Book 6 / Musings of a Recovering Executive · Available now
What happens when the workplace you once trusted becomes the place where you begin to question yourself?
By Lynn Cirillo
A conversation leaves you confused. Priorities change, but the earlier instructions disappear from the story. You begin rehearsing what to say, working harder to avoid criticism, or asking whether you have become too sensitive. Sometimes the hardest part is finding words for what you have been noticing.
In You’re Not Imagining It, Lynn Cirillo examines the behaviors, workplace patterns, and organizational conditions that can erode confidence, trust, and your sense of self. Bullying, gaslighting, manipulation, shifting expectations, and failed accountability become subjects for careful observation—not reasons to assume you already know someone’s motives.
Across twenty chapters and four acts, the sixth and final book in the series moves from noticing behavior to understanding patterns, considering your choices, and reclaiming the parts of yourself that survival may have pushed aside. It makes room for ordinary human mistakes, meaningful repair, and the realities that make staying or leaving more complicated than a simple instruction.
Buy on AmazonInside the book
Each act asks a different question. Together, they offer a way to examine your experience without letting confusion, fear, or someone else’s explanation make every decision for you.
Act I · Behavior: Notice
The opening chapters explore subtle beginnings, changing rules, and behaviors we learn to excuse. They distinguish difficult feedback and human mistakes from harmful conduct, and ask what accountability and repair look like. You begin separating what someone said or did from what you believe it meant.
Act II · Pattern: Understand
Repeated contradictions, changing stories, and attacks on credibility deserve a closer look. This act examines how silence, favoritism, incentives, and power can enable harm; why capable people begin to struggle; and how the effects travel beyond the workplace. Neurodivergent experiences are considered without making someone’s wiring a reason to dismiss their observations.
Act III · Impact: Choose
Fear, documentation, speaking up, personal accountability, and decisions about staying or leaving come into focus. The book considers income, health, family, career, support, and boundaries. It asks what belongs to you to examine or repair—and what responsibility you may be accepting for someone else’s choices.
Act IV · Recovery: Reclaim
Leaving an environment does not always end the habits it taught you. The final act explores the difference between present-day breadcrumbs and echoes of earlier experiences, rebuilding self-trust, and releasing defenses that no longer help. Recovery becomes an ongoing practice of choosing what to carry forward, with room to learn, change your mind, and remain human.
Who it’s for
You may still be in the environment, be weighing a next step, or have left and discovered that some of its expectations followed you home.
What you can take from it
Chapters pair the discussion with a workplace scenario, an exercise, reflection questions, a Grounding, and a Musing. The recurring experiences of Jordan, Alex, and Casey bring abstract patterns into everyday conversations and decisions. The practical sections invite you to apply what you notice to your own life.
In “Document the Facts, Not the Fear,” you practice keeping a simple, sustainable record: what happened, when, who was there, what can be verified, the impact, and what remains uncertain. Bullet points and short notes count. The point is to support understanding and decisions without turning the experience into a second full-time job.
In “Learning to Trust Yourself Again,” a small self-trust inventory asks where you seek reassurance, which boundaries you could maintain, and what information would help you decide. You explore the difference between reflection that leaves room to learn and self-interrogation that starts by assuming you were the problem.
Throughout the book, you return to the distinction between a breadcrumb and an echo: what the present is showing you, and what a previous environment may be bringing into the moment. Both deserve attention. Groundings offer a pause; reflections and musings make space to reconsider the stories you have been carrying.
The book’s focus is discernment: recognizing behavior, examining context and patterns, and making informed choices. You do not need to diagnose another person, establish their motives, or reach perfect certainty to begin taking your experience seriously.
“You do not need someone else’s agreement to take your own experience seriously.”
LYNN CIRILLOIn Closing · You Were Never the Problem to Solve
You’re Not Imagining It
Begin with what you notice. Make room for what you can learn. Decide what you want to carry forward.
Buy on AmazonThe complete six-book series
From recognizing a breaking point to reinvention, boundaries, identity, neurodiversity, and reclaiming yourself after an unhealthy environment, each book offers a different way into the questions that matter to you.