A ladder, A brick

I’ve carried this scene in my head for a long time, and the last couple months I’ve been thinking about it again as I’ve once-a-freaking-again been shifting how I move through the world.

I’ve been feeling the discomfort of taking ownership of the role I’ve played in unhealthy dynamics and the ways I’ve contributed to dysfunctional systems—even when my intentions were good. I didn’t intend harm, but I was still part of the system.

The scene looks like this:

A ladder.

A brick.

A long line of people stretching generations back, standing on a ladder, each one holding the next generation above their heads—straining to lift them just a little higher than where they had started.

And moving upward through the line, hand to hand, was a heavy brick.

Pain.

Years earlier, after reading the line “Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it,” I had first imagined the brick.

A long line of people stretching generations back, each one passing it forward.

Pain handed from one set of hands to the next.

Bricks imprinted with:

• Don’t talk about that.

• Stay loyal to the family story.

• Don’t make things uncomfortable.

• Keep moving forward.

Most of these rules were not born of malice, but of survival.

War.

Immigration.

Poverty.

Social constraints.

When people were fighting simply to make it through the day, there often wasn’t space to feel everything.

Passing the brick was the only workable option.

Forward.

Forward.

Forward.

Until someone could finally stop, hold the brick, feel the full weight of it—and put it down.

Later, another image came to me.

A long line of people again, generations deep.

But this time they were standing on a ladder.

Each person holding the next generation—their children—above their heads, straining to place them just a little higher than where they had started.

Parents trying to give their children a better life than they had.

Eventually the two images merged.

The ladder was still there.

The brick was still there too.

Pain moving upward.

Sacrifice lifting upward.

Generation after generation—lifting, passing, straining, hoping.

Until the brick landed with someone who was high enough, safe enough to hold it without passing it on—steady enough to feel it.

Steady enough to allow the system to feel the disruption of a pause.

Risking a break in the rhythm of transmission.

And suddenly I realized:

What a gift it is to feel the pain.

To have enough space in your life to notice it.

Enough safety to hold it.

Enough freedom to take it apart and transform it instead of transmitting it.

Yes, it can feel unfair to receive pain that isn’t yours.

But to be the one who can finally feel it—

to be the one with enough ground beneath your feet to stop the transmission—

that is a strange and profound privilege.

Because the people below you on the ladder were lifting you, too.

I am here with more space and safety because of them.

And what is life, really,

but a gift passed up

and up

and up

through time?