There are things about me that for years I treated as personal decisions, until I started asking when exactly I had decided them. I do not remember having chosen my personality, my ease with certain things, what produces fear in me, the way I react when I feel threatened, or even many of the things that interest me. Some I can trace back to concrete experiences, others probably have biological components, and many are such a complex mixture of both that trying to find an exact origin would be fairly useless. Even so, when I say “this is how I am,” there is a certain feeling of authorship, as if at some point I had deliberately designed the person I am now describing.
Obviously it was not like that.
No one chooses their genetics, the brain with which they begin to experience the world, the family they are born into, or the first circumstances that start teaching them what to expect from other people. We also do not choose our initial intelligence, our temperament, or many of the experiences that later end up changing us, and although over the years we acquire a certain capacity to intervene in some of those traits, we do so using precisely a mind that was already partially formed by things that happened before we could decide very much.
That produces a kind of circular problem I find hard to ignore. If my decisions depend on my preferences, my personality, my experiences, and my way of reasoning, but I did not completely choose any of those things either, then it is reasonable to ask how much of a decision really belongs to me. Even what we call “willpower” appears unevenly distributed among people and circumstances, because deciding after sleeping eight hours, having economic stability, and counting on a good support network does not necessarily demand the same thing as deciding under fatigue, fear, or despair.
Taking this idea too far, however, produces a conclusion that does not convince me either. If every behavior can be explained by genetics, environment, prior experiences, and brain function, we could end up describing any decision as the inevitable result of prior conditions and progressively eliminating individual responsibility. The problem is that understanding why someone did something does not necessarily mean justifying it, just as recognizing the causes of a behavior does not automatically erase its consequences.
I think that distinction becomes particularly important when I try to understand my own mistakes. There are behaviors of mine that I can now explain much better than before, and in some cases knowing their origin has allowed me to stop interpreting them simply as moral defects. I can understand why certain situations awaken certain reactions, why some things cost me a disproportionate amount, or why I have sought certain relationships even knowing they probably were not good for me. But there is a fairly comfortable temptation in turning every explanation into an absolution: “I am this way because of what happened to me,” as if discovering the origin of a behavior meant I no longer had any responsibility for what it produces.
And I do not think it works that way.
I may not have chosen an insecurity and still be responsible for not using it to control another person. I may not have chosen to feel rage and still have responsibility for what I do while I am angry. I can recognize that certain characteristics of my brain make some tasks difficult without concluding that, therefore, any result is out of my hands. Explanation modifies judgment because it introduces context, but it does not necessarily eliminate the possibility of acting otherwise.
It also happens in the opposite direction. We like to attribute our achievements to personal decisions much more readily than our failures, even though the same forces that complicate the idea of guilt should also complicate the idea of merit. Having been born with certain capacities, meeting the right person, having access to education, having time to study, or simply being in the right place are circumstances that can change a trajectory enormously without having been individually conquered. That does not make the later effort false, but it should make us a little more cautious when we use our own result to judge someone who started from different conditions.
This part is especially uncomfortable for me because I like to think that whatever I manage to achieve will be mine. If someday I finish medical school, build a company, write something I really like, or reach any of the goals I have now, I want to feel that it happened because I worked to get it. And it will probably be partially true. What would be harder to defend is that it happened only because of that, because behind any achievement there will be capacities I did not manufacture, people who appeared without my being able to plan it, opportunities others did not have, and a considerable amount of chance that is normally much more visible when it harms us than when it works in our favor.
Recognizing this does not mean that effort is irrelevant either. Precisely because we do not control the initial conditions, what we can still intervene in acquires a particular importance, even if we can never perfectly separate which part came from us and which from prior circumstances. I do not need to have chosen my starting point in order to be able to partially modify my trajectory, just as recognizing my limitations does not oblige me to treat them as instructions.
Perhaps that is why the question “how much of myself did I choose?” has no clean answer. The more I try to find a border between what I received and what I built, the harder it becomes to draw it, because even the tools with which I try to change myself are part of the person I am trying to change. My capacity to reflect, discipline myself, ask for help, or correct a behavior did not appear from nothing either.
Even so, there is something I would find dangerous to lose inside all of this explanation: although we are not absolute authors of ourselves, we remain the place where our decisions occur and where their consequences end up affecting other people. Perhaps responsibility does not need to mean “I completely chose to be who I am,” but something considerably more limited: this is what I received, this is what happened to me, this is what I progressively understand about myself, and from here I still have to decide what I do with it.
I did not choose many of the pieces with which I ended up building myself. Some I would even have changed if I had been asked. But now that I can see at least some of them, explaining where they come from is no longer exactly the same as deciding what to do with them.
