly from that song and that quote: 'Extrapped: a life that fits.' And there's a tagline of 'The accumulated self?', in which that question mark is entirely deliberate and purposeful… it does a lot of work.
I quite like the suggestion of how the message from the song might, with due integrity, be adapted to personal struggles… a feeling of being trapped in difficult circumstances, relationships, or jobs, highlighting a perhaps-desperate need for change—freedom.
Here's the draft intro.
At some point—and you probably can't pinpoint exactly when—you stopped choosing your life and started maintaining it.
The job that was supposed to be temporary. The relationship you stayed in past its natural end. The version of yourself you presented so consistently to the world that eventually you forgot it was a performance. One day it just was you.
This isn't a book about dramatic suffering. It's about something quieter and more common—the slow process by which ordinary people become trapped inside ordinary lives. Not by catastrophe. By accumulation.
The strange thing about this kind of trap is that it doesn't feel like one—at least not at first. It feels like stability. Responsibility. Just how things are. The bars are invisible precisely because you helped build them, one reasonable decision at a time.
But somewhere—in the gap between who you are on a Tuesday afternoon and who you suspected you might become—something knows.
This book is about that gap. About how we get there, why we stay, and how some people—not by grand gestures or dramatic reinvention, but by something more honest and more difficult—find their way out.
There's a word for what lies on the other side of that process.
'Extrapped.'
To me, it seems an appropriate thing to do.
I don't know when it'll be ready, so meantime here's a pdf of a previous publication. Please… steal it, share it, let it move. Thankyou. 🙂
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