Nature & Nurture

This year has been one of the most transforming years of my life so far, in all of my 25 year old existence. And that is largely because of one person. A person that I happened to meet and whom I now can't imagine my life without. This post is not going to be a post about how much I love her. I'll save that for another time. What I'm reflecting on is how the relationship has changed me and how I perceive the world. I've changed, love has the power to do that. When you cross paths with a person who comes from a fundamentally different background than you - that shit is eye-opening. And It makes me wonder, what would I have been like if I had a different upbringing?

As babies and children we are blank canvases. Our frames are the genetic material that we are made out of, a big part of which we share with our fellow humans. Inside the frame however, the content that shows up within it - it can take on all sorts of appearances. It's nature and nurture - that's what makes us US. I am who I am today because of the accumulation of everything that has ever happened as well as not happened to me. Every positive experience, every negative experience. The times I was held and comforted. Everything I received and took for granted because I didn't know better. Everything I didn't receive and didn't know I needed. This goes for the people who raised me as well - they too are the result of prior life experiences and it affects how they show up in the world today. There's an inherent vulnerability we share as humans.

A person plays many different roles in his or her life; child, friend, boyfriend/girlfriend, parent. Grandparent. Before my parents were my parents they were just two young people who I must assume didn't know much more than I do at this very moment. And yet, to a child the parent might as well be god himself. The speaker of truth.

I think it's part of becoming an adult to realize that your parents are just people. That can be quite an uncomfortable realization to have, anxiety-inducing even. From the perspective I have now I can empathize with my parents. I don't have children of my own yet, but I don't need that to understand that having children is hard work. Hard as in the hardest job I'll probably ever have. So yeah, I can empathize with my parents. Yet I can't help but wonder what they would have been like had things been different for them in their lives prior to me being born. Would there have been less struggle? Would there have been a happier atmosphere in the house I grew up? Would they have been able to show up for me in the ways I needed during some really tough years, and would I have been able to articulate those needs?

The sad truth is that I probably wouldn't have been born in the first place, even if they got together in this hypothetical other dimension I'm thinking of. Life is a lottery. And all of us who are alive are the ones who happened to be selected. In that sense we are all winners. Even though some things in my life are fucked up, I am alive. I am a person who exists, when i might as well not have. Maybe that should be my new mantra: "I exist". I don't know if that sounds depressing, I think it's quite powerful.