I'm overstimulated, which is a writer's worst nightmare. My thoughts have the zoomies, making them hard to catch or pinpoint. I feel overwhelmed by the vastness of human life. I've met so many new people this week at my new job. And I've seen even more people there that I haven't met. I keep thinking of how my grandma is driving across the country with my aunt and uncle. How people who don't know her will see her and only see an old woman, see her frailty. But that is just her body, that is not who she is. She may be an old woman now, but she was also once a little girl exploring the beaches of Lake Michigan with her best friends and neighbors Rae and Johnny. She was once a girl sitting on her older sister's stack of records in the basement while listening to the record player. She was once my grandpa's high school sweetheart. She was once a girlfriend left behind as my grandpa went to war in Korea. She once, newly married, and never having traveled out of her small town, moved with my grandpa to an Air Force Base in South Dakota where she gave birth to my mother far away from her family and friends. She was once the mother of five young children, raising them mostly on her own. She is a woman who lived through the death of her teenage son. She is a strong woman who lived with and loved an alcoholic man. She was a woman known to be vivacious and full of life, which if you look close enough, you'll see she still is. She is a woman who once filled the halls of her church with art and posters she created and hand-drew on her own. She is a woman who raised strong and fierce children into even stronger and fiercer adults. She is a woman who helped raise her grandchildren, telling them stories, singing them songs, teaching them art, and capturing their imaginations. She may be an old woman now, but she is still all these things. As I've met and seen so many new people at my new job this week, I've been struck again by how each of us has a story, each of us is more than what we seem on the surface. If we urge one another not to judge books by their covers, how much more should we not judge people by theirs? We all love and are loved; we all have people who see us for who we are. We all are more than the sum of our parts. It's shockingly easy to forget this, to merely see people as annoyances, or in our way. We can become so engrossed in our own lives, we forget everyone else is also experiencing life in different, yet very similar, ways. I, for one, am working on remembering.