Nigeria, Feb. 26 -- Life has a stubborn habit of defying neat arithmetic. It refuses to balance according to our tidy assumptions or reward our carefully constructed expectations. We like to believe that patterns will hold, that roles will remain intact, that the teacher will always teach and the healer will always heal. And when those patterns crack, the shock travels faster than the news itself. It is this instinctive trust in social order that makes certain headlines explode while others barely whisper.

As a child, I began to notice this strange mathematics of expectation. Some people could do almost anything publicly and it passed as normal. Others could merely hint at the same behavior and it became spectacle. A young man walking d...