Born, Never Asked

Maybe it’s DNA that programs us, or that’s the easiest target. Maybe the doctrine of predestination? It could be family of origin, closely related to DNA and psychology. We tend to recreate the same situations over and over until the patterns are overcome, bypassed, circumvented, or destroyed.

“Your parents are such great people,” a semi-stranger told me earlier this week. I smiled.

I remember when I noticed the way I had subconsciously found the same buildings that reminded me of my childhood, deciding to work in places that reminded me of my grandparent’s funeral home, choosing to live in buildings of the same Victorian architectural style. I’ve felt a gnawing discomfort growing inside myself as I’ve experienced subtle changes in self esteem, but especially after I forgave myself for my past. Nothing was the same yet everything was entirely too familiar. It was if I had chosen to become my grandfather, without my permission. “You look exactly like your grandfather,” an uncle told me at a family wedding. Who was this man I never met? He exists in photographs in family albums. Both of my grandfathers died before I was two years old.

Similarly, my friendships began to remind me at first of high school, then of grade school. I began to pursue the same interests I had in grade school: writing, art, reading, spelling and typography. I wrote my first poem about a cloud on my grandparent’s typewriter, in the funeral home office. I essentially am the same person I was in Fourth grade. It took a while to get here, to time travel, but maybe that was the plan all along.