Naturally speaking

Some people are given everything, and some people are dealt a shitty hand. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. Sometimes we get lucky, sometimes we don't.

There's no rhyme or reason, you can be a great person or a major league asshole, a genius or the village idiot, it bears no influence on where you're born. To whom you're born.

You're a certain way when you're born. And then you experience things and emotions, you go through situations, and you change. You grow. But you never stay the same. You can't.

Between nature and nurture we end up where we are. We begin as a semi-defined clump of clay and mold with the bumps. We're constantly changing. We're ever-evolving, even if we end up being worse off than how we began.

Had I been born in need, would I steal? Would I rob and deal? Would I still feel the craving to write? Would I be anything at all but myself, the self I have come to know?

I immigrated to this country at the age of ten. I had two different childhoods, one there and one here. But if I had never come over, who and how would I be?

I ask myself this question because I think that in finding out the characteristics about myself that would not have changed, no matter where I ended up, I will find out the part of me that is natural. I will know just how much of me is nature. Everything else is nurture. Everything else is the product of the pressures, good and bad, of the world.