When someone crosses a class line — through education, marriage, professional achievement — they do not simply change economic category; they enter a profound identity negotiation between the world they came from and the world they have entered. The literature of first-generation mobility is full of this vertigo: fluent in the new register but carrying an accent, belonging everywhere enough to function and nowhere enough to rest. The movement is not always progress; it can be a kind of permanent internal exile.
Each step builds on the last.