A Page in a Chapter

Everyone Is Somewhere in the Middle of Something

What We Don’t Know

I often wonder if other people do what I do when they are around strangers. Study them. Watch the way they move through a room. Try to read what the surface is not saying. Everyone has a story and when you encounter someone you rarely know what chapter they are on or what page within that chapter brought them to this particular moment. What we don’t know is the most important thing most people never think about.

People are fascinating by nature. The more differences we try to point out the more clearly the similarities emerge underneath them. We are far more alike in our struggles than we are different in our details. But the details are what the hierarchy uses to sort us and so we have learned to lead with the details and bury the struggles where nobody can use them against us.

There is no blueprint for how to do life, although society will spend considerable energy trying to convince you there is. When you step back and look at how we function as a society the whole structure becomes visible. It is dictated by rules of etiquette and decorum calibrated to the level of hierarchy a person has been able to achieve or has been born into. And here is the part nobody says out loud: every category within every level of that hierarchy has its own smaller hierarchy running inside it. A hierarchy within a hierarchy within a hierarchy. People pretend not to see them. But they are always there. And everyone is always navigating at least three of them simultaneously.

What is rarely discussed is where we first learned to navigate them.

The First Teacher

Last weekend we celebrated Mother’s Day. A day dedicated to mothers everywhere, to their love, their care, their selfless labor, their role as the birthers of future societies. Mothers are held in high regard across nearly every species and culture because what they do is foundational in the most literal sense. They create and maintain the temperature of a household. They provide more things than can be named in a single essay. But one of the most significant things a mother does is this: she is every child’s first teacher of everything.

The physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional state of a mother while a baby is in utero shapes how that child will respond to the world once born. Before a single word has been spoken. Before a rule has been stated. Before the child has any conscious framework for understanding the environment they have entered. The body already knows. It has been listening. It has been learning.

Which means the hierarchy is not something we encounter later in life and decide whether to accept. It is something many of us absorbed before we had language to describe it. Mothers, often without knowing it, are the first teachers of the very systems that will later limit or liberate their children depending on which side of the hierarchy they were born into.

The Chapter Before You

Do you ever wonder who your mother was before you were a thought?

Not your mother as a role. Not your mother as a function. But the woman who existed before you arrived and changed the trajectory of her life, for better or worse, by simply being born. Did you interrupt her story or enhance it? Were you her answered prayer or a reminder of what could have, should have, would have been? Did she pour herself into you from fullness or from a place that was already running low?

Every person born started a new chapter in a woman’s life. And every chapter begins mid-sentence, in the middle of something already in progress. When we meet people we never know what chapter they are currently living. We do not know how many chapters came before. We do not know how many times they had to start a new page because the previous one became unlivable. We do not know if their choices were truly their own or if they were handed a short list of options and told to choose from that and call it freedom.

Yet we make assumptions. Constantly. About what someone should have accomplished by a certain age. About what their circumstances say about their character. About what their current chapter means about all the ones that came before. We meet people at page 47 and review the whole book based on the paragraph in front of us.

None of us get to pause. Life moves forward for everyone, everywhere, all at once. The woman who raised you was also living her own story, turning her own pages, navigating her own hierarchy, passing down what she was taught because it was the only curriculum available to her. The same is true of the woman who raised her. And the woman before that.

What We Carry Without Knowing

We are shaped by every experience and taught the hierarchy from the womb. That is not a metaphor. That is a transmission. Long before we are old enough to question what we have been given we are already fluent in it. We know which rooms we are welcome in and which ones require a performance. We know what parts of ourselves to lead with and which ones to keep in reserve. We know the rules even when nobody stated them directly because the body keeps the score of every environment it has ever lived inside.

This is why meeting a person at any single point in their story and drawing conclusions from that moment alone is one of the most common and most costly mistakes we make as human beings. The page you are reading is not the book. The chapter you encountered is not the life. And the hierarchy that shaped them, the one they are still navigating, the one they may be passing on without realizing it, began long before the moment your paths crossed.

The next time you find yourself forming an opinion about where someone is and where they should be, try asking a different question instead. Not what chapter should they be on by now. But what chapters did they have to survive to get here. And what did those chapters teach them about which parts of themselves were safe to bring into the world and which ones needed to stay hidden just to make it through.

That question changes everything about how you read the room. And the room, it turns out, has always been reading you back.

The Chapter I Am In

I don’t know what to call this chapter of my own life yet. What I do know is that I am committed to completing it honestly before I move on to the next one. Every once in a while I go back and read some of my previous chapters and I think I am getting close to a place in my story where I no longer want to rip out the difficult pages. I understand now that ripping them out would change the way my character continues to develop. The hard pages are not mistakes to be removed. They are evidence of a person still in the process of becoming. Hopefully the section containing all the major obstacles is behind me. But even if it is not, I know how to keep reading.

And that reflection always brings me back to the same curiosity I started with: where are the people around me in their stories? What chapter are they navigating and what page did I enter in that chapter of their life? The hierarchy shapes the experience but it does not determine the story. What intrigues me most is watching how people navigate it, the ones who acknowledge it and the ones who don’t, the ones still trying to follow the blueprint they were handed and the ones quietly writing their own.

I am intrigued and sometimes genuinely surprised when I learn about previous chapters in the lives of people I thought I already understood. I wish I could sit with some of them for days just to listen. People are truly fascinating. The lessons available in someone else’s lived story are often richer than anything fiction could construct. Each story is unique, full of characters I have never encountered but can sometimes envision, or recognize a version of someone I have met somewhere along the way.

Everyone you meet is somewhere in the middle of something. The least we can do is remember that before we decide we have read enough to know how their story goes.

Vee