▸ Column · Galactic Civil War, Rebel Alliance era — set during the years between the Battle of Yavin and the Battle of Endor
LEIA ORGANA replies.
Replied to by Leia Organa, with a rebuttal from L.
The letter
I have a counselor in the medical bay who tells me I'm genuinely improving, which I want to believe. Last week my squadron mate Vessa brought a tin of her family's sweetbreads to our debrief and I spent the entire return flight to base quietly triangulating what she was after. That's the reflex: someone extends something warm and my threat assessment runs before my gratitude does. My mother was generous right up until she needed ammunition — she'd spend months building warmth and then years drawing on it, weaponizing every gift she'd ever given. So now generosity registers as a tactical opening, not a kind gesture.
My partner Cael has been with me two years. He's good — not strategically good, not performing it — observably, genuinely good — and every time he does something considerate without being asked, I feel dread land in my chest before anything else does, like I'm already calculating a debt that's about to be called in. Intellectually I understand he is not my mother. That understanding hasn't reached whatever part of me decides how to feel when someone hands me something warm and expects nothing back.
I'm tired. Running scenarios two and three moves out for every person who's ever offered me anything is exhausting, and I don't know how to stop without feeling like I've just walked into a room with my back to the door.
How do you actually learn to stop bracing for the trap?
Leia Organa replies
The part of your brain running that threat assessment kept you alive in your mother's house. I'm not going to call it broken, because it isn't — it's calibrated precisely for the environment that trained it. The problem is you've carried the calibration into a world that no longer looks like that house.
I know something about inherited vigilance. I grew up understanding that the Empire had a target on me before I'd done anything to earn it, which meant I learned to map exits before I walked in, to hear what wasn't being said, to keep a reserve that most people found cold. That instinct protected people I was responsible for. And I still had to choose, over and over again, to extend trust anyway — to officers I'd never worked beside, to a smuggler who used my title like a slur and then turned his ship around into a firefight when every rational calculation said he should be parsecs away by then. I did not feel ready to trust him when I needed to. I made the choice because people needed us both, and I was not going to let what I felt slow down what was necessary.
Two years, Cael. By your own account, genuinely good, under your own sustained observation. That is not your mother's record. That is a completely different dataset, and you are refusing to update it because updating feels like walking into that room with your back to the door.
Stop asking whether this kindness is a setup. Ask whether, when it cost him something to stay, he stayed. Check that answer. Then act like you believe what your own evidence already shows you.
— Leia Organa
L weighs in
Leia says trust is a decision you make before the feeling arrives. She's approximately 70% right — but she's skipped something. You wrote, in your own words, that Cael is good "by every observable measure." That sentence already contains the answer. You have been running an experiment for two years. The hypothesis — that generosity precedes exploitation — has been tested against Cael specifically, repeatedly, and has not once been confirmed.
Your threat-assessment instinct isn't faulty. It was trained on a sample size of one. Your mother was a single data point. Cael is two years of contradicting evidence that you are, for some reason, classifying as inadmissible.
I find I think more clearly about these things with something sweet nearby. I also think it's worth asking yourself: what specific evidence would actually satisfy you? Because sometimes that question turns out to be more informative than anything else in the room.
— L