A few days ago, a friend and I were talking about someone we both grew up with. I'd been noticing something about her for a while, though noticing is generous. I've known her since we were eleven, and what I've been doing is simply observing her as she matures into her mother, honing that role and improving each year.
I shared my perspective openly, and my friend responded, "But don't we all get things from our family?"
Yes. But.
Imagine your life as a grid of a hundred squares; each one is 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 old enough to form 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 across it. From a distance, the person looks like any other: they have opinions, a job, a personality. But when we excavate, almost none of it was decided; it was issued.
The other is mostly green, with a few red squares left visible on purpose. Red isn't shameful; we can't avoid inheritance. But the green ones reveal something the red ones don't: that at some point, someone paused and chose to keep them. Some green squares began as red. You can inherit your mother's stubbornness or your father's loyalty, examine it honestly, decide it belongs in the life you're building, and keep it. That's what consciousness does: it turns inheritance into choice.
The concept looks simpler than the act, doesn't it? We could stop here. I could tell you to walk the grid, keep what holds up, cut what doesn't, and sleep at peace. Whether your grid comes out more green than red is just a matter of the harvesting you do over a life.
The end.
Except... listen to that sentence again. Harvesting.
It makes three promises it can't keep: that the square comes loose when you pull, that clearing the grid is the same as choosing what grows there, and that no fences prevent you from walking the whole thing."
#1. Some squares make good hiding places
Not every red square is ready to be harvested. Some are firmly rooted and extend beyond simple pulling: they're connected to your country of birth or your original social class. These aspects of ourselves can't be easily repainted. For instance, I was born in Brazil but now live elsewhere, and that Brazilian root remains, no matter how proficient I am in my second language.
However, a fixed square serves as an excellent alibi, and this is where it becomes tricky. Occasionally, the static square truly influences the shape of the movable square: where you're born does influence how sociable you are, how loud a room has to be before it feels like home... that's something.
The core issue lies in how you handle it. You feel how much Brazil is in your temper, and slowly that feeling turns into so it's not mine to answer for. It is. Your birthplace loaded the gun; it didn't pull the trigger.
#2. A cleared grid and a scorched one look alike from the road.
Rebel individuals enter 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, the grid looks green, greener than anyone's. Get closer, and every square is still set by the red beneath it, just flipped to its negative.
Some of what they discarded was actually beneficial to them, and they secretly knew it. But being the negative of their family has become the whole identity, so the good stuff goes in the fire too, sacrificed for the satisfaction of sustaining the no.
Some go further and reject the reddest square there is: the place they were born. You've seen these folks, the "I don't feel like I belong here, I feel like I was born somewhere else", and then names a country far, far away, usually one they've visited once. But again, some squares don't repaint, and a life arranged around your back being turned is still a life controlled by the thing behind you.
A free person can hold their roots without flinching and let go of what doesn't belong to them without a fight, while the rebel can do neither. The rebel's entire grid is a response, a cage adorned with protest.
#3. Some grids are actually cages
Here the harvest stops.
An abusive family is a cage. So is a religion that punishes doubt. So is a culture that asks you to shrink to be loved. So is poverty, the real kind, the kind that decides what you're allowed to want.
You still get the same grid, the same set of squares, but yours come with a rule: don't you dare look, don't you dare change. Your grid is part of the family's grid, and changing yours without everyone's blessing is selfish.
And here is where the framework falls apart: examining a neutral inheritance is one thing; examining a cage is another task entirely.
In a grid-cage, doubt is disloyalty, distance is betrayal, dreaming of something different is proof you were always ungrateful. And they'll swear the cage is just a grid; how dare you append the word cage to it.
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.
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.
Some do it anyway, because the alternative is worse. Some don't. Some just add fresh wallpaper to the cage.
Which brings me back to the friend I've been watching.
Her mother has strong narcissistic traits, which I only recognized because I had to learn about them. The family's whole focus is on money: not having it, orbiting the people who do.
She learned this at the table, fine.
Over twenty years, I've watched her improve at fawning over rich strangers, whose good opinion feels urgent because of expensive shoes, and gradually categorize longstanding friends as an audience. She no longer performs fully for us, giving only tired stories and distracted eye contact. We get the tired recycled version. The eye contact of someone already scanning the room for someone more useful.
There's an easy way to explain this, and a true one:
The easy version is that she chose it. The truth is harder: she can't see it.
The grid-cage rule against looking took, early, and it took completely. Whatever window she had at eleven, or fourteen, or twenty-two, closed while no one was watching... herself included. What looks from the outside like a thousand small adult decisions, I suspect, is just the classic cage wallpaper seen from the inside.
That doesn't make it hurt less; being sorted into the audience by someone you've known since childhood feels exactly like that.
So when my friend, the one across the table, asked me: "Don't we all get things from our family?", this is what I couldn't say.
Yes. We all get things.
Some of us get a set of squares and the freedom to sort them. Some of us get a set of squares and a rule against looking. And some of us get a cage, and we spend the rest of our lives either taking it apart one square at a time, or living inside it so completely that the bars stop registering as bars.
But I didn't say any of it. I said something smaller, and we changed the subject.
