Don't we all get things from our family?
Yes. But.
Imagine your life as a grid of a hundred squares, each one a piece of you: where you were born, the language you think in, your relationship to money, what you find funny, how you fight, what you're afraid of, what you want, who you forgive. Some of those squares were assigned to you before you were born, or before you were old enough to have an opinion about the world. Color those red.
Some squares you built yourself, out of your own friction with the world. Color those green.
Now picture two grids. One is mostly red, with a few green squares scattered around. At a glance, that person seems like anyone else: with opinions, a job, and a personality. But dig deeper, and almost none of it was chosen.
The other grid is mostly green, and plenty of those green squares started out red. You can inherit your mother's stubbornness or your father's loyalty, look at it honestly, decide it belongs in the life you're building, and keep it. The moment you do that, it stops being something that happened to you and becomes something you chose. The few red squares left are the ones nobody gets to repaint, like where you were born, and the ones that person simply hasn't reached yet.
I call it the Hundred Squares theory, and the entire thing rests on one principle: the square becomes yours the second you look at it and retain the God-given right to tell it to fuck off. Its origin story is irrelevant. What matters is whether you’ve ever held it in your hands, considered both answers, and chosen not to be its hostage.
Before you read on, pick three squares of your own. Your relationship with money, the way you act in a fight, and the thing you'd never admit you want are good ones to start with. Keep them in mind, because we're going to sort them together as we go.
The concept is simple enough. The execution, naturally, is where the circus catches fire. I could say: go walk your own grid, keep the squares that survive cross-examination, evict the ones that don't, and enjoy the kind of sleep usually reserved for people with no inner life. Whether you end up with more green than red depends on what you've spent your life harvesting.
The end.
Except... listen to that word again. Harvesting.
The theory makes three promises it cannot keep: that the square will yield, that an empty grid is a garden in waiting, and that the entire grid is yours to traverse. Each broken promise reveals a different kind of square.
#1. The squares you can't move
Not every red square can be harvested because some are rooted too deeply, like your country of birth or the social class you were born into. I was born in Brazil and have lived abroad for years, and that Brazilian root stays put no matter how fluent I get in another language. Call these fixed squares.
A fixed square makes an excellent alibi, and that's where it gets tricky. Sometimes it really does shape the squares around it: where you were born influences how sociable you are, and how loud a room has to be before it feels like home, even how you date. The trouble starts when you feel how much Brazil is in your temper and slowly let that feeling turn into "so it's not mine to answer for." It is. The fact that a pattern was handed to you does not make you any less responsible for what you do with it.
You probably have a sentence you use for this. "I'm just like that, it's where I'm from." "That's how we were raised." "It runs in the family." Try finishing one of those out loud and notice which square it's protecting. The fixed part is real, and what you do around it is still yours to answer for.
#2. When you burn the whole grid
Rebels walk into the room holding their grid, having rejected everything their family gave them, because they "want to be nothing like them."
From where we're standing, their grid looks greener than anyone's. Get closer, though, and every square is still set by the red underneath, just flipped to its negative. The rebel looked hard, but the answer had been decided before the looking began. A verdict reached in advance is not a choice, but actually prejudice. Some of what they threw away was good for them, and they knew it. But when your identity depends on never becoming your parents, even a perfectly good inheritance starts to go bad. Call these flipped squares.
I'd love to tell you I'm above this one, but I'm not. My parents spent their lives relying on others to carry them, so I built a life in which I never rely on anyone. For years, I called that independence and took pride in it. Then I realized I'd become hyper-independent, so allergic to needing anyone that I turned down help even when I really needed it. Leaning on people now and then is a healthy part of being human, and I'd thrown it out just because my parents did it badly.
Some rebels go further and reject the reddest square there is, the place they were born. You've met them: "I don't feel like I belong here, I feel like I was born somewhere else," followed by a country far, far away, usually one they've visited once. Those people amuse me.
Here's how to spot a flipped square in yourself: you can describe it only in terms of what it isn't. "I'll never yell like my father." "I'll never be broke like them." "I'll never need anyone." If the first thing you think of is the person you're refusing to become, the square is still theirs. Look at your three squares. Is any of them a "never"?
A free person can hold their roots without hesitation and let go of what doesn't belong to them without a fight. The rebel can do neither, because their whole grid is a protest sign.
#3. When the grid is a cage
Here the harvest stops.
An abusive family is a cage. So is a religion that punishes doubt, or a culture that asks you to shrink to be loved, or poverty, the real kind, the kind that decides what you're allowed to want.
