ur under my skin

existence is a team effort

When I was young, my mom told me never to apologize for crying. I tell other girls the same when they do it. In fact, I often tell them to never apologize for anything.

A girl I met at camp when I was a preteen showed me how to French braid. When I taught my friends, I would explain it the same way she did. I’d never see her again.

I used to hate the sound of knuckles cracking. And then my first boyfriend would regularly take my hand and crack my fingers one by one. He’d teach me to lie flat on the ground and exactly where to push to crack someone’s back. Years later, I do both, and we don’t talk anymore.

My own little traditions, passed down from whoever and melding into my everyday life.

But more intimately than that, the thread that stitches together all of my habits, values, vices, all the pieces of who I am, is made up of something that isn’t me at all. Or didn’t start out that way. Living on borrowed time, on stolen land, with adopted perceptions. There are studies that show how tightly-knit communities or friend groups develop their own type of language, a shorthand that’s unintentional and maybe entirely subconscious. Living habits and belief systems can travel up to three degrees of separation.

Parts of me are hardwired, imprinted on, stained by every meaningful interaction I’ve ever had. Like a community effort, everyone’s hands taking a turn on the pottery wheel until their fingerprints all run together and it’s something new entirely.

Not unlike Jenga. If any one piece were missing, it would still be okay. Recognizable. But the more you start to remove, the less whole and more unstable it becomes. Uneven, incomplete. Perhaps becoming a different thing on a different path, or falling apart entirely without its support system. And I can’t help but wonder if I’m anybody at all, or rather just a well, a casing, a mirror-like blank canvas, a reflection that changes based on who’s looking.