The Danger of Unchecked Certainty
What a cockroach taught me about acting in a play it never auditioned for in the first place.
And there I was…a few days left of a TDY in a hotel near Fort Bragg.
If you've ever stayed in contracted government lodging, you know the experience. The furniture has stories. The HVAC has two settings: Arctic and Swamp. Somewhere around day three, making coffee in the bathroom starts to feel completely normal. You decide it’s easier to keep up with your things when you leave the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and get your own towels from the desk.
That's when I found the cockroach.
She wasn't one of those terrifying sprinters that disappear before you can react. She looked, well, sick. One antenna drooped; one wing sat stuck outward. She was clearly dying, like she'd lost a fight with whatever government-approved pesticide somehow manages to kill an insect rumored to survive nuclear fallout.
Instead of grabbing a shoe, I trapped her under a bowl from the kitchenette. My logic was simple: if she made it this far, she deserved to die in peace over a violent squish. Besides, as long as the bowl stayed put, she couldn't crawl up my nose while I slept.
The next day, curiosity got the better of me. I tipped up one side of the bowl. She wasn't dead. In fact, she looked better: shinier wings, straighter antennae, moving with purpose, but she didn't run.
Naturally, I did what any reasonable person does: I googled how long a cockroach can survive without food or water. Turns out, weeks without food, about a week without water. That should have settled it. Instead, it just gave me a timeline to worry about. So, I left the bowl in place. If she recovered, I'd release her when I checked out.
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Somewhere over the next few days, the cockroach became Katy. Waking up and eyeing the bowl, I'd say, "Morning, Katy." When I came back each evening, I'd tell her about my day. She was an excellent listener.
Checkout morning finally arrived. I carefully raised the bowl, camera ready to take her picture before our goodbye. Before I could even say "cheese," she bolted under the air conditioner and vanished.
I stood there in betrayed disbelief, followed quickly by shame. Katy hadn't exploited my compassion; she was just being a cockroach. I was the one who had cast her in a play she never auditioned for.
Worse, my quiet denial had created a real-world problem for the hotel. I had avoided reporting her to the front desk because I knew deep down what pest control does: they spray, no negotiating. But now she was loose in the infrastructure.
Maintenance came fast, and thorough. I watched them spray under the same air conditioner she'd disappeared beneath. Within minutes, she fell out twitching, her legs drawing inward. An antenna flicked one last time, and she was gone. I hadn't planned on staying for that part, but I did.
All the time I'd spent protecting Katy from a quick death got her a slower, chemically engineered one instead. Bagged by my own hands, I wondered if I'd have been kinder on day one using my shoe.
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In retrospect, what fascinates me isn't that I spent a week protecting a cockroach. It's how quickly my brain filled in everything it couldn't possibly know. I observed a handful of facts: she looked sick, she barely moved, and she didn't run. From there, my brain quietly took over. It decided she was dying, that she needed saving, and that she'd appreciate the gesture. By the time Katy ran, I wasn't reacting to an insect anymore. I was reacting to a story I'd constructed so completely that I'd forgotten I'd written it.
The brain is remarkably good at creating reality from incomplete information. Most of the time, this predictive processing is an extraordinary advantage. It allows us to move through a complex world without stopping to analyze every micro-decision. But it also means the stories our brains construct can feel so real that we stop noticing they're just hypotheses. I'd written Katy into a relationship, and then felt disappointed when she didn't play the part my brain expected of her.
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Katy taught me something I still think about today: overdone strengths aren't always the problem. Sometimes, unchecked certainty is. The same trait that helps us understand another person, take responsibility, or stay optimistic under pressure can quietly convince us we've already seen clearly enough. Every leadership strength becomes a liability the moment we stop checking our assumptions:
Confidence becomes certainty.
Responsibility becomes control.
Optimism becomes denial.
Empathy becomes rescuing.
The failure was believing my first interpretation was reality.
Now, when I catch myself moving quickly toward certainty, I ask myself one question:
What story have I already decided is true?
