I have...

I have my mother's hands. The skin is papery, but the hands are strong. The hands have the capacity for creativity. I often have the nails painted and I moisturize all the time. They shake occasionally but they're steady when (if?) I'm paying attention.

I have my father's eyes. The eyes are brown and require glasses but they hold and express and laugh. They squint and are pretty judgey and say more than they ought to sometimes but they can't lie, for better or for worse.

I have my mother's autoimmune condition. She didn't mean to hand it down, but oops she said. The condition is an asshole and it ruins some days but it's a perspective at least. My mother died worried about it and I feel terrible but I find comfort in the fact that at least she's not worried anymore? It's doing okay at the moment and I will insist it makes my funnier. My Pokemon collection of doctors and specialists are aware that I am HILARIOUS.

I have my father's stubbornness. He also didn't mean to hand it down but who doesn't love a stubborn woman who is resistant to everything, at all times? That last part is sarcasm, another thing that lined up with no conflict between me and my father, I promise, and is yet another aspect of my personality that no one has ever, in the history of time, had a problem with. Not even once.

I have my mother's insecurities. The insecurities are undeserved but present. They direct decisions and are never ever standards to which anyone else is held but that's not the point. You can defy fiercely in other people the things you can defend in yourself.

I have my father's impatience. The impatience is a direct result of a need for control developed in an environment in which I felt I was a stranger, despite the fact that I was sown and grown there and that I was as entitled to my existence as anyone else was.

I have my parents' strengths and weaknesses but seemingly never in a combination that adds up to an entire independent or balanced person. The strengths are great when in relation to self-awareness (and goddess knows I'm fucking self-aware), and the weaknesses are ignored until they hit critical mass and then I hide inside myself until I think everyone is looking in the other direction. The strengths and weaknesses can dress up as each other on days that end in Y, just for kicks, and part of the fun is figuring out what's what ~ in the moment. ~

I have my own timeline because no one else is here to boss it around. The timeline is increasingly unpredictable, but is pretty satisfying, and abandoning the impatience (or dialling it down to 25% instead of 94%) and setting aside the insecurities (or dialling them down to 25% instead of 94%) has made stuff a lot more adventurous. I wish I'd had access to the "fuck it" mentality (in a healthy way, not in the traditional Depressed Way) before now, but a lot of it has been informed (and enabled) by my parents' back-to-back deaths, and while I'd trade this for them, the silver lining is that at least I have a more stable "Yeah, NO" in my arsenal that I can mean without it being dangerous.

I can inhale and exhale freely and not worry about anything else and I can stretch my body that has the immune condition and the brown eyes and the papery hands and the sarcasm and the impatience but still not worry about smacking into the walls of other people's expectations and that kind of freedom is terrifying and liberating at the same time.

I have my terrifying liberation and it is preferable to the alternative. The terrifying liberation is like trusting that the stairs have been built to code and that I'm not going to trip over 2mm because human beings will trip over a literal 2mm difference on stairs. The terrifying liberation still gets tripped up sometimes, but my father's stubbornness will encounter my mother's insecurities and win (sometimes), and most of the people around me help me balance both in the most productive way possible so it generally works out okay.

I have gratitude for the soil in which I was grown despite its penchant for rockiness or containing too much manure, and I feel satisfied that I just needed to find my garden (this is a metaphor) and that I'm not actually an invasive species (like mint or stinging nettle, also metaphors since they're both capable of being useful foods) that needed to be weeded or kept down or under control.

Moral of the story: find your garden and fucking thrive.