At the start of my career, I believed sex work would teach me something about men, and it did, but fitfully. The lessons were impermanent, just pulses of knowledge. I kept glimpsing flickers. I kept trying to catch the flash. It was like fishing with bare hands. The slipperiness of wisdom—the Sisyphean struggle to not just achieve revelation but to make it stay put—isn’t a unique challenge but a feature of the human brain. Sometimes a savant, like a Zen monk, will train so rigorously and for so long that they’re able to hold the wisdom fish and show it to the rest of us, but we can’t stare at someone else’s fish for our whole lives. Looking isn’t the same as holding, anyway. One can examine their own pathology and still be bereft of a why. Even rarer is the why that lingers long enough to make a change, to eliminate the need for the behavior and spoil the enjoyment of its ephemeral satisfaction.