Something opened for me this week, and it traces back to a Girl Scout camp when I was twelve — a small moment that taught me what cheaters have to teach us all. A situation in front of me at 3D raised a question about fairness. Held at 5D, that same question revealed something I had never considered: rule breakers may be doing us a favor. What a concept. 

A Breath-Holding Contest and the First Rule I Questioned

I loved the water. Swimming has always mattered to me, and even at twelve I was strong at it — strong enough that when the coaches announced a breath-holding contest, I knew I would win. I had the deepest breath in the group. I expected to take it. 

Two girls down from me, another girl turned her head to the side, took a breath, and returned her face to the water. She held her breath longer than anyone — for reasons that were obvious to me, if to no one else. 

Something in that contest stuck in my stomach (and in my memory!), even then. I kept the observation to myself. Who would have believed a twelve-year-old making that claim? And I knew that speaking up would have turned into a spectacle — I would have worn the label of poor sport for the rest of camp. So, I stayed quiet. I could have asked for a rematch. Today, I would. 

That memory returned to me this week in a far more grown-up version of the same puzzle. 

Two Conversation Styles, One One-Sided Rule

A friend and I ran into a disagreement about talking styles, and underneath it was a rule she held for me that she never held for herself. My style, with people I trust, is repartee — quick, overlapping, a back-and-forth where we finish each other's sentences and build on what the other just said. I have always taken that as participating. When someone jumps in on me mid-thought, I read it as engagement, not violation. I thought this was the way everyone talked. This is why I was confused, and felt unfairly judged, because my friend was looking for something else: long, uninterrupted stretches where she could speak her piece from beginning to end while I held my responses until she finished. 

I did not see, until then, that these are two distinct styles of interaction. Sharing this with a good friend, he said, "Oh, my wife and I have this conversation all the time." He explained that she grew up on the East Coast and he on the West in America. People from her part of the country, he said, tend toward this quicker, layered way of speaking, while he, raised in California, was used to longer, unhurried exchanges where one voice finishes before the next begins. That was a real aha for me. I had no idea this was a thing, a named recognized difference — I thought it was just us. 

When the Rule Only Runs One Way

In my girlfriend's case, she felt free to interrupt me any time, after all, I never stopped her and I never minded. But the freedom did not run in both directions. That’s what caught me by surprise! When I interrupted her, I was called out, and underneath that, I started to feel a sense that something here was not fair. The rule only worked one way: she was free to step into my sentences whenever she liked, and I was expected to wait for mine. 

I had assumed the rule moved both directions. Indeed, I hoped it would. Actually, I expected it. Once my gentleman friend explained the difference in styles, I looked closer, and saw the real shape of it: two people, one shared conversation, and an authentic way of speaking that was dramatically different than what I knew!  

And, surprisingly, that only counted one way. That is the moment this whole reflection opened for me, because it is the same shape as the girl turning her head to breathe. A rule existed. One person kept it. In this case, both persons had “rules” but neither knew of the other’s rules! This matters, because it shows how easily we are taught to follow the rule in front of us, when what we are meant to follow is the wisdom already inside us — the higher self that sees what the bigger picture.  

Once I saw the pattern, I could not stop finding it. We are trained early to hold the line, to choose what is safe, to stay inside the boundary that keeps us welcome. Women learn this through makeup and hairstyles, through a narrow range of what counts as presentable. Men carry their own version of the same standard, quietly. The whole arrangement can feel like a rigged game — one that calls for a real challenge rather than quiet compliance. 

The Cheater's History Calls Visionaries

This is part of what cheaters have to teach us, and I want to widen the word for a moment... because history holds many people who broke an implied rule and are remembered as visionaries rather than cheaters at all. 

• Roger Bannister (1954): Broke the "impossible" four-minute mile, proving the barrier was a belief, not a physical limit.
• Ignaz Semmelweis: Introduced handwashing and cut maternal deaths from 18% to 2% — rejected by the establishment before germ theory caught up.
• Alfred Wegener: Proposed the continents once fit together and drifted apart — dismissed for decades until the ocean floor confirmed it.

Roger Bannister was an Intern, a medical doctor who didn’t believe the conventional wisdom that the heart would burst, if a man ran faster. This four-minute mile was a wall the human body could not cross according to the prevailing experts. Medical science of his era treated it as settled fact, a number etched into the sport as though it were physics rather than misguided information or ignorance.  

Yet, in 1954, Bannister ran the mile in three minutes and fifty-nine point four seconds, and the limit turned out to be just a story that wasn’t true. Within two months, another runner, much better trained than Banister beat his time The barrier was never physical. It was a rule the professionals had been keeping without ever testing it. 

Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that midwives had fewer maternal death’s than doctors delivering babies! He noticed the doctors did not wash their hands between autopsy’s and delivering babies. He theorized there was a connection between a cadaver’s particles and life itself. Because he instituted strict hand washing – in his clinics he lost far fewer mothers to fever than doctors who did not, (doctors lost 18% of their patients, while in his clinic the number dropped to 2%)and he said so plainly to the medical establishment. They found the idea beneath their consideration. He couldn’t prove it scientifically; germ theory hadn’t been scientifically known at that time. He was pushed out of his position in the clinic and died before germ theory caught up to what he had already seen with his own eyes. 

Alfred Wegener looked at the coastlines of Africa and South America and proposed that the continents had once fit together and drifted apart, an idea the geological community dismissed for decades until the ocean floor itself confirmed it. Each of them looked at a belief everyone else was keeping, found wisdom beyond it, and trusted what they had personally observed over what the establishment had agreed to believe. 

Trusting What You See With Your Own Eyes

This is the heart of what cheaters have to teach us. That is the deeper teaching. Held at 5D, a cheater in the ordinary sense wants to win more than they want to fit inside the rule. That willingness is the example. But the people history later calls visionaries wanted something more specific: they wanted the truth of their own observation more than they wanted the comfort of the group's agreement. Both are willing to stand apart from the crowd. There is difference of course.  

Bannister crossing the line at three fifty-nine returns to me. Semmelweis, dying before he was believed, returns to me too. Every one of these carries the same question: when a rule asks something of you that it does not ask of everyone else in the room, is it a rule at all — or is it simply the room, telling you how to behave? 

A boundary that runs in only one direction is not an agreement. This is what cheaters have to teach us: the courage to notice when a rule runs only one way. It is control, dressed as etiquette. And this is why rule breakers matter to what comes next for all of us: they are the ones willing to test the wall before anyone has proven it can fall. It is their willingness to test “accepted norms” that invites us to do the same. 

I think of the girl at camp, turning her head for that quick breath, and of the twelve-year-old me who saw it and said nothing. That, in the end, is what cheaters have to teach us. I think of the version of me now who would ask for the rematch without pointing fingers. The lesson was never about catching the girl who cheated. It was about learning to trust what I had seen with my own eyes, even when no one else in the room was prepared to see it with me. That trust — quiet, personal, unprovable to anyone but yourself — is the same instrument Bannister ran with, that Semmelweis argued with, that Wegener studied the coastlines with. It is available to you the next time a rule, a boundary or conventional wisdom asks something of you that it does not ask of everyone else. Notice it. Name it, if only to yourself. And then decide, the way the water always taught me to decide: That is what cheaters have to teach us: trust what you know, speak your truth, without blaming others.