Sunlight doesn’t create dust. It just shows you how much was already floating around.

Noticing a problem is not the same as causing it, though the timing makes them easy to confuse. When you start paying attention to something, whether your spending, your temper or the state of a friendship, it seems to get worse immediately. What changed is the light, and the discomfort is information arriving rather than damage occurring.

When honesty makes things look bad, stay in it a little longer before drawing conclusions. Write down what you are seeing now that you were not seeing last month. The first phase of improving anything feels almost exactly like decline.