Posture: The Stories Our Bodies Tell

I was walking one evening when I saw her.

She had just stepped out of the supermarket inside our compound. One of those unremarkable moments, people coming and going, nothing you would usually stop to notice. She was some distance away. I couldn’t see her face. Not her features, not even clearly what she was carrying. She was wearing a T-shirt and track pants. The most neutral, global uniform you could think of.

And yet, almost immediately, I found myself thinking she looks Indian. Or at least Southeast Asian.

I noticed the thought as it arrived, because there was nothing visible to base it on. No clothing marker, no cultural signal, nothing that would place her in any obvious way. Just a woman, at a distance, carrying groceries.

I walked closer. I was right. I didn’t know her by sight. She was a stranger.

That stayed with me longer than it should have. Not because I had guessed correctly. That part was almost beside the point. What stayed was the question underneath it. What had I seen, from that distance, with so little information? It took me a while to find the word for it.

Posture, maybe. Though that doesn’t quite cover it.

It was something in the way she occupied space. Or more precisely, the way she didn’t quite occupy all of it. The way her arms stayed close to her body. The way her stride was contained, not tentative exactly, but measured. The way she seemed aware of the space around her, adjusting slightly even when there was no one immediately in her way. It wasn’t dramatic. You wouldn’t consciously register it if you weren’t looking.

But I was looking. And I recognised it. Because I have seen it before. In others. In myself.

The slight adjustment when someone walks too close. The instinct to move inwards rather than hold your ground. The way you navigate space without quite claiming it. The pre-emptive awareness that arrives before any decision. Don’t take up too much room, don’t draw unnecessary attention, move through rather than across. It doesn’t feel like instruction in the moment. It feels like how you walk.

The body learns to adjust so well that it stops asking whether it needed to. And after a while, it doesn’t feel like something being done to you. It feels like who you are.

I have also seen the opposite. People who move through the same space without that negotiation. The stride is longer. The arms move freely. There is no quiet calculation of how much space is acceptable to take. Not because they are more confident. Because they were never taught to question their right to be there. The space was simply available, and the body learned that too, just as thoroughly, just as quietly.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

These are not things anyone sits you down and explains. They arrive in smaller ways. Sit properly. Don’t sprawl. Be mindful. Don’t attract attention. It sounds like etiquette. It is etiquette. It is also something that gets repeated often enough that the body eventually takes it over and carries it forward without being asked. It settles in. It becomes gait. It becomes the instinctive negotiation of space that happens before you have even registered there is a decision to make.

I wonder, sometimes, whether what I recognised in that woman was her nationality at all. Or something more specific than that. A body that had learned the same things mine had. That was what I recognised.

In a different home, a different language, a different set of rooms, but the same essential instruction. Be aware of yourself. Make room. Don’t assume the space is yours. That is a particular thing to carry. And apparently, it is visible from a distance. Though I’ll also say this, because I think it matters. I don’t entirely know whether that recognition was insight. Or bias wearing the language of experience. Whether I saw something real, or whether I found what I was already inclined to see. That question doesn’t have a clean answer. I’m keeping it anyway.

By the time I reached her, it didn’t matter where she was from. I had already recognised something else.

I’m just not entirely sure what that says.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.