A man says good morning to a neighbor in a doorway and is walked past without a word. Over the days that follow he builds a whole grievance on it — certain he's been snubbed, certain there's a reason — until he learns the truth: the other man was a frightened father who'd barely slept in a fortnight, his small daughter gravely ill, walking past everyone and seeing no one. Nothing was ever done to him. He built the whole of it himself. In this episode we use the Crosshollow tale "The Doorway" to explore a striking piece of psychology: we magnify a harm the moment we believe it was intended, and we're quick to read deliberate malice into what was really just someone lost in their own trouble. It's a conversation about how much of what we carry was never handed to us — and the quiet power of asking, before we take offense, what the other person might be carrying too. The podcast has an accompanying blog: The Doorway - A tale from Crosshollow
