Many of the ambitions, fears, values, and feelings we call our own are often inherited from family and society long before we are capable of choosing them. Over time, borrowed expectations become personal identities, and inherited anxieties are defended as conscience or responsibility. Real self-understanding begins by questioning these internalized burdens and asking whether they truly belong to us, or whether we have simply mistaken them for ourselves.
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Originally published in Deccan Herald on 22 may '26
A mother’s fear of scarcity gets transmuted into an urgency around money which the child internalises as her own personality.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, an unannounced transfer occurs. A parent’s unspoken fear becomes our ambition, a family’s definition of what counts as a life well lived becomes our standard.
And the community’s old shames settle into the nervous system as something that feels indistinguishable from personal guilt. We do not remember accepting any of this. But by the time we are old enough to notice, the weight already feels like part of us.
