Born this way

In a sense, Lady Gaga was right. We might not have all our flavors baked in at first, but as we grow in our first few years, we certainly pick up a lot things that shape how we see, feel, and think.

If raised in a home filled with tension and conflict, you learn to be on edge - living in fear and in defense mode all the time. If that is extended into school, work, or other environments, you just live that way. 

Vice versa, if you grow up in a peaceful, reassuring environment with teachers, friends, and all the people you're around normally being encouraging, etc, you'll have more confidence and less defensiveness.

Or to use a different dynamic, you can grow up dreading work and prefer relaxing and doing less physically demanding things. Or vice versa - you might dislike sitting still and not being busy.

You can make a long list of different kinds of variables a person can experience growing up that make them feel "born this way" as their life unfolds and they develop into adulthood.

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Some of the dynamics are tied to how much money you were raised with and how educated your parents were and how much they emphasized education for you - the quality of your subculture, essentially.

Some of them are tied to genetics - not everyone is the same physically, even from the same gene pool.  Two kids can come from the same parents and still have different outcomes and tendencies.

Our genetics dance with our social environment and, before we know it, we have a personality, a direction we're headed, and voices from our culture affirming things about us that affirm them.

We can grow up and go all the way through life without a clue that we could choose to be or do something other than what we believe has been given to us; within reason.

Alternatively, we can have moments where we awaken to possibilities that come to our attention. Maybe from a church group, a teacher or school, a song, a friend, and just about anywhere ideas originate.

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We can try out a lot of things, but we're limited to the resources and opportunities that we're aware of, guided by our learned preferences, tastes, and potentials.

A person can decide to be something and work at it and believe fully that they are that thing and, depending on the openness of the social environment around them, be affirmed in that.

There are other things they're not aware of they could be and, if eventually made aware of them as options, could become convinced they were born *that* way and not some way they thought they were previously.

So much of what we are convinced that we are is from the people around us that we have come to trust in some way.  That trust doesn't mean that you like them or have warm feelings for them.

We sometimes accept the life that we have presented to us without questioning - we go along with the rules, language, ideas, and roles - we just assume it is the way things are.

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We do get to choose from the among the options presented to us.  It may seem like we don't at times because of blinders put on us through the process of socialization, but we can choose.

Some of the choices we have presented to us range from amazing, wonderful, fowl, disturbing, and bland, to "run of the mill", addictive, repulsive, etc - and they can be almost invisible to us, but they are there.

The decision usually comes down to what we feel is true, good, right, trustworthy, and helpful or positive in some way, benefitting us as we understand beneficial, good, right, helpful, trustworthy, true, etc.

Some truth is practical. 2 + 2 = 4, whether it's inches or dollars or apples, math is math. Some truth is perceived and weighed out - taken on faith because we can't see the structure where the abstract sits.

Most all of it comes from what people told us and that we've come to believe, for better or worse. We come to believe what we've been told is true because they told us it's true and gave us the definition of it.

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Whether it is faith in God, politics, economics, or what Hollywood says, we have to learn to listen and hear with understanding. 

Many prefer to just "go along to get along" and suffer or benefit from that choice.  Some prefer to attempt to discern and learn and suffer or benefit from that choice.

Those who profess to have something to share or defend or protect must drill down to find the bedrock they base their thing on, or admit they don't know for sure.

Those who question where they've come from and have begun to look for some new direction or conviction are often caught between the river options they have flooding their way and the desire to rest.

Few things are as black and white as people would like them to be.  But some things are.  And that's where the idea of "born this way" begins to give way to being called to something better.