High fit

Brightness controls whether someone leans toward the hopeful or the dark read of a situation. After her divorce, Christy Hawkins had every reason to focus on the worst-case version of putting herself out there again — rejection, humiliation, a repeat of that eighth-grade phone call. Instead, she shifted her lens: she noticed she no longer had the perm, no longer wore the thick glasses, and had survived far worse. She moved from dreading dating to deciding her odds were actually pretty good.