"True worlds are seldom beautiful;
beautiful words are seldom true."
["Tao Te Ching", Lao Tzu]

My mother often said, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." It was one of her favorite expressions. It's the quote I most remember her saying. And she was quite right.

In the past few years, I've played a game of "Questions" with many people. I like it as a getting-to-know-you tool. Each person takes turns asking questions, the bravest ones they dare, to push the limits of what the other is or isn't willing to answer. The rules are simple: you can't ask anything you yourself wouldn't answer. I've struck on questions others wouldn't answer, though seldom, in fact. There's often been a few questions I don't dare ask unless it's a very close personal friend. And in all this time, I can't recall ever being asked something I wouldn't answer. In fact, that was part of the point of my playing this game. Having spent all that time writing "Welcome to My Mind", coming to grips with who I am and exorcising my personal demons, I wondered which, if any, skeletons still lingered in my closet. My self-dissection had left no part of me unexamined; I was left with no secrets to keep.

A few weeks ago, when I last wrote, I explained how I was digging into my family's past, trying to understand where I came from, trying to unearth a better understanding of how I came to be who I am. And I expected when I asked these questions and took this long gaze through the microscope that I would find things I wasn't particularly proud of. But I guess I mostly expected to find small things.

But then, over brunch, each of my two sisters blurted out a single independant piece of that massive puzzle - interlocking pieces, central pieces, which fit ever so perfectly together and brought the past 50 years of family history into an unprecedented focus. This deduction, this inference that these two interlocking pieces make about the rest of the picture... make it all make sense like never before. It's a fact we can't prove, or even investigate. But it is a truth so self-apparent in the light of day as to be undeniable.

And so at long last I have my wish. I have some of the truths I was seeking. And I have a secret big enough to be worth hiding.

One sister is sorry she knows. She wishes the other had never spoken up. The other puts it more easily behind her. After all, it's something we cannot change. For me, as disturbing as it is, I'm still glad to know. I believe in truth. I believe in embracing the truth in all its ugliness. But I have folded on one account: I do also now believe that there are some things better left unsaid. There are some things I won't be telling the world.

And I've learned something else from this whole ordeal, from taking a long hard look back at the sordid past that brought me here. I've learned something very important. I've learned that I am not the sum of my genetics, nor my upbringing, nor even the sum of my experiences.

Those things are predisposition, not predetermination.

I am the sum of my choices. I am who I choose to be.

And regardless of how uneasy the distant past may make me, who I am remains unchanged.

I'm still happy being me.