You get the same grid as everyone else, but yours comes with a rule: don't you dare look, and don't you dare change. Your grid is part of the family's grid, and changing yours without everyone's blessing is selfish. Doubt counts as disloyalty, distance as betrayal, and dreaming of something different is proof you were always ungrateful. And they'll swear the cage is just a grid, so how dare you call it a cage.
This is where the framework stops being neat, because examining a neutral inheritance and examining a cage are entirely different jobs.
Some people, handed a grid-cage like that, spend decades in the quiet, expensive work of prying up one square at a time. It costs them relationships, holidays, whole versions of themselves, to say the least. Call these pried squares.
I know this because I've pulled up a few squares myself, not the same ones, but I know the sound a square makes when it finally comes loose, and the silence when you realize no one else heard it.
If you grew up in a cage, some squares will feel immovable long before you understand why. Your chest tightens, your thoughts begin negotiating, and suddenly a prohibition you never consciously agreed to feels like a law of nature. You don't have to dismantle it today... the first crack in a cage may be the discovery that one of its bars was inside your head.
#4. Why we'd rather redecorate
If looking is the point, why do so many people never do it?
Because sometimes truth is terrifying: seeing your family clearly can feel like abandoning them. In a cage, even curiosity has consequences. Every square you examine becomes a quiet withdrawal of allegiance, and the people you love may sense the change before you can explain it to yourself.
And then they do something clever: instead of prying the squares up, they redecorate them. If you watched your parents panic about money every month, you might grow up unable to stop working, because resting feels like falling behind, and call it "I'm just ambitious." If you grew up where nobody hugged or talked about feelings, you might keep everyone at arm's length and call it "I'm just private." If your house was constant chaos, you might only feel alive in a crisis and call it "I work well under pressure." Call these wallpapered squares. They're still red underneath, but they've been papered over so nicely that even the owner thinks they picked the pattern.
Wallpaper has a tell: it always sounds like a compliment you gave yourself. If you've got a trait you describe with a little too much pride, the kind of "I'm just very loyal" that comes out before anyone asked, it's worth peeling a corner to see what's underneath.
How to tell what's yours
There are two checks, and a square has to pass both. First, imagine someone you respect challenging that part of you. If your instinct is to defend it with a feeling of betrayal, as if the question itself is an attack, the cage is still doing the talking. A strong reason feels calm and a little boring.
The second one is: what does it cost me? This catches the decorated squares, because those always come with a good explanation ready. "I'm just ambitious" sounds perfectly ok. So ask yourself about the downside: if you can say it out loud, like "my ambition costs me rest, and the ability to enjoy what I already have," you've really looked at it.
Run both checks on your three squares.
#5. Not everything came from home
So far I've talked as if every red square came from home, and that's too generous to everyone else. Plenty of people painted your grid while you weren't looking: the teacher who called you "the smart one" or "the difficult one" and made it stick, the first friend group that decided what was cool and what was embarrassing, the religion you were raised near even if you never practiced it, the first partner who taught you that love means waiting by the phone, and the feed you scroll every night that has very strong opinions about what your body, your kitchen, and your thirties should look like.
These squares are sneakier than family ones, because they don't feel inherited. They feel like taste.
That gives you a quick way to tell where a square came from: when someone questions a family square, you feel off. When someone questions a crowd square, you feel embarrassed, like you got caught. And when someone questions a square that came from one particular person, like an ex or a teacher, you often hear their voice in your head before your own.
The good news about outside squares is that crowds are much easier to leave than families. You don't need to invite them to Christmas.
#6. Squares don't stay the same color forever
One glance isn't enough, which is what makes self-awareness so exhausting.
A square can be green the day you choose it and quietly turn red years later, without you making a mistake. Life moved; the square didn't. And because you remember choosing it freely, you may keep defending it long after it has stopped being yours in any meaningful sense.
And the simplest way to see it is to ask what a square was for when you chose it.
Every chosen square is a snapshot of who you needed to be at a certain point in your life, the best answer you had with what you knew then. But people keep changing: you move cities, survive things, love new people, cross lines you once thought were walls, and each of those makes you someone your old squares weren't built for. The square stays the same while you outgrow it, the way a coat you chose carefully at twenty no longer fits at thirty-five. Nothing wrong with that; you just grew, and growing means some of your best old decisions eventually need to be made again.
Take my independence. At eighteen, I was providing for my family, and doing everything myself was the most conscious choice I'd ever made. Nobody was coming to help, and that square kept me standing. Years later, the problem it solved was gone, and the square was still running the show. I'd turn down help I actually wanted, and treat people offering a hand as if they were trying to take something from me. The square looked exactly the same as before, but it had gone from my best decision to my best defense, and I never noticed the moment it switched.
