Welcome to
human
Walk the exhibits first, full size, the way a living museum works. Then it becomes yours to build on.
Everything below is drawn from the same idea: conflict is not a thing that happens to you occasionally. It is closer to weather.
Almost all of it is already moving in your body before it reaches your mouth. The DOT Model is the practice of learning to read that while you are standing in it.
The three moves
Three moves and a centre. That is the whole DOT Model.
Deepen.
Go under the story to what is actually happening. Your body first, then the room, then the system you are both standing in.
Orient.
Find where you are in the whole. Not the loudest position, not the most wounded one. The whole.
Transform.
Move what you are protecting into what you are building. Defensive becomes generative.
Part one
How we go inward
Taught by the exhibits themselves, each one full size. Tap the pins under each to learn what it is, where it came from, how it works, and what is being learned from how people actually use it.
Frames of relationship
The Emotion Atlas
A turnable map of the body under pressure. Drag it. Put yourself on it.
A real capture of the tool’s own resting state, pinned with what real visitors have actually clicked on. Full drag-and-turn interaction lives behind the button above.
A three dimensional map of what happens to a person under pressure. The axes are the directions you move when you are afraid (fight and flight, fix and freeze, and a third axis still being built). The points are the states you land in. The pathways are the routes between them.
It started in the backseat of a car on long childhood road trips, watching which sibling ended up grumpy before anyone had said a word out loud. The bodies arranged the conflict first. In grad school the same shape kept showing up: two clinicians describing one client through completely opposite lenses.
Turn it with a drag. Every term is clickable and travels you to where it lives on the site. Lenses stack: which axis you are looking at, which behaviors and archetypes are showing, whether thought bubbles and pathway trails are on.
The four places fear takes you
Most people have a favourite. Many people cycle through all four inside one hard conversation.
None of these makes you a bad person. Each one is a protection system doing exactly what it was built to do. This path does not try to shame you out of a trap. It shows you where the door is.
Fight
Villain, the bully.Fuelled by rage.It costs you this: you become the prosecutor of a story that will not end.
Flight
Victim, the target.Fuelled by terror.It costs you this: you become the one who is always recovering.
Fix
Victor, the hero.Fuelled by judgement.It costs you this: you become the one everyone waits for instead of moves with.
Freeze
Vicar, the bystander.Fuelled by shame.It costs you this: you become the witness who could have helped.
The daily check-in
How’s your human?
The feeling wheel, full size and on its own. Six doorways around a centre, one per pole of the DOT Model.
Opens on every page today as a daily pop-up. Here it stays open on the page, exactly as it opens for real: the wheel first.
Six doorways, one per pole of the DOT Model, with an intensity dial from core to rising to full. This is the identity-bar check-in, the “How’s your human?” pick at the top of the page, not the internal research dashboard.
The first version worked off a fixed lexicon: a table mapping each emoji to a place on the model. If an emoji wasn’t in the table, it got dropped. Then it ran for real, and the flaw showed itself: most of what a community actually uses isn’t in any textbook table, and the emoji people reach for when the standard set doesn’t say the true thing is often the truest signal in the room, not noise around it. So the lexicon flipped, from a gate into a living, community-learned record.
Listen agnostically, speak canonically. Every emoji is recorded as real, including the ones the model doesn’t recognize yet. When you use one it doesn’t know, it asks what it holds for you, never what it “really” means, and the answer sits beside the model’s own frame, never on top of it. Every check-in also plants a seed in your garden, and seeds open the deeper books and layers across the whole site.
Where a feeling lands
The body map
Five real places on the body, five real things this project already knows about them. Tap a pin. Tap “Open the real tool” to try tagging your own.
The pins above are captured facts. The real tool folds this beneath the wheel in one check-in; open it here to actually drop a spot of your own.
A silhouette you tag directly: tap a body word or tap the figure itself to drop a spot for where a feeling actually lives, sized and coloured however it feels.
In 2014, researchers at the University of Turku asked people across five countries where in their body they felt each of twenty emotions. The maps that came back were consistent across cultures: anger in the arms and face, fear quiet in the legs, sadness pulling the periphery inward. This tool is in conversation with that research, not proof of it.
