Main Character Syndrome

You have direct access to one inner life: your own. When another person’s motives or expectations are hidden, your mind fills the gap with the model it has closest at hand. Your beliefs become their presumed beliefs; what you would intend becomes what they must have intended. The substitution is nearly invisible, so an inference generated inside you arrives disguised as knowledge about them. This is Projection operating at the scale of an entire personal narrative: you are not merely central in your experience, but quietly become the template for its supporting cast.

Other people sometimes do share your expectations, and interpreting them through your own experience can produce a correct guess. The model matters when you forget that it was a guess. Its boundary is evidence: resemblance between your interpretation and your own motives does not establish what was happening in someone else’s mind.