That's the pattern: a square goes red again when its reason expires, and the habit outlives it. Being careful with money at 22, when rent was a real fear, was smart, but at 40, with a cushion, refusing to buy a decent mattress is the old fear wearing the new person's clothes. Smoothing every conflict might have been the only way to survive a loud house, and in a calm relationship, it turns into never saying what you need and resenting your partner for not guessing.
You can catch this situation by noticing that the effort stops matching the result, because you're working just as hard to keep it going and getting less and less back. You defend it with your history instead of your present, and "I've always been like this" is usually a square running on an expired reason. And someone new in your life keeps bumping into it, the way a guest notices the smell of your house that you stopped noticing years ago.
#7. When two grids meet
Everything so far happens inside one grid... yours. But nobody lives alone, and the real chaos starts when two grids sit side by side.
Your red squares go looking for familiar ones. We tend to feel most at home with what's familiar, and for a lot of us, familiar means the same red we grew up with. That's why someone raised in chaos can find calm people boring, and can mistake an unpredictable person for chemistry. Someone raised by a critical parent can fall hard for the one person who's never quite impressed.
Your unexamined squares recognize each other before either of you does, and you mistake the recognition for a spark.
If you've ever wondered why you keep dating the same person in different bodies, or keep ending up in the same friendship with different names, this is probably why.
Two red squares in the same spot are usually where couples and friends fight. Imagine two people who both inherited a scarcity square. One wallpapered it into "I'm just ambitious," and the other flipped it into "money doesn't matter to me." They'll fight about a dinner bill like it's a war, because in a way it is. Two unexamined squares are defending themselves through two people who think they're arguing about restaurants.
The same thing happens everywhere. Two people who both learned that love means sacrifice will compete to sacrifice more and resent each other for it. One person who learned that conflict means danger, paired with one who learned that conflict means caring, will spend years misreading each other: one goes quiet to keep the peace, and the other hears the silence as "you don't care." Most fights that feel way too big for their topic are two old squares meeting for the first time.
You can't pry up someone else's square. This is the hardest one for me. When you've pried up your own squares, you start seeing everyone else's, and it's very tempting to grab a crowbar. It never works. Asking someone to look at a square they've wallpapered is asking them to risk their belonging, so it lands as an attack, which proves your point and changes absolutely nothing.
You can't lecture someone out of a cage. But when you show them your own grid without apology or accusation, you offer something more radical than an argument: proof that looking is survivable.
Every relationship builds a shared grid.
When two people commit, whether that's a marriage, a friendship, or a business, they start painting squares together: how you fight, how you spend, whose family gets Christmas, what you do on a Sunday. If neither person has looked at their own grid, the shared one fills up with whoever's red is louder, and you end up living out one person's childhood with two people in it.
Two people who've done the looking can actually choose.
That's my honest definition of a healthy relationship: two people who know where each of their squares came from, can say it out loud without shame.
Think of the person closest to you right now. Do you know their reddest square? Do they know yours? If neither of you could name the other's, you've been painting a shared grid in the dark.
#8. What you hand down
The last branch is the one that should make all of us a little nervous. Whatever you never look at, you hand down.
If you have kids, this one is obvious. Your wallpapered squares become their red ones, and they'll have to do the prying you skipped. But you don't need kids to be somebody's family table. If you're the older sibling, the boss, the mentor, the friend everyone copies, or the person whose opinion a younger cousin memorizes, someone is learning their squares by watching yours. The manager who panics about money teaches a whole team that money is panic. The aunt who jokes about her body every dinner teaches every girl at the table how to talk about hers.
The scary part is that you hand down the squares you haven't looked at much more reliably than the ones you have, because the examined ones come with an explanation and the unexamined ones just come with a feeling. Kids and teams copy feelings first.
So who's watching your grid right now? And which of your squares would you least want them to inherit?
Back to the question
So, don't we all get things from our family?
Of course. We all get things from our families and from everyone else who ever held a paintbrush near us. Some of us get a set of squares and the freedom to sort them, and some of us get a set of squares and a rule against looking. And some of us get a cage, and spend our lives either taking it apart one square at a time or living inside it so completely that the bars stop registering as bars.
Now go back to the three squares you picked at the start. By now you probably know which one is fixed, which one you flipped, and which one you've been wallpapering, and maybe one has surprised you by being greener than you thought. Whatever you found, you looked at it with the door open, and by this theory, that means it's already a little more yours than it was when you started reading.
I'm going to keep looking. I hope you will too.
