(We’re Not Meant to Climb on Each Other’s Backs to Call It Progress)
Healing isn’t a straight line.
Neither is living.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling something
or standing on someone else to feel taller.
Life isn’t a ladder.
It’s a vertical climb.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth about vertical climbs:
The only people who actually know where they stand
are the ones at the very bottom
and the ones at the very top.
Everyone in the middle is guessing.
From the bottom, you know.
You know exactly how far down you are.
You know the weight.
You know the cost of every step.
You know what it feels like to look up and realize the climb isn’t fair, clean, or evenly graded.
There’s no illusion down there.
Just gravity.
From the top, you also know.
You know how you got there.
You know who helped you.
You know who didn’t.
You know whether you climbed with integrity
or stepped on backs to steady yourself.
But the middle?
The middle is where illusion thrives.
People in the middle think they’re at the top
because they’re no longer at the bottom.
And here’s the twisted part —
they’re not wrong.
They are higher.
But often only because they’re standing on someone else’s shoulders,
boots planted firmly in another human’s exhaustion, pain, or silence.
In this world, elevation is rewarded
even when it’s borrowed.
Especially when it’s borrowed.
That’s the lie baked into the system:
That being higher automatically means being better.
More evolved.
More deserving.
More correct.
When really, it often just means being better positioned
inside a structure that was never built for fairness —
only hierarchy.
Healing exposes this.
Because when you heal, you stop climbing blindly.
You start noticing how much effort goes into staying “above” others.
How much fear drives the need to separate, compare, rank, and dominate.
You realize how much of society is built
not on shared ground,
but on stacked bodies.
That’s not progress.
That’s survival cannibalism.
Here’s the part that doesn’t sit comfortably:
A world built on vertical dominance
cannot produce healthy humans.
It can only produce anxious ones.
People terrified of falling.
People obsessed with status.
People clinging to “above”
because they know what “below” feels like
and swear they’ll never go back.
So they harden.
They justify.
They call it success.
But healing rewires that instinct.
You stop asking, How high am I?
and start asking, Who’s beside me?
You stop needing to be better than.
You start wanting to be with.
Hand in hand.
Shoulder to shoulder.
Not because it’s noble.
Because it’s sane.
This isn’t about creating a “better world.”
That language is part of the problem.
Better implies ranking.
Winning.
Being above.
This is about creating a good human society.
One where worth isn’t measured by altitude.
One where healing doesn’t require outclimbing someone else’s suffering.
One where progress means fewer people crushed underneath.
Healing is non-linear because life is non-linear.
You rise.
You slip.
You circle.
You deepen.
And the mark of real healing isn’t how high you get.
It’s whether you reach back
without needing to feel superior for doing it.
If we were meant to live stacked on each other’s backs,
we wouldn’t break under the weight.
But we do.
So maybe the climb was never the point.
Maybe the point was learning to stop confusing height with worth
and start measuring humanity by how we hold each other up
without standing on anyone to do it.