Consider how much of a person was decided before they had any say in it at all. The place. The language they think in. The faith they were handed, along with the conviction that it happened to be the correct one out of all the available options. The century, the customs, what counts as respectable and what counts as shameful, what a good life looks like and what a wasted one looks like. All of it arrived complete, and by the time anybody was old enough to examine any of it, it had stopped looking like an opinion and had started looking like the floor.
This is worth sitting with, because it is genuinely unsettling. Almost everything most of us were most certain about at twenty, we were certain about for no reason other than proximity. Nobody reasoned their way to any of it. It was absorbed the way a room absorbs the temperature of a house, and then it was called a view, and it would have been argued for at some length and with real feeling.
And here is the part that is difficult to sit with. Born four hundred miles away, into another family, in another decade, the same person would hold a completely different set of certainties with exactly the same confidence. The confidence has nothing whatsoever to do with the content. It never did, in anybody.
Why the inherited things feel like facts
A chosen belief and an inherited one feel completely different from inside, and the inherited one feels stronger. That is the trap, and it is a good one. Something reasoned towards has a memory attached, an argument that can be reconstructed, a moment when the person was not yet sure. Something poured in at four has no such memory. It has never been anything but obvious.
So when it is challenged, it is not experienced as a challenge to an idea. It is experienced as an attack on reality itself, and the reaction is not thought, it is alarm. This can be watched happening in anybody, including oneself. Somebody says something quite ordinary that happens to touch an inherited certainty, and before any part of the mind has properly considered the sentence, a defence has already been raised and armed. Where did that defence come from, and who put it there, and when?
This is why arguments about deep things so rarely go anywhere. Two people are not comparing conclusions, which could be done reasonably. They are each defending a floor, and a floor cannot be discussed while somebody is standing on it. The conversation looks like an exchange of views and it is nothing of the kind.
Looking at the floor
How does anybody examine something they cannot see because they are standing on it? There is no clean way, and it may not be possible entirely from inside. What helps, unexpectedly, is other people. Not people who agree, who only confirm the floor and make it more comfortable, but people whose certainties are arranged quite differently and who are neither foolish nor cruel.
Their existence is the difficulty, and it is a productive difficulty. If they are decent and thoughtful and hold the opposite thing without any strain, then one's own certainty cannot be the only reasonable shape a person can take. That does not mean everything inherited is wrong, and much of it may be perfectly sound. But sound because it is true, not sound because it is ours, and almost nobody has ever separated those two things.
Until they are separated, nobody actually holds a view. They are simply being held by one, and being held by something is a very different condition from holding it. And this applies far past religion or politics, which are only the loudest examples and the easiest to point at. It applies to what a woman should be. What success looks like. What counts as a serious life and what counts as a waste of one.
What is actually ours
A very simple question can be asked of any conviction, one at a time, without hurrying. Where did this come from, and did we ever agree to it? Some survive, and keeping them after asking feels entirely different from keeping them before. They become ours for the first time, which is a strange sensation to have about something held for thirty years.
Others fall apart at the first question, which says something about how much weight they were carrying and how little they were made of. It is uncomfortable work with no end to it. Every year another one turns up that was never noticed, sitting there quietly, being obvious. Probably they keep turning up until the last day, and that is not a failure of thoroughness.
But there is something underneath the discomfort that is much closer to relief than to anything else. A life built entirely on things nobody chose is a life lived on somebody else's instructions. And most of the people who wrote those instructions were doing their best with what they had been handed themselves, and are long past being able to discuss any of it.
