Break Rules of Silence: The Form Said Don't Call. I Called. Then I Showed Up.

There's a bookstore I've been wanting to host an event at for months now, and their website could not have been clearer about how to make that happen. Don't drop in. Don't call. Fill out the form and someone will get back to you. So that's exactly what I did, three weeks ago, because I like to think I follow instructions reasonably well when the instructions seem fair.

Then I waited. And waited. Not even a confirmation came through, which left me wondering if my submission had vanished into some kind of internet void. So I called, and learned it had in fact been received, except the person who handles it was out that day and my message would be passed along. A week later, still nothing, so I called again and got the exact same answer.

By yesterday I'd had enough of bending the rule. I decided to break it outright and show up in person, letter in hand in case the right person wasn't there to meet me. While I was browsing, I ended up buying a book I'd wanted for a while, and that book struck up a conversation with the woman at the register, who happened to know the author personally and called him a great guy. That was my opening. Book chat, she said the book I'd chosen was a great read, and one thing led to another until I mentioned that I had my own book coming out in October and would love to bring an event there. I left her the letter and she promised to get it into the manager's hands.

I don't yet know how this particular story ends. But I know exactly why I couldn't leave it sitting in a form that might never get read.

The Rules We Never Agreed To

Here's what I keep coming back to. Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up a set of rules we never actually chose. Don't make a fuss. Don't call twice. Don't take up more space than you've been offered. Wait your turn, even when your turn seems to have been forgotten. Some of these rules got handed to us so early, and so gently, that we mistook them for our own personality instead of recognizing them as inherited instructions we absorbed before we had any say in the matter.

I learned a version of this rule as a kid, and I carried it much further into adulthood than served me. Stay quiet. Don't make waves. Trust that the system, whatever the system happens to be that week, will eventually notice you and do right by you if you just wait long enough and don't cause trouble. It's a rule that sounds reasonable on its surface, which is exactly why it's so hard to spot and so hard to shake. Nobody hands you that rule with a warning label.

And silence, once it becomes a habit, doesn't just sit there patiently waiting to be broken when convenient. It compounds. Every time we swallow the phone call we wanted to make, or the follow-up email we talked ourselves out of sending, or the honest sentence we softened into something smaller and safer, we're reinforcing the same old belief that speaking up costs more than it's worth. That belief doesn't stay confined to bookstore forms. It shows up in relationships where we don't say what we actually need. It shows up in careers where we wait to be picked instead of putting ourselves forward. It shows up in the stories we don't tell because we've decided somewhere along the way that our version of events isn't the one that gets to be heard.

Why This Theme Runs Through My Book

This is a big part of what my memoir, The Picked Lock, is actually about, and it's baked into the title itself in two ways at once. There's the literal meaning, rooted in something taken from me by someone I trusted. But there's also the figurative meaning, which is the one I think about more often these days: picking the lock on my own silence. Learning, slowly and imperfectly, that I was allowed to tell my own story instead of keeping it locked away because some inherited rule told me that was safer.

Writing that book meant going back through journals I'd kept since I was fifteen and confronting, in real time, just how long I'd been following rules that were quietly working against me. Rules about who gets to be believed. Rules about what's worth making a fuss over. Rules about staying small so other people can stay comfortable. Watching that pattern on the page, in my own handwriting, across years, made it impossible to pretend it was just one isolated moment of staying quiet. It was a whole architecture I'd built without ever meaning to.

Why This Theme Runs Through My Coaching

This is also, not coincidentally, the exact work I do with the clients I coach. So many of the successful, capable people I work with are navigating a career pivot or a life reinvention, and what trips them up almost never turns out to be a lack of skill or ambition. It's the auto-pilot rule they picked up decades ago that says don't ask for more, don't disrupt what's already working, don't be the one who causes the inconvenient conversation. They've built entire careers around rules they never consciously agreed to, and untangling which rules are actually still serving them versus which ones are just old furniture nobody's bothered to move is a huge part of what real transformation looks like.

I tell my clients some version of what I eventually had to tell myself. The rule was never really about the form, or the phone call, or waiting your turn. It was about whether you believe your voice is worth the friction it might cause. And once you can see that clearly, the actual rule in front of you, whether it's a bookstore's submission process or a boundary you've never set with a boss or a partner or a parent, starts to look a lot more optional than it did before.

Some Rules Are Worth Rewriting

I'm not arguing that every rule deserves to be broken. Plenty of them exist for good reasons, and I still believe in patience, in process, in not burning down every system just because it's slow. But some rules were never actually protecting anyone. They were just protecting the discomfort of the person who might have to hear a "no," or worse, a "yes" that changes things.

Yesterday I broke a small rule about a bookstore form, and it turned into a real conversation, a book connection, and hopefully an event down the road. That's a small story. But it's the same muscle I had to build to write an entire memoir, and it's the same muscle I help my clients build every single week. The muscle that notices a rule was only ever there to keep you quiet, and decides that quiet has cost enough.

If you've got a rule like that sitting somewhere in your life right now, the one that's been running the show for longer than makes sense, I'd start by asking who actually wrote it. It's rarely you.