I may not have felt like a plastic bag this week, but I sure did find one.

In fact, the very Target bag floating through a parking lot that I referenced in my last newsletter? I found one in a thicket across the street from my house. Not the bag, of course, because there is presumably more than one Target bag in the greater Indianapolis area. Still, I found myself wondering: what does this mean?

This is a question I hear all the time from clients, though usually in less ridiculous forms:

What does it mean that he read my text and didn’t answer for six hours?
What does it mean that my partner was quiet during dinner?
What does it mean that I crushed the interview and still didn’t get it?
What does it mean that fewer people engaged with this newsletter than the last one? (Okay…maybe I asked this one, too.)

But what if it means absolutely nothing?

Here was the scene: I was outside leaving a WhatsApp voice note for a friend. Not walking around the block, exactly, because I live in Indianapolis now and not Brooklyn, so the geography is less “block” and more “cul-de-sac.” As I was talking, I spotted the bag.

It was lodged in a thicket. Bona fide. A thicket so full of branches, leaves, and assorted suburban debris that I had to stop my voice note and use both hands to extract it.

As I walked back into the house, Target bag in hand, I found myself wondering: what does this mean? Is it a sign from the universe?

And then I remembered something my coach says: sometimes things happen and it’s just data. Just information. And then we move on.

This has stayed with me because it cuts directly against one of my favorite and least helpful habits: assigning meaning too quickly.

Noticing is useful. Pattern recognition is useful. Reflection is useful.

But compulsive meaning-making? That is often just anxiety wearing like a terry-cloth bathrobe or something.

We do this all the time. Someone does not text back, and suddenly it is not just a delayed response — it is evidence about the relationship itself, about whether we were too much. Or not enough. A quiet week at work becomes proof that we are losing momentum. A rejected application becomes a referendum on our talent.

The mind is unfortunately extremely efficient at this. It does not merely observe. It narrates.

And often, it narrates badly.

Sometimes the unanswered email means they are busy. Sometimes the low-engagement post means the algorithm did its weird little thing. Sometimes the interview process stalls because the company is disorganized. Sometimes the plastic bag is just… a plastic bag.

What if, instead of rushing to interpret, we paused?

What if we asked: is this a fact, or is this a story I’m layering on top of the fact?

This is part of the work, I think — in coaching, in adulthood, in all of it. Learning how to stay close to what is true without immediately building a whole psychological escape room around it.

Sometimes things mean something. Sometimes they are worth examining. And sometimes they are just data.

The trick is knowing the difference.