Variable not working across slides

Thank you, everyone! What ended up working was getting rid of the "visited" states and creating a new one that I named "visited 2." I created boxes that sit on top of the buttons and make them look disabled (because the disabled built-in state does not work with the variables). I created another trigger that has these boxes change to hidden when the state of the previous button is "visited 2," with the condition that the user must visit the previous sections conclusion before this happens. To do this, I created a T/F variable for everyone conclusion slide with the default "false." I created a trigger that has this variable change to "true" when the timeline starts on that conclusion page. This made everything work!