Agency Inventory

Authorship can be transferred quietly — to a parent's expectations, a partner's comfort, an industry's timeline — without ever being formally handed over.

1. List five significant decisions currently shaping your life: career, money, relationship, health, where you live.
2. For each, ask honestly: whose definition of 'right' is this decision actually answering to?
3. Mark each as self-authored, co-authored, or outsourced.

• Choose one 'outsourced' item and identify one concrete way to reclaim partial authorship this month.

• Which decision surprised you when you saw whose definition it was answering to?
• What would it cost to reclaim authorship there? What would it cost not to?

Outsourced authorship is often a rational adaptation to a past context — a way to reduce risk or conflict. It becomes a problem only when the context changes and the arrangement goes unexamined.

Reclaiming authorship does not require dramatic rupture. Partial, deliberate reclamation is still reclamation.

What did you notice when you ran this? Your observation helps the Lab refine the experiment and the underlying inquiry.