Carried: Calcification (Deposits of calcium in the body)

Standards that no longer fit the situation are held to with more force precisely because the situation has outgrown them. The rigidity is a security arrangement: with the ground unreliable, the old procedure is the only thing that reads as safe, even where it produces the defeat it was meant to prevent. It comes from a regimented, perfectionist upbringing, or from having been the steady one in a household that could not steady itself; what the shape asks for is one rule tested against the present instead of the past.

My rules stopped working years ago and I follow them harder than ever.

Procrustes, who kept one bed and altered every guest to match it. The form implies a task: to measure the bed against the traveller for once, rather than the reverse.