Right before I graduated college, I applied to the Louisiana State Police.
Part of the process was a polygraph test. If you’ve never taken one, here’s how it works: you sit in a small room while someone asks you a series of yes-or-no questions, and a machine tracks your heart rate, breathing, and a few other things that apparently reveal whether you’re lying.
One of the questions was simple enough on paper: have you ever stolen anything?
I sat there and actually thought about it. Not in a panicked way – in an honest one. Had I ever taken something I shouldn’t have? Of course. Probably a piece of candy as a kid. Maybe something small from a friend’s house that I forgot to give back. Years of little, forgettable things that I genuinely couldn’t reconstruct with any confidence.
So when the examiner asked if I had told him everything, I hesitated. I wanted to say yes. But I couldn’t, in good conscience, claim I remembered every small thing I had ever taken across two decades of being a kid. I told him what I could remember and admitted there was probably more I had simply forgotten.
I failed the polygraph. Not because I was hiding some terrible secret, but because I could not honestly pretend to remember every small mistake I had ever made.
At the time, this felt like one of the most unfair things that had ever happened to me. I had been honest – more honest, probably, than the test wanted me to be – and it cost me the job. I remember feeling a particular kind of frustration that’s hard to name: not anger at a person, exactly, but anger at a moment. Like the universe had handed me a raw deal for no good reason.
I didn’t know what to do next. So, I did the thing you do when you don’t know what to do: I bought myself more time.
I went to graduate school. I want to be clear that this was not some grand strategic pivot. I didn’t have a five-year plan. I was a guy who had just lost the job he thought he wanted, looking for the next reasonable step, and graduate school was it.
Almost twenty years later, I cannot imagine a better life than the one that decision built for me and my family. The career I have now, the work I get to do, the people I have met along the way – none of it exists in the version of my life where I pass that polygraph and become a state trooper instead.
I’m not saying that path would have been bad. I’m saying I can’t picture my life now without the detour that felt, at the time, like a punishment.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: in the moment, I was certain I understood what had just happened to me.
Something bad. Something unfair. A door closing for no good reason. I was wrong about all of it. Not factually wrong – the door really did close, and it really did feel unfair. I was wrong about what it meant.
We do this constantly. We experience something – a setback, a rejection, a plan falling apart – and we immediately assign it a verdict. Good or bad. Lucky or unlucky. Fair or unfair.
We are rarely wrong about what happened. We are often wrong about what it means, because meaning usually takes longer to arrive than judgment does.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll sit back and assume everything happens for a reason, or that every setback is secretly a blessing. Plenty of bad things are simply bad, with no silver lining waiting on the other side. That’s not the lesson.
The lesson is smaller and, I think, more useful: we should hold our verdicts a little more loosely than we do.
The instinct to immediately decide whether something is good or bad, fair or unfair, a disaster or a blessing, is almost always premature. We are judging a chapter as if it were the whole book.
So the next time something happens that feels like a clear, obvious setback, pause before you finish the story in your head.
You might be right. The setback may be exactly what it appears to be.
But you might also be twenty years away from realizing that the thing you were sure had gone wrong was actually the moment everything else became possible.
Dr. Raymond E. Barranco is Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University and the creator of the Public Dignity Standard. He currently resides in Caledonia, MS with his wife, three kids, and two dogs.