Two axes locate charge in the body. Fight and Flight tend to live in the upper body: the arms, the chest, the face. Fix and Freeze tend to live in the head and the gut. Choose a word (head, jaw, throat, chest, heart, shoulders, arms, hands, stomach, gut, back, hips, legs, whole body), or tap the figure directly. Resize, recolour, or remove any spot by tapping it again.
Seeing each other
The BodyMap Mirror
What you do with the map, together. Ruth: “both, they do different jobs.”
Person A Person B (example marks, not real data)
The marks above are an example, not real data (nobody’s tracking this yet). The real tool: each of you maps alone first, then switches to Overlap to see where you meet.
Two people, side by side, each mapping where one shared moment lives in their own body. Then a switch to Overlap shows where you meet, and where you differ.
Built for a specific moment: two people mid-argument who have enough social capital and relationship investment to want to stay in it together, whose distress is low enough and whose emotional fluency is high enough to step out of their own projections and actually recognize each other. Ruth had been studying dyadic conflict this way for years before building the tool itself, including a collage she made mapping the same idea in 2015.
Each of you maps alone first. Switching to Overlap lays both maps on top of each other. Named elsewhere on the site as Locate, then Co-regulate: the mapping is the locating, and the conversation that follows the overlap is where the actual compassion work happens. Full Atlas opens the same map this whole path is built from.
The four ways through
The way out of a trap is not out. It is into a role.
The charge does not get suppressed. It gets met, named, and pointed somewhere.
From Villain
Challenger.The fight charge becomes the one who challenges for the room instead of against it.
From Victim
Creator.The flight charge becomes the one who makes new room to move in.
From Victor
Coach.The fix charge becomes the one who steadies instead of rescues.
From Vicar
Connector.The freeze charge becomes the one who holds people together.
Four qualities travel alongside all four and belong to none: Trust, Curious, Open and Give. Trust and Curious are decisions. Open and Give are body practices. They pair only with each other.
The turn
You just walked exhibits Ruth built and has been living inside for years. That part is over now. What comes next is not another exhibit to read. It is a blank one, and it is yours.
Start building yoursYou have seen what each instrument is learning. Take the tour to read them together.
Part two
Your own place
Having walked the exhibits, you begin building yours. Share what you want to share. Choose the categories you want to grow around.
The worked example
This is Ruth's own page. Not the template everyone must fill in the same way, a proof that the shape can hold something real.
/about/ruthdiaz/, live today
Listen
Music
Songs that hold what was too heavy to say plainly. Players, words, and room to comment.
Soon
Stories
Short, true pieces still taking shape. A placeholder on purpose, some things are worth waiting for.
Make
Projects
Worlds, builds, and the Land Stewards work, including the Mini-Golf Revival.
Choose what you want to grow around
A short list to start from, or write your own.
Building itself happens at your profile, the garden that already exists behind the scenes. This page is the doorway in, not a second copy of it.
What else is in here
Quests, the library, human stories, and a collection that refuses to punch down.
Earn your way in
Quests
680 tagged, not ranked. Search or filter by feeling, book, or type, and open one in the chamber whenever it fits.
Browse the Quest Codex →Eleven books, one field
The Library
The Emotional Fluency Learning Cloud. Books open as your garden grows, in sequence, because it works in sequence. The Body Atlas book lives here too, its own chapter, not a separate exhibit.
Open the Library →Shared, not solo
Human stories
Not just Ruth's. Short, true pieces from across the village, honest rather than polished. The page is live and intentionally still filling in, proof that some of the most honest parts of a life are the ones still being written.
Read the stories →Curated, with a real test
Gifs, memes, comedians
A collection that does not marginalize or other a crowd. Ruth's own framing. Coming soon.
The honest line
.human is a practice, not treatment. It is not therapy, not diagnosis, and not a crisis service. Nothing here is staffed, and nothing here should be your emergency plan.
If you or someone near you is in danger or thinking about suicide:
- 988 (call or text, US Suicide and Crisis Lifeline)
- Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
- International: findahelpline.com
- Or your local emergency number.
Reaching for one of those is not leaving the path. It is the same move this whole place is about, made at the moment it counts most.
Step in
The first quest is one question asked properly: how is your human today?
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