Heirloom Traits I'm Trying to Return
On the terror of seeing your family's worst traits in yourself, and the work of choosing a different path.
The Easy Inheritance
My granddad’s ears arrived on my head like satellite dishes designed to pick up every whispered criticism within a three-mile radius. For the first fifteen years of my life, these magnificent appendages stuck out so far from my skull that I looked perpetually startled.
Fortunately, I eventually grew into them, along with my sway back and the slight pot belly that apparently runs in the family like a stubborn genetic subscription service nobody remembers signing up for.
Physical traits are annoying but manageable. I learned to work with my ears (great for hearing gossip), embrace the sway back (it makes me look like I'm always ready for a photo), and the pot belly just means I'm prepared for winter or famine, whichever comes first. These inherited features tell a story, but they're not writing my ending.
The real inheritance—the one that keeps me awake at night—isn't written in my DNA. It's written in patterns, responses, and the terrifying possibility that I'm becoming the very person I spent my childhood promising myself I'd never be.
The Harder Questions
My mom survived trauma that would break most people. She carries wounds that never healed properly, like emotional compound fractures that set wrong and ache with every change in weather. Her pain is real, her survival is remarkable, and her inability to see how that unhealed trauma bleeds onto everyone around her has shaped our family in ways that still take my breath away.
I spent my childhood walking on eggshells, learning to read micro-expressions like a survival skill, developing hypervigilance that I'm still trying to unlearn decades later.
I watched her use religion as a weapon, manipulate through martyrdom, and turn every conversation into confirmation that she was the victim in her own story, or a personal affront to her very existence.
I promised myself I would be different.
I would heal.
I would break the cycle.
So why is my own son now convinced I'm exactly like her?
He and his wife’s accusations were painful. "You're a narcissist. You're only focused on yourself." The same words I've applied to her, now being applied to me by someone I love more than my own life.
And suddenly I'm spiraling through every interaction, every conversation, every decision, wondering if I inherited more than my grandfather's ears. Did I inherit her inability to truly see herself? Her talent for making everything about her pain? Her way of loving people by trying to control them?
The cruelest irony is this: the very act of constantly questioning whether I'm like her is evidence that I'm not.
Narcissists don't lose sleep wondering if they're narcissistic.
They don't engage in the painful work of self-examination. They don't spend therapy sessions dissecting their own behavior, terrified they're causing the same damage they experienced.
But that knowledge doesn't stop the spiral.
It doesn't ease the grief of loving someone who can't or won't see you clearly, whether that's your mother who refuses accountability or your son who sees you through someone else's lens. It doesn't make the estrangement hurt less or the generational patterns feel less inevitable.
All I hear echoing in my ears are my mother’s words, cursing me, telling me someday my own kids would treat me the way I treat her.
Well, at least one does, so… thanks, Mom?
Maybe that's part of why I'm so drawn to writing damaged heroes and heroines. People who have to learn how to love without controlling, who have to let go of hyper-independence and learn to let people in.
I understand the work it takes to recognize your own patterns, to choose vulnerability over self-protection, to risk being hurt again in the name of something better. My characters get to have those breakthrough moments, those perfect conversations where everything clicks into place.
Real life is messier, but the hope is the same.
The Work of Choosing
Here's what I'm learning about breaking cycles: the awareness itself is the break. Every time I catch myself responding from old patterns instead of present reality, every time I choose vulnerability over defensiveness, every time I apologize without adding "but you did this too"—those are the moments the cycle cracks.
I can't control whether my son sees me clearly or whether my mother ever does the work of healing. I can't force anyone to recognize the difference between surviving trauma and perpetuating it.
What I can control is my commitment to staying curious about my own blind spots, to continuing the work even when it feels thankless, to choosing growth over being right.
Some family heirlooms are meant to be returned. The trauma responses, the survival strategies that outlived their usefulness, the way we learned to love that felt more like grasping than giving—those can go back to the vault.
But the resilience, the empathy forged in fire, the hard-won wisdom about what real love looks like? Those are keepers.
The victory isn't becoming perfect or even being seen clearly by everyone who matters. The victory is refusing to stop growing, even when growth feels hella hard. Even when the people you're growing away from paint you with brushes dipped in their own pain.
That's the inheritance I want to pass down—not the patterns of previous generations, but the courage to examine them and choose differently.
Even if that choice comes at a cost.
Even if it's misunderstood.
Even if it's lonely.
Especially then.
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