A Companion Workbook for examining choice, commitment, and possibility
A thoughtful guide to what your life has taught you to value, what it still gives you, and what no one can know in advance.
Made to accompany the video The Life That Taught You What to Want. Printable and fillable PDF · US Letter.
Every choice, including $0, brings you the complete Companion Workbook: every page, illustration and reflection exercise. Your contributions help the Library grow and bring these workbooks to more women. We are deeply grateful for each one.
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You can have made good decisions and still have questions about them. You can love a commitment and wonder about a cost. You can also look closely at your life and decide that, yes, this is the one you still choose. None of these answers makes you less thoughtful.
This Companion begins with a surprising problem. The experiences that result from your choices can change the preferences by which you judge those choices later. It draws on a novel, decision research, philosophy, and one carefully bounded idea from Carl Jung. You do not need to have seen the film to follow it.
There are three ways to use these pages. Read the explanations first; they give you distinctions worth making. Reflect on the situations that resemble your own, and disregard those that do not. Write where a question would benefit from an actual example rather than a quick impression. Choose one commitment or possibility at a time. You are not expected to put your whole life on trial.
These inquiries are not diagnoses, psychological tests, or instructions to change anything. They cannot reveal a secret motive or guarantee certainty. Their purpose is more modest—and more useful: to help you tell apart what you know, what you value, and what you are assuming.
Other people know your role. That does not mean they know every reason you would choose it.
Not choosing an option and not having a fair chance to know it are different things.
The past can pull you forward. It can also leave you with something genuinely worth keeping.
Some possibilities can be researched. Others can only be understood partly through living them.
A considered decision does not require a final judgment on every year that came before it.
What appeals now
A present inclination or valuation: you favor one possibility, experience, or outcome over another. Preferences can be strong, thoughtful, mixed, and sincerely held.
A question to carryWhich part of this arrangement do I specifically want?
Standing behind a choice
Your reflective judgment that you have reasons to preserve or pursue something, including its current value, obligations, alternatives, and costs. This is an editorial distinction, not a clinical measurement.
A question to carryWhich reasons would I stand behind after careful comparison?
Deprivation changes evaluation
In philosopher Serene Khader's account, a morally significant form of preference shaped by deprivation that undermines basic flourishing. Her framework examines injustice while preserving the importance of people's agency.
A question to carryAm I examining taste, restricted access, or actual deprivation?
The existing-option bias
A documented tendency to favor the existing arrangement beyond what a neutral comparison of alternatives may warrant.
A question to carryWhich reasons favor the arrangement apart from its being familiar?
What cannot be recovered
Time, money, or effort already spent that the next decision cannot bring back. Past investment can exert psychological pressure to continue.
A question to carryAm I preserving future value or trying to recover yesterday?
An unfamiliar future perspective
In L. A. Paul's philosophical account, an experience that can transform what you know firsthand and potentially what you value, creating limits on advance comparison.
A question to carryWhat would only become knowable from inside this experience?
Learning a new value
In Agnes Callard's philosophical account, an active process of coming to appreciate and care about a value you initially understand only incompletely.
A question to carryWhat would I have to learn before I could fairly judge it?
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