Sometimes I get so caught up in my story. I’m writing my own path every day and it’s so easy to get invested in my pages, wrapped up in my problems. I’m the narrator, the main character, the lead writer, so it’s natural to be focused on my own plot more than others.

Sometimes I get so lost in my own drama, my own twists and turns that I forget what’s all around me. I forget that my story is only a fragment of the whole. I forget that my little segment is only a chapter in this gigantic book we’re living and reading and writing every single day.

And even though my story feels like the most important one, there are thousands and millions of others that shape mine, build mine, and break mine in important ways.

I am not the center. I am not the most important piece.

And when I stop for a moment and look outside myself, I can see this. I can see how my mother’s story has edited itself into my own. How, because of her decisions, my life has now been shaped. Or my sister’s whose journey is interwoven with mine. Or the boy I loved and lost, who has written a future for me and someone else, maybe with whom I haven’t even imagined yet.

These stories are connected to mine, but there are so many more. There are friends. There are strangers. There are people I walk by in passing, whom I might not even say a word to, but we exchange a smile and thus the course of their chapter changes.

I don’t know how all our pages are written or constructed together, but I know that I must remember my story is not the only one. And mine is not the only one impacted, changed, or rewritten based on a circumstance or even based on my own editing.

We are all connected to a larger story, one with turns and twists and high moments and low moments. And as I continue to write mine, I will remember this: I am not alone.