Tuesday 8th August

What makes us?  Each human being?  We are all so similar and yet nearly 8 billion of us are different too.  What is it that makes us all so different?  Is it Nature or Nurture?  Well, I think it is a bit of both and a few other things too.

Certainly our genetic code, the particular way that the genes donated to us by our parents manage to combine and divide must be part of the puzzle.  We have all seen instances of two children, of exactly the same parents, who are as unalike as chalk and cheese.  Mind you some are strikingly similar too.  And from a very young age too.  Some sleep most of the time, seemingly contented with life – others are waking and unendingly miserable, unsatisfied by milk or nappy-change or cuddles they simply like to bawl away their early weeks and months.

Then we must also consider what happens for the first nine months of our existence. Slowly growing in the womb, floating in a sea of amniotic fluid, being fed by the placenta.  Who knows what stresses or anxieties we suffer while in this safest of harbours?  And if our mothers are smokers or drinkers, what difference does that make to our adult addictions?  Or if our mothers themselves suffer traumas or are unhappy, how much of that misery seeps into us?

The first few years of our lives too are important.  If we feel loved, needed and nurtured – or maybe slightly ignored.  My own personal history was complicated. I was fostered out for a couple of years, my real mother seeing me at weekends.  Who knows how this may have affected me?  If at all.  Then there the possible effects for children of working mothers of being looked after by child-minders?  These substitute parents may also affect our personalities.

The existence of siblings may well affect us too.  Or the absence of them.  Or, worse still, the arrival of a new baby to supplant us in our mother’s affections.  Another hungry baby to attend to may mean that inadvertently we are ignored.  Tough lessons to learn I am afraid.  Then school and our relationships with other kids, whether we feel included, whether we are the farmer or his wife or the dog, or even the bone.  All of this may affect us.

Adolescence too, with all those hormones raging. Our success or lack of it, with the opposite sex, our perception of our own appearance and attractiveness, all of this may affect our self-confidence.

Work, and our feelings of being valued by our colleagues may also make a difference.

Then marriage itself and the effect our own children may have on us.  Divorce or simply dis-satisfaction with a relationship.  Our reaction to separation or divorce, whether we consider ourselves the instigator or the unhappy recipient.  Once bitten, twice shy?

And then as we age our relationship with our own failing bodies.  I would hate to think how I might cope with a serious illness, pretty badly I imagine.  I am subject to self-pity a lot of the time anyway.

So; all of these things can affect our personalities.  It really is that complicated.  Or maybe people are simply correct when they put me down as a miserable old bugger….hahaha