In this time span called life I had only a few epiphany moments. Only a few but they drastically changed how I look on life. Well maybe not all views were drastic, but memorable nonetheless.
One of them happened in my teen years. I was around 17 years old and there were three of us. For the sake of the story recap I will call tem X and Y. So we went at X’s home and when she came to the kitchen she saw her father. She sat in his lap and kissed him. Later on Y pointed that out that she found it perverse. What X said after wrapped itself round my brain like a red band.
I only came home and greeted my father. I saw nothing malice in it. So if you saw something perverse in the act, who is the actual pervert in the room?
In my head I called it mirroring and I still call it thus though I later learned that mirroring actually means when you subconsciously replicate another person's nonverbal signals. No … I called it mirroring because Y was reflecting someone else’s thoughts on how a father/daughter relationship should look. In other words, someone thought her it is perverse to kiss your father or she picked it up somewhere.
We are not ourselves. Not really. What we are is a jigsaw puzzle. We pick something here and something there. Our opinions, thoughts and behavior are laced in our crib from start. Don’t do this, don’t do that, this is wrong, this is right, shit here, shit there, I think, she thinks, buy this, buy that, do this, do that, read this. Yes we pick the idea up and reshape it a bit, tweak it and make it our own. But its core is not really ours.
… we run on borrowed ideas.
X’s father died next year of cancer. Though in our family unit which ran in its own culture we abhor all physical touching (except occasional birthdays) I do wish and hope she got all the hugs and kisses to last her for a lifetime.