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A kid once told me a story on a bus.

He was maybe nine, maybe ten, sitting next to me on a packed local ride in July, the kind of afternoon that melts plastic. I'd given him a piece of gum and now apparently I was his therapist. He told me he didn't like his cousin. His cousin killed a spider in the bathroom that morning. "It was just sitting there. Not doing anything," he said, chewing furiously. "It was being normal. And she called it creepy and squashed it with a sandal."

Then he shrugged like this was just something that happens. Which, of course, it is.

That's the thing about normal. You can be sitting still. You can be doing what you've always done. And someone else walks in and screams and decides you shouldn't be alive anymore.

That's what stuck with me, long after the gum had lost its flavor.

Normal is an illusion. What's normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.

It's a quote from The Addams Family of all things, originally said by Morticia. People use it to sound edgy on social media, usually with a GIF. But the deeper you sit with it, the more it unravels. Because it's not really about spiders. And it's definitely not about flies.

It's about us. Living in a world where everyone's just trying to spin their own web, while someone else is already panicking in it.

We are all spiders to someone.

Some cultures revere spiders. In West African mythology, there's Anansi — the trickster god. Not evil, not heroic, just… clever. He spins stories the way a spider spins a web. In many Native American cultures, Spider Woman is a creator figure. She brought the world into being by weaving it into form.

Meanwhile in the average Western home, a spider is something you trap in a glass and release politely outside (if you're nice) or annihilate with bug spray and a scream (if you're not).

Same creature. Completely different meaning.

If you've ever come across the term "cultural relativism," you probably know it's the idea that one culture's norms and values should be understood within their own context, not judged by the standards of another. Makes sense, right? But in practice, people suck at this. They go to someone else's house and immediately decide it's weird that they sit on the floor, or eat with their hands, or pray five times a day.

Even scientists who are obviously trained to "objectively observe" — fall into it. In 19th century Europe, phrenology (measuring skull shapes to determine intelligence) was considered normal science. It was published. It had charts. It justified slavery and colonialism. Later, we recognized it as pseudoscientific racism. But back then? It felt normal.

See the problem?

What we accept as "normal" is almost always just what we're used to. Not what's true or what's good. Just what feels familiar.

Look at the history of medicine if you want chaos disguised as normal.

Lobotomies were once mainstream treatment for mental illness. You know — ice picks through the eye socket. It won someone a Nobel Prize. That was considered a scientific breakthrough. And then decades later we look back and say, oh no, that was clearly barbaric.

The patients didn't change. The symptoms didn't change. What changed was the collective idea of what treatment should look like.

Or take childbirth. In ancient Egypt, women squatted on bricks. In Victorian England, they laid flat in agony because male doctors thought it looked more "dignified." In modern hospitals, they're hooked up to machines and told when to push.

Each of those practices in its time, was called normal.

And each one, from someone else's point of view — the spider or the fly — looked like complete madness.

Even nature plays this game.

There's a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii — it lives in cat guts but spreads through infected mice. What it does is wild. It gets into a mouse's brain and rewires it. Makes it attracted to the smell of cat urine. The mouse, acting on what it thinks is normal curiosity goes toward the predator. The cat eats it. The parasite completes its life cycle.

Now… imagine you're the mouse. Everything feels normal. You're just following a scent. You're just doing what feels natural. But what's really happening is a massive disaster in slow motion.

This is biology but again also a metaphor. We are all being programmed by something — culture, trauma, religion, algorithms anything you can think of. Most of the time we think our reactions are normal. We rarely ask who or what trained those reactions in the first place.

People will fight to the death for what feels normal.

That's one of the worst things about humans. The moment someone lives differently — eats differently, dresses differently, marries differently, thinks differently — it's seen as a threat. Not because it is a threat. But it makes people question their own web.

If you have built your whole sense of self on a certain version of masculinity or motherhood or morality — and someone comes along thriving without any of those things — suddenly it feels like chaos. And instead of expanding your definition of "okay" you just label them a fly in your web. You shake the strands. You try to chase them out.

And if you have power? You squash.

Think about it. Empires were built on this logic. Colonizers didn't just want land. They wanted people to abandon their own customs and adopt "civilized" behavior — usually meaning Christianity, trousers, and table manners.

And don't pretend it's over. Look around. Everyone's still trying to force everyone else to behave more normally.

"Act professional"

"Dress appropriately"

"Talk like this"

"Eat like that"

There's an unspoken rulebook everywhere you look — and it changes depending on where you are, what skin you're in, who you love, how you speak.

All it takes is one deviation and you become a glitch in someone else's matrix. A fly.

And sometimes you're the spider.

Sometimes your routine, your language, your tone — the way you were raised, the things you don't even question — are terrifying to someone else.

There's a moment in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, where a human ambassador visits a planet where people don't have fixed genders. He's constantly misstepping, mislabeling, misunderstanding. If you are thinking if anyone's being difficult there? No but because he can't process a culture so different from his own.

He's not malicious. But he is a spider. Just by existing, he disrupts their order. And that's the part we don't like to admit. Sometimes our way of being is the chaos in someone else's story.

And… sometimes we don't mean to trap anybody. But they get caught anyway.

It's tempting to say the solution is empathy. And yeah, maybe that's part of it. But people treat empathy like a magic spell. Like if you just imagine hard enough what someone else is going through, everything will be fine.

Except… you can't imagine what you've never seen. Can you? You can't empathize with what your nervous system sees as dangerous. The fly isn't going to suddenly stop panicking because the spider seems chill.

So maybe the better question to ask yourself- what web am I living in? And who's getting caught in it?

Because we all live in systems. Political, cultural, economic. You can't see most of them — unless you try. And even then you only see the strands when they snap.

This isn't a call to burn down every system. Nah it's not a manifesto. It's just a reminder that normal is often just the name we give to the systems that benefit us. And chaos is what we call anything that threatens them.

But the truth is, they're the same thing. From different angles.

The spider's architecture is the fly's panic attack.

The doctor's innovation is the patient's trauma.

The mouse's instinct is the parasite's victory.

The cousin's quick reflex is the spider's end.

That kid on the bus didn't mean to be profound. He was just chewing gum and telling the truth.

I think about him sometimes. He didn't know the quote, or understood systems, or cared about relativism or colonialism or neuroscience. He didn't. He just saw something others didn't — that being normal is a lousy defense when someone else has already decided you're the problem.

And still. The web keeps getting spun. The flies keep getting caught. And we all keep pretending we're not part of it.

But we are.

We're all in someone else's web. Just pulling our own threads. And no one — not the spider not the fly is ever totally safe.