byChrisWhite – 2021

I would imagine that some folks think it simple, this matter of our personality. Simple like nature vs. nurture, 50/50, as if they are two stones lodged in the riverbed of the self, firm and final. But there is no such stone. There is only the silt and the pull, and the water ever reshaping us.

It begins with breath. Before a thought. Before voice. The first wail cut loose from a child’s chest carries more than need. It carries design, an instinct encoded into our flesh by God’s design. And already the watchers begin their tally. “He’s so alert.” “Wow she’s stubborn.” “He looks just like your uncle when he’s mad.” The ledger starts there. Not in the cells. Not in the soul. But in the stories told by those who surround us, long before we speak our own.

And yet the blood speaks too. It says I am what came before. It says you will walk with the echoes an ancestors in your gait and wake to dreams you never lived. You will despise your mother’s tone and wield it like a weapon. You will curse your father’s temper until the day it saves you. You will think you are alone, but you are made of others. Many others.

I have walked these truths myself. In language. In lineage. And in silence.

I was the five year old child who read dictionaries as if decoding a sacred text. Not to learn the meaning, but to taste the words. To gather them like precious relics. My siblings ran feral through the long grass of our childhood, wild with sounds and swing sets, and there I was, crouched in a corner with my syllables. Hoarded them. Held them in the dark like fireflies in a jar. And none of them understood.

They thought it odd. I thought it holy.

I have always hated numbers. They come with no music; beats without a tempo. They clang inside my skull like a dropped box of ball bearings. But maps and words and paintings. These things hum with names and obscure words and bent roads and hidden paths and color and the possibility of misunderstanding; another opportunity to learn. My father drew and drafted. My mother calculated and managed numbers. I wrote and collected maps and art.

My mother was the mind sharp enough to slice a boardroom in half without lifting her voice. High IQ. Low tolerance. She solved equations as others knit scarves. And she drank scotch neat, in silence, in the blue light of prime-time news. I never saw her read anything but fiction. But I never saw her afraid either.

Daddy was warmth and nonsense. A charmer. Not brilliant, but disarming. His hands stained with fish bait, printers-ink, and nicotine. He told long stories with no point and forgot their endings halfway through. He believed people more than data. He never knew how much I watched him.

I inherited both. Her steel. His drift.

I was confused by her for years. For her certainty. For the way she refused sentiment. But now I keep her calendar. I hear her in my tone when I dismiss poor reasoning. And I miss the things she never said.

He died too early. Before I could ask the right questions. Before I could make him explain why he never seemed to care much. Or how he bore disappointment without bitterness. He is a silence in me now. A long corridor with lights that barely flicker.

And my siblings—different constellations spun from the same sky. One paints fantastic portraits, one is a retired brilliant healthcare professional with three brilliant children, one is dead—having suffered from schizophrenia or traumatic brain injury—hard to say which now. We orbit the same origin. Our collisions are infrequent but always in accord. We all three value family and loyalty above all else. And in our distance, we resemble one another most.

You want to know what forms a person. What engine drives their will or leaves them stranded. It is not one thing. It is a congress. A parliament of ghosts and memories and jokes half-remembered. A father’s grin. A mother’s silence. The day you were forgotten in the parking lot. The first time someone saw you and didn’t look away.

And children. God. Children.

I became a parent like one steps into a cathedral—awed, ill-prepared, trembling. You think you will shape them. You think they are clay and you the potter. But they come with spines and opinions and a hunger for contradiction. They watch everything. They file it away.

And still we try. We break our backs building myths in their name. We praise too much and not enough. We give what we never had. We take what we cannot admit. We fail daily, and still we rise, because they look at us as if we hold the answers. Until they find out we don’t. And even then, they keep watching.

I tried to be better. I tried to be invisible and invincible and indulgent and firm. I failed in all directions. But I stayed. I stayed. And that is a kind of success, I guess.

Personality is not fixed. It is a river, yes, but also a scar. A performance. A home. A war. It wears faces. It tells lies. It tells truths no one wants to hear.

Mine is word-bound and restless. Rooted in my mother’s pragmatism, my father’s drift, my own ache to be understood. I have loved people I could not trust. Trusted people I did not love. I have ruined things with a sentence. Saved them with one. I have felt myself become someone else in the span of a single conversation. And I have stood still and let the world misname me because I was too aloof to correct it.

In this life, we wear roles like coats. Dutiful son. Angry teen. Grieving adult. Parent. Partner. Ghost. Each one a costume sewn with thread from the past. And yet none of them whole. None of them quite enough.

We look to parents for blame and blueprint. But their impact is not formulaic. A tyrant may raise a saint. A saint may raise a brute. Sometimes the greatest influence is the one who stayed. Or left. Or merely existed at the right time.

I think of my mother as sovereign. The axis around which our household turned. Not nurturing. Not soft. But unyielding. Powerful. She taught me that success need not apologize. That intelligence is not a parlor trick. That being right is a kind of armor.

And I think of my father. Kindness like an open palm. Humor as shield. A man content with small things. A man who never needed to win to be remembered.

I am both and neither.

If you ask me what matters in the shaping of self, I will say this: watch what you praise. Watch what you ignore. Know that children make shrines out of offhand remarks. That absence becomes myth. That presence becomes burden. That all your efforts will echo in ways you never intended.

And still. Be there. Even flawed. Especially flawed.

I am still learning who I am. Still becoming. Still discarding versions of myself that no longer serve me. Still haunted by the ones that did.

I believe in effort. I believe in grace. I believe in the alchemy of apology and frank communication.

And I believe this: we are not our pasts’. But we are not free of them either.

That is the contradiction. That is the beauty.

That is personality.