Do not try to be one’s parents. This is a lesson I’ve continuously had trouble with, especially compounded by my mother’s belief that ‘we are all a family,” and continuously mingling boundaries and treating individuals as constituents of a whole, a Chinese cultural artifact, to speak this having grown up alongside a person of this belief—this makes it especially hard, especially as one grows and learns one’s parents benefit most FROM one not being their parents, that one has more to give them that way, and that to continue to try to be one’s parents as role models eventually leads to even greater suffering and ultimately, ruin.

It is hard personally, for me, to take this lesson inside me. “Do not try to be one’s parents.” To let go of one’s own parent’s cultural and upbringings’ conditioning that they know best, to see firsthand the suffering that I’d brought onto myself trying to be like them, so see firsthand that it was not working and navigate the sense of despondency and inner helplessness after, was not empowering.

I think that one’s mom and dad should be a guidepost into adulthood and independence, but at a certain point, I was doing actions that were not my own, and I was castigating myself for things that were beyond my control. I still am doing so. To reject the lessons of my parents for my own instincts before they had taught me how to act, otherwise, feels extremely wrong, especially knowing the Chinese addendum of raising one’s family in compliance with harmony—to accept disunity and differing lived-in-realities between individuals as an aspect of life was such even more disconcerting. But suffering is suffering, and one can only accept the paltry coinage of parental (or any greater authority in one’s life) for so long before the suffering noticed in oneself, induced BY oneself, wanton and unnecessary, of acting out the same rote social rituals begins to override validation.

My parents, I found, were people that did not always know what was best for themselves nor me, but fervently told themselves that they always had and did and do. Perhaps another more spiritual man might call this ego. But this is the way it is for me. I realized that I did not have to maintain this illusion to do well and succeed. This was an illusion of overadmitting one’s credit-a failure of investors pre-economic meltdown of 1929, and a failure of myself from the past. By overextending my line of credit in the present, I could not BECOME that greater credit eventually in the future, no matter how much effort or trying that this took–this is no reality. Rather, letting go and allowing the credits of the past to flow into the present: for one’s self-esteem defense systems to not be propelled constantly by overextension, but by past lines of credit–such was effortless, which ironically took effort, because it went against everything that I had seein in my mom and dad and thought was the reality of growth.

In truth, experience, the simplest of teachers, the always present, absent leader, experience then taught me that growth does not follow projection and then “catching up,” like a hook shot latching onto a target and pulling oneself along (Zelda!). In truth, one constantly finds oneself “catching up,” because the target one has chosen to latch onto is the future and the future is only a possibility, not a certainty; unlike the Legend of Zelda, imagine the target constantly changing, oneself constantly choosing to change the target, AS one gets pulled along.

How can this be a true projection of REAL growth? I learn that despite my mom and dad thinking that by faking it until one makes it, repetition will lead to persistence, persistence, belief, belief, persuasion-but this is only a half truth that only deludes both parties involved. Nominally, true growth does not follow; simple, experiential lived reality has shown me that the suffering of constantly experiencing the indeterminacy of being in the air, of playing catch-up, of falling behind and not knowing, is nothing if not the told-to-you delusion of semblential growth. Real growth needs no effort in reality, as it comes AS one says it, as it is lived, out of the expression of the past choosing to connect itself to the present.

The reality of growth is no jump to a probable future in forsakement of the past, for so it is more something that makes sense: growth is effortless, because it is one choosing to admit one’s credit in the past, truth and truth and truth, unbroken in a continuous catechism borne of one’s own past INTO the current, allowing the future to make room for itself, as uncertainties cannot be relied upon for contingencies for growth.

There is, I’ve seen, no need to fake-it-until-you-make-it because what is made itself is let go-I can already see my own reflection to be expressed by the road I’ve taken, truths that can be denied by others, but continue to be known by oneself. Growth in truth is merely a continuation, as I choose to volitionally coopt it from my own lived-in-life, as the past, in expression WITH the present, a current.