Seventy Chapters (At Least)
Why life feels harder when we expect it to be shorter.
I have been thinking about chapters lately. Not as a comforting metaphor, but as the way life actually unfolds, unevenly, inconveniently, and without regard for the story we thought we were in.
The thought came to me because my best friend is moving to London. Not forever, but for two years. Temporary, everyone keeps saying, as if temporary things do not leave permanent impressions. As if two years is a footnote when you have a small child who loves her deeply. As if distance does not rearrange the shape of daily life. She and my daughter have a rhythm, a closeness formed quietly through repetition, trust, and time. I imagined years of that rhythm continuing uninterrupted, our weekly afternoon hangs where we paused the world to play with our favorite little girl. The ordinary magic of familiarity, the intimacy of her simply being near. Now this chapter looks different than I thought it would, and the first feeling that surfaced was grief disguised as resistance. Why now, why this, why does it have to change. It felt like something precious was being altered without my consent.
What steadied me was not acceptance but perspective. I zoomed out, not to dismiss the sadness, but to place it correctly. This is a chapter, not the story, and that realization landed because I think we have been miseducated about how many chapters a life contains. We are trained to think in clean arcs, childhood, coming of age, crisis, resolution, wisdom, end. Seven chapters if we are lucky, maybe a sequel if life is generous. That structure teaches us to expect coherence and closure. It tricks us into believing clarity comes quickly, growth is linear, lessons stick the first time, and endings stay ended. Real life refuses that design.
Real life has closer to seventy chapters. Many are short, some are messy, and plenty do not advance the plot at all. There are chapters you thought were endings that turn out to be footnotes, and long stretches that are nothing but maintenance, grief, boredom, rebuilding, and waiting. There are chapters where you think you healed something only to meet it again wearing a different outfit. Chapters where nothing happens except that you survive. Chapters where you realize the character you centered was never the main one. These chapters do not announce their purpose while you are inside them. They simply insist that you keep going.
When we expect seven chapters, every rupture feels catastrophic. A friendship changing feels like collapse rather than transition. A pause feels like regression instead of recalibration. A season of exhaustion feels like failure instead of something deeply human. Zooming out reveals something else entirely. Change is not failure, it is continuation. The problem is not your pace. It is the lie about the length.
Motherhood taught me this faster than anything else. I thought becoming a mother would be a chapter that resolved into confidence, that once I crossed the threshold I would arrive somewhere stable. Instead, motherhood fractured into dozens of chapters almost immediately. Pregnancy, birth, recovery, losing myself, reassembling, joy, rage, awe, guilt, gratitude, boredom, fear. Love that rearranges your nervous system daily. There was a chapter where my body did not feel like mine, another where sleep deprivation distorted everything, another where I mourned my former freedom. None of these chapters canceled the others. They stacked.
The same is true of community. I have lived in the same neighborhood long enough to watch it change, and to change with it. There were chapters where community meant block parties, late nights, and spinning records for people who felt like family. There were chapters where it meant mutual aid, grief, and showing up for funerals. Now it looks like a nanny who has become family, elders who greet my children by name, and corner boys, often reduced to caricature, who stop to say they love us and ask how the kids are doing. If I believed in a short book, I would think I lost something. Instead, I see that the shape changed.
Oh, the many chapters. Sharing Thanksgiving dinners with a Mennonite family that sponsored my own to Canada, learning belonging before I had language for it. Being bullied through elementary, junior high, and high school until anger and rebellion became armor and I learned how to make myself untouchable, or so I thought. Skipping school after 9/11 to avoid the daily hate, then getting in trouble at home because I did not yet know how to explain what I was surviving. Starting my career in television on a lakeside in Toronto, believing proximity to storytelling might help me understand my own. Moving to New York for a modern arranged marriage, trusting tradition and risk at the same time, a bad and necessary chapter. Becoming a DJ and finding freedom for the first time behind the music, realizing movement could be medicine. Living in the Hollywood Hills among characters who mistook closeness for access and tried to extract everything I had to give. Traveling from Hong Kong to Nairobi to Mumbai while deeply depressed and anxious, learning that scenery does not outrun the self. Meeting my best friend in 2018, feeling like I had known him already, and marrying him years later. Becoming a mother twice, the longest-held hope of my life and the chapter that reframed every chapter before it. And I am just getting started. When I zoom out far enough, I can see that none of these chapters were detours. They were the book teaching me endurance.
My friend moving to London hurts. My daughter will ask for her. I will feel the absence in ways I cannot plan for. The relationship will stretch, adapt, soften, strain, and transform. That is not a tragedy. It is a consequence of life moving forward. This chapter will include FaceTime calls across time zones, photos sent late at night, and a child learning that love can travel and return. It will also include me learning, again, that impermanence does not equal loss.
Life is not a neat arc or a tight trilogy. It is a long series of resets, detours, false endings, and quiet rebuilds. Nothing about this moment is wrong. It is just not the conclusion. And it was never supposed to be. Seeing life as seventy chapters instead of seven allows the story to breathe. It frees us from demanding resolution where none was promised.
