You Are What You Eat (and no, this really has nothing to do with food)

I wonder if psychologists and psychiatrists and psychics ever get tired of knowing why people do the things they do. If it takes too much mystery out of life.

That being said, I wish I could understand more clearly why I do some of the shit I do. Stupid shit. Self-destructive shit. Manipulative shit. You don’t realize how much you emulate what you observe until you start actively sabotaging your own life. Bad stuff in, bad stuff out. You are what you eat. Monkey see, monkey do.

There are some bad habits that are really easy to spot, and therefore easy to deal with (if you accept the mantra “the first step is admitting you have a problem”). Alcoholics, for example. While there may be other shit going on, the problem that’s immediate and identifiable is that they drink too much. Solution: stop drinking. Pretty cut and dried.

But there are far subtler things we can do to ourselves that pass unnoticed, even as we do them. Snarky thoughts, overactive paranoia, vanity, shame, greed—they fester, and they creep, and they wither whatever they touch.

I’d say I’m an adult now. Well, the world would say I’m an adult now. Twenty-one years old. She can smoke, vote, drink, and go to strip clubs. She’s responsible now. And as an adult, one would think that I would be able to approach my adult relationships (work relationships, family relationships, romantic relationships) with a degree of maturity.

So not the case.

The bad thing about being voracious learners as children, is that we’re children. We don’t know yet how to separate the good information from the bad, the appropriate from the inappropriate, the healthy from the destructive. We observe, we intake, we internalize, and we act according to how we have observed others acting. If we have pitch-perfect role-models, this would be a great system. But we don’t—no one does. And if we happen to love or respect our childhood role models, then it takes a lot of uncomfortable eye-opening to realize that they were not—and are not—perfect. That they made mistakes, and they occasionally fucked up.

Which means we inevitably will, too.

Nowadays I approach any given situation with my arsenal of learned behaviors: I see something and I think, “This is similar to a situation that so-and-so had, and this was their outcome, so I should A) go forward and do as they did, B) retreat, or C) do the opposite of what they did because what they did sucked.”

There is nothing new under the sun, including the way we approach life. Everything we do, we do because we saw someone else do it before us. It helps us to justify our actions, good or bad. Most of the time, this is okay. But sometimes it’s a crutch. And sometimes it’s damn near crippling.

I’m twenty-one. I’m trying to be grown-up. I’m trying to deal with the new, adult responsibilities of my life with some measure of maturity. But all these tricks and habits and insecurities I picked up by watching other people live and make mistakes and be human are incapacitating me in the most inconvenient moments. Simple things suddenly become enormously complicated. I second-guess every action in a way that would have been inconceivable to me as a kid. If I did something bad when I was five, I got punished. Pretty simple system. Now, if I do something bad, I hurt people. Adult mistakes can’t be fixed by a time-out and no dessert after dinner.

The other problem with the system is that as we age, we lose our eagerness to learn. There are statistics about how it’s nearly impossible to learn a foreign language fluently after adolescence. People may memorize information for tests, get trained for new jobs, or even visit totally foreign countries, but they don’t really learn how to be better at being people. So when we’re young we learn a lot, but indiscriminately—and when we’re older, and finally have the capacity to discriminate, we’ve lost our ability to learn.

Yay for being human.

I’m mostly irritated at myself. I can almost see my mistakes in real time, like that proverbial shoulder angel telling me not to do this or that—but I do this or that anyway, because it’s what I know. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, it’s what I’ve observed—even if it’s ultimately self-destructive. And I can’t seem to break loose from the established pattern.

The sins of the father pass on to even the tenth generation…

Monkey see, monkey do.