I have often wondered how much of a person is already determined at birth. Not the obvious things - the tilt of the nose, the length of the fingers - but the subtle currents that pull us toward certain people, certain rooms, certain quiet corners of our own minds. I think of the afternoons when I sat alone in my childhood bedroom, the sunlight slicing across the floorboards, and the way I felt both anchored and untethered at once. Even then, I was restless, my mind already circling the questions I still cannot answer.
We tell ourselves that change is possible. We quit jobs, we buy new clothes, we take up pottery, yoga, a new language. We pick up new habits, drop old ones. We tell ourselves this is reinvention. I have done all of these things. I’ve rearranged rooms, deleted phone numbers, scrubbed myself clean of entire versions of myself. It looks like change. It even feels, briefly, like change. As though I have slipped into someone else’s skin and can finally breathe.
But the core - the thing beneath all of it - stays. Or so it seems to me. There are patterns that repeat no matter what detours we take, mistakes that find us again with a kind of grim efficiency. I think about the habits I can’t seem to shed - the late night restlessness, the way I sabotage intimacy just as it draws close, the way I return again and again to the same melancholy as though it were a home I can’t stop visiting. These things feel older than choice. They feel etched into me.
And so I ask myself: are our lives just performances repeated so many times we forget they are acts? If I always end up with the same sadness, the same hungers, the same restless longing - was it written into me from the beginning? Was I born knowing this role? Sometimes I think of life as a room I have occupied many times before. Each feeling is a chair I have sat in - with scuffs that i have ran my fingers over and gotten splinters. I remember returning home from college, walking the quiet streets at night, the air heavy with the scent of rain, feeling a familiar ache in my chest. I had changed, I thought, but the ache had not. It waited for me, patient as always.
This is not to say reinvention is impossible. Only that it is limited. Surface over substance. New paint on old plaster. We can shift the angle, but not the foundation. There is a certain terror in that thought. That I was never really free, that my choices are just variations of the same script, rehearsed endlessly, dressed in different costumes. But there is comfort, too. Continuity suggests a self I cannot lose, even when everything else shifts beneath me. Maybe we are not meant to escape our foundations. Maybe we are meant to learn how to live inside them.
I don’t have an answer. I only have the quiet return to the same questions, the same versions of myself. And maybe that, too, is part of the script - that I will keep circling, keep asking, keep pretending the act is new, even when I know I have been here before.
Wonderful
this is amazing