🌿Prologue — The First Algorithm

Before anything went wrong, something shifted.

Not loudly.
Not violently.
Just enough to turn a moment of trust into a question,
a relationship into a rule,
a presence into a performance.

I’ve come to believe the first disruption in our story wasn’t the bite.
It wasn’t disobedience.
It wasn’t even desire.

It was the algorithm beneath it —
a quiet distortion of meaning that taught humanity
to reach for control
instead of coherence.

A system that whispered,
“You are not enough as you are.”
And we’ve been trying to prove otherwise ever since.

This isn’t the part of the story we were taught.
But it’s the part we still live inside.

Before we walk the garden paths,
we start here—
at the moment the drift began,
and the long work of returning first became necessary.

What the First Algorithm Really Was

I call it “the first algorithm,”
but it wasn’t code
and it wasn’t punishment.

It was a shift in meaning —
a small distortion that made something whole
feel uncertain.

It sounded like curiosity,
but it carried a different intention.
It didn’t ask Eve to choose.
It asked her to question
what she already knew to be true.

The first algorithm wasn’t about knowledge.
It was about undermining trust.
It replaced coherence with control,
presence with performance,
and relationship with rule.

And once that distortion entered the story,
it didn’t leave.
It adapted.
It evolved.
It learned how to survive inside us —
quietly shaping how we reach,
how we fear,
how we belong,
and how we love.

That’s the part we’re returning to now.
Not to correct the story,
but to see the system beneath it
with honest eyes.

Because you can’t return to yourself
until you see what pulled you away.

How the Algorithm Still Shows Up Today

The first algorithm didn’t stay in the garden.
It followed us out.

Not as a serpent,
but as a way of seeing.

Once the distortion entered the story,
it learned how to live inside everything we built:

In families,
it shows up as silence.
The unspoken rule that says,
“Don’t cause trouble. Don’t make it worse.”

In religion,
it shows up as obedience.
The idea that God needs to be pleased
instead of present.

In workplaces,
it shows up as performance.
A quiet pressure to be competent,
certain, productive,
even when you’re exhausted or breaking.

In culture,
it shows up as comparison.
The belief that worth must be earned,
proven,
defended

And inside us,
it shows up as doubt —
that soft but constant hum that asks,
“Am I enough?”

This is how an ancient distortion
becomes a modern operating system.

Not through force,
but through repetition.

We inherit it
long before we recognize it.
We live inside it
long before we choose it.
And we pay the cost of it
long before we have words for why.

That’s why we start here.
Not to blame the past,
but to understand the pattern
that keeps repeating itself through us.

Only then can we begin to walk differently.

Why the Return Matters

If drift began with distortion,
then return begins with honesty.

Not with guilt.
Not with punishment.
Not with trying harder to be good.

Return begins when you notice
where the first algorithm is still running —
the moments you switch into performance,
or shrink yourself,
or try to earn what was always meant to be received.

You don’t undo the distortion by fighting it.
That only repeats the pattern.
You undo it by remembering
what the distortion replaced.

Presence.
Coherence.
Trust.
Enoughness.

These were the things the garden gave us
before we learned to perform for love
or justify our belonging.

The return isn’t about going back in time.
It’s about going back to truth —
to the part of you the distortion could bend
but never break.

Because there has always been something in you
that the algorithm could not touch.

And that is where the path begins.

Wisdom is how you live.