Find Yourself, Not Someone Else

There's something flattering about a child who grows up to resemble you, who picks up the same habits and walks the same road you walked. That resemblance can feel like proof you did it right. But the child wearing your shoes may find they pinch. Generations ago, having children was partly practical: you raised them to carry on the work, to help during seasons when hands were short, to step into your place once you could no longer fill it. A son or daughter who refused that role often disappointed the parents who counted on it.

The reason has shifted. These days when a child follows the parent's path, what it mostly delivers is reassurance. It tells the parent the choices they made were sound. Think of the ugly duckling from the old story. He grew into a swan, not what anyone around him expected, and beautiful on his own terms. You can carry that same sense of not belonging if you never quite fit your family, your classroom, or the town you grew up in. Some children actually look unlike the people raising them, when, placed among relatives who share their genes, they would blend right in. Kids with Down syndrome and some biracial children get seen as the odd ones out next to their own families.

Spend any time with genetics and you learn that traits travel from parent to child through a tangle of mechanisms that rarely behave the way common sense predicts. Two children with the same mother and father can turn out strikingly unalike. The same goes for talents and natural abilities. Then factor in everything that happens between conception and birth, which differs from one pregnancy to the next, and you get children who are genuinely related to their parents yet very much their own people. Traits do get handed down, but not always to the child or the sex you were hoping for, say the firstborn boy.

Temperament is inherited too, and it may clash with what the parents have. Picture an easygoing mother or father landing a child who is slow to warm up, hanging back from anything new, and the parent cannot work out why.

A strength a person is born with may have no place in the family or the community they land in. I grew up on a farm and eventually, after a few other turns in life, married a farmer. So I understand why he's puzzled that a city boy doesn't know how to do the things any farm kid can do, and why he struggles to see the worth in what that city boy learned at college, even a degree that had nothing to do with agriculture.

I love flowers, and still I don't want them all identical, blooming the same way forever. New ones, strange ones, those are the ones I want to see. What one person around here calls a flower, somebody in another place calls a weed. You could even say the same of the blossoms that show up on a marijuana plant. (I'm not suggesting anyone take up growing it.)

Be who you are, as long as you aren't setting out to harm yourself or stepping on others for your own benefit. Find yourself and you'll make the contribution only you can make, and grow into whatever you were meant to become. That, I think, is the point of being here: each of us carries something no one else can supply. Put too much stock in other people's ideas of who you should be and you can lose your footing. The honest road isn't always the smooth one, though it tends to pay off. Consider how many pairs, across how many stores, some of us try on before we hit on a shoe that fits, feels good, and lasts. It's an individual thing. A style that's perfect for one foot is wrong for the next. Plenty of people, women especially, suffer for squeezing into shoes they feel obligated to wear because fashion says so. Oprah has talked about exactly this.

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