Who Told You Who You Were?
The Roles We Inherit and the Freedom to Rewrite Them
Families are very good at assigning roles. Sometimes nobody remembers holding the auditions.
In my family, I accumulated a collection of descriptions over the years. I was the absent-minded professor. I was the professional student. I was the quirky dilettante. I was shy, maybe a little different, and generally more comfortable watching from the edges than marching into the middle of things.
None of those descriptions was entirely invented. I could be absent-minded. I did love school. I have always had more interests than available hours in the day. And I was shy in some situations, especially when I was young.
The problem is not that families notice things about us. Of course they do. The problem is that shorthand has a way of becoming the whole story. A child who hangs back becomes “the shy one.” A child who feels things deeply becomes “the sensitive one.” A child who does well in school becomes “the smart one,” which sounds perfectly nice until she makes a mistake and feels she has somehow failed to meet the terms of the job description.
Before long, the description is no longer about something the child does. It becomes who the child is.
Families are especially good at this because they know us before we know ourselves. Long before we have the language, confidence, or frankly the authority to say, “I’m not sure that is actually what is happening here,” somebody else has already written the first draft.
And once a family story gets established, confirmation bias is more than happy to take over from there.
Confirmation bias is one of those psychological terms that makes a very ordinary human habit sound rather impressive. Basically, once we decide something is true, we become very good at finding evidence to support it and much less interested in evidence that does not.
It is a shortcut.
Instead of stopping each time and thinking, “What is actually going on here?” we reach for the explanation we already have. It saves mental effort. It is also, if we are being fair, a little lazy. But it is wonderfully comfortable because it allows us to keep proving our own thesis.
And human beings do love being right.
So the absent-minded professor forgets where she put something, and everyone nods.
Naturally.
The shy child hangs back at a gathering.
There she goes again.
The quirky dilettante develops another interest.
Well. Obviously.
Meanwhile, the times the absent-minded child is focused and organized, the shy child is animated and funny, or the supposed dilettante remains devoted to something for years do not attract quite the same attention. They are inconvenient pieces of evidence. They do not fit the working theory, and the working theory has been around a long time.
At some point, I began to wonder how much of my own understanding of myself had been shaped by those old descriptions.
Was I absent-minded? Absolutely. I have looked for my eyeglasses while they were on top of my head. I am not going to waste anyone’s time mounting a defense.
But I was also someone who could become completely absorbed in thought.
Was I a professional student? Also fair. I spent a great deal of time in school. But perhaps I simply loved learning. Some people collect antiques. Some people restore cars. I apparently collect degrees, trainings, books, and entire new subjects that suddenly seem absolutely necessary to investigate, usually with the conviction that I just need to know a little more. This has rarely turned out to mean just a little.
And then there is the quirky dilettante.
That one may actually be my favorite.
I have been interested in psychology, yoga, spirituality, writing, painting, history, family systems, trauma, creativity, and enough other things that writing them all down begins to make me look like someone who cannot be left alone near a continuing education catalog.
From the outside, that might look scattered.
From the inside, it feels much more connected.
I have spent most of my life trying to understand people. How, and why do we become who we are? What do we carry from our families? What happens to experiences we never had words for? Why do some patterns keep turning up generation after generation? How does the body hold what the mind would prefer to file elsewhere? How do we heal? How do we make meaning out of what happened without allowing it to become the only story we ever tell about ourselves?
The medium changed. The questions really did not.
That is one of the things that happens when we begin looking again at the stories other people have told about us. We do not necessarily discover that everyone was wrong. Usually it is more complicated than that.
We discover that they were incomplete.
A family sees a child through whatever lens happens to be available at the time. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins—we all interpret one another through our own histories, personalities, expectations, sensitivities, disappointments, and blind spots.
Children are doing exactly the same thing.
Memory is not a surveillance camera. It is much closer to a very opinionated editor who has strong feelings about what belongs in the final version.
Two siblings can grow up in the same house and later tell stories that make it sound as though they were raised by different parents. Neither one has to be lying. They occupied different positions in the family. They had different temperaments and different needs. Parents changed. Circumstances changed. One child noticed what another barely registered. And each one made a different meaning out of what happened.
This is one of the harder things about family stories.
We are not only the narrator of our own life. We are also a character in everyone else’s lives.
And we do not get editorial control.
Somewhere, someone may be telling a story about us in which we are selfish, dramatic, aloof, irresponsible, overly sensitive, intimidating, fragile, impossible, or simply peculiar.
We may hear that version and think, Well, that is certainly an imaginative interpretation of events.
There is a strong urge to correct the record. I understand it completely.
Excuse me. I have reviewed your manuscript and there appear to be several factual inaccuracies.
Unfortunately, family mythology does not appear to have an appeals department.
What we can do is become more curious about the stories we absorbed. Which descriptions still feel true? Which ones once described a behavior and somehow got promoted to a personality? Which belonged as much to the person doing the describing as to us? Which have simply been repeated so often that nobody has stopped to ask whether they still fit?
And which ones should probably have been retired years ago but remain, inexplicably, in active circulation?
I think about the shy child I once was. For a long time, shyness could easily be read as deficiency. She should speak up more. Join in more. Be more outgoing. Stop hanging back.
Now I see something else.
She was observant. She was taking in the room. She was noticing who seemed safe, who was interesting, who was kind, who was loud, and who might best be enjoyed from a reasonable distance.
She was deciding how, and whether, she wanted to enter at all.
That is a very different story.
And perhaps this is one of the advantages of getting older. We finally have enough distance to go back and read the early drafts with a red pen.
Not to erase them. Not to declare everyone else wrong. Not to replace them with a flattering little press release about ourselves.
Just to add context.
The absent-minded professor was thoughtful and easily absorbed. The professional student was curious and genuinely loved learning. The quirky dilettante was creative and interested in a great many things. The shy child was watching, listening, and deciding where she felt comfortable.
Those newer descriptions do not need to become another set of fixed identities either. That would defeat the purpose.
Maybe the goal is not to finally arrive at the correct label.
Maybe the goal is to stop mistaking the label for the person.
We are more complicated than the roles our families assign us. More contradictory. More changeable. Usually much more interesting.
And, fortunately, still being written.
Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S, is a psychotherapist, Certified Yoga Therapist, writer, and founder of Interiority Wellness. Her work explores the places where psychology, embodiment, family stories, creativity, and meaning-making meet. She writes about the complicated, often funny, and deeply human work of becoming more fully ourselves.
