Inherited Patterns
What I Almost Said on a Lovely Night…
It was about 9pm on a Monday night in April when I was walking Mingo around the block. That’s such a lovely time of night when very few cars are driving by and the streets get quiet. One of my neighbors was out front dragging his trash to the curb. We don’t really talk much, just the wave-and-nod kind of neighbors. But he looked up this time and said, “It’s a lovely night, isn’t it?”
I said, “Yep, sure is,” and then kept walking.
And that should be the whole story. But it isn’t.
Because what I nearly spewed out was this: “Yeah, for now. Wait until June arrives and it’s 90 degrees at 9pm and 90% humidity.”
Think about that for a second. Seriously, let that land.
Here’s a man I barely know who offers me a small, genuine moment of shared appreciation for a nice evening, and my gut response was to preemptively rain on it. To dim it down before it could disappoint us.
I caught it this time. I didn’t say it, thank goodness. But I noticed it and that reeled in my mind for the rest of the walk.
Where the hell did that come from? And why is that sometimes, if not many times, my initial reaction? To go straight to the cons list?
Well, I know exactly where it came from. And chances are, you do too, if you’re honest with yourself.
We don’t arrive at these kinds of patterns on our own, almost never. Most of them were handed to us long before we had any say in the matter. The way we talk about money, about risk, about whether something good is allowed to just be good without a bullshit disclaimer attached... that stuff gets installed early. Like, way early. And it runs quietly for decades before you even realize it has become a character trait. Yikes
My father grew up in a lower income rural household, but was able to later build a solid career, provide well, retire comfortably traveling the globe, and accomplish things his own parents never managed to do. I don’t say any of what follows to tear him down. I say it because it’s true, and because understanding it changed a lot of things for me.
There is a negativity about the way he sees certain things. Not everything, of course. He is warm and funny and even very outgoing at gatherings. But when it comes to money, or to anything that carries risk or hope... it’s straight to the cons list. What does it cost, rather than what can this do for me? What could go wrong, rather than what will go right? Don’t get your hopes up, rather than cheer early and often.
When my niece got her first gig as a professional ballerina, his first response was not one of congratulations. It was “I hope they pay well.” That’s a shot in the gut for someone landing their first role in a profession she already knows doesn’t pay well... but she does it because it’s a passion. Much like a painter, or a writer. But his instinct is to say such things because he genuinely cares for her wellbeing, which is tied to happiness, which is tied to money. See the pattern?
And I grew up hearing that same voice, often. For a very long time, without knowing it, it became my own. Wanna know what that looks like in practice?
I’m a college football fan. For context for any international readers, the American kind. I grew up in the south where college football may as well be a religion for many people. Having graduated from UGA, it’s hard not to be an avid fan. And for a long stretch of years, Georgia’s football team had a mental block with winning against Alabama’s program. They would struggle against them in ways that didn’t always make sense on paper.
One afternoon, less than a decade ago, I walked through the den while that game was on. The score was only 7-0 Alabama. First quarter. A one-score difference with most of the game still to go.
Without missing a beat, the voice in the room proclaimed: “If they don’t score on this drive, they’re dead ducks.”
First fucking quarter. Are you kidding me right now?
Georgia did lose that game. But that’s not the point. The point is the move itself. Get ahead of the disappointment. Call the loss before it happens so it can’t blindside you. Right then and there it feels like realism, or even wisdom. But what it really is... is armor.
There’s a joke I’ve had with myself for years about how things got fixed when I was growing up. Duct tape and rubber bands was the primary methodology. Not literally, but also not that far from it. The approach was always: why invest real effort when this will hold for now, and it’s probably going to fail anyway? It’s a defensive mechanism at work in real time.
Duct tape and rubber bands is what happens when you don’t fully try, so that when something fails, you were already prepared for it. In other words, you’ve embedded the failure into the repair. Now you can say: “Of course it failed, I didn’t really try”. And since you never fully committed, it feels like the failure was never really yours. It’s a way of never being wrong. One could argue that it’s a brilliant defense mechanism, honestly. But the cost of never being wrong is never being in the game. And that last part sucks.
That’s the pattern. And that’s what almost came out of my mouth on a perfectly nice night in Charleston while my neighbor just wanted to express his appreciation for the weather.
When the Negativity Feels Earned
Let me be very straight with you, because I’m not writing this from a hilltop.
Right now, I’m carrying real financial weight and looking for work in a tough economy. The leads I’ve chased have mostly gone nowhere, at least so far. The rat race of shitty online job hunting is genuinely demoralizing. Some days it’s hard to stay connected to the belief that the path I’m on is the right one.
So when I talk about catching a negative thought on an evening walk, I’m not talking from a place of ease. The negativity I’m working against right now isn’t just inherited armor. Some of it is a direct response to very real, very current circumstances. And both of those things can be true at the same time.
That’s the distinction that matters most.
There’s a difference between acknowledging a hard situation and letting a lifelong pattern of preemptive disappointment run the show. One is honest. The other is armor.
Gabby Bernstein talks about this in ways that have stuck with me for years. The idea that The Universe Has Your Back doesn’t mean nothing hard ever happens. It means you don’t have to white-knuckle your way through it alone, and it means the story isn’t over. You have a support team, both physical and spiritual if you so choose.
Wayne Dyer spent decades teaching that our thoughts create our experience of reality, not reality itself. The circumstances are what they are. What we do with them is something else entirely. That thread runs through everything I’m building on this platform, and in my own life.
None of that is easy to say or hold when the stress is real. That is fact. But I also know this: even now, even in the middle of a chapter that doesn’t look exactly the way I want it to, I can sit at my desk in downtown Charleston with the glorious rain falling outside, thocking away on a keyboard I love, and feel genuinely happy to be exactly here.
Both things are true. The hard stuff is real and the joy is real too. That’s not a contradiction. It’s just what it looks like to be a human being paying attention.
I couldn’t always do that. For a solid decade, I was drinking my way through my own life. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean I was genuinely not present for most of it, including a lot of the patterns I was running. Avoidance was the whole game. The armor was so thick I didn’t even know I was wearing it.
Getting sober didn’t fix everything. It just turned the lights on. And once the lights are on, you start seeing things you didn’t know were there, including the voice in your head that wants to say your team will lose right after the game has begun. Or the impulse to tell a neighbor that the nice night won’t last.
Thirteen-plus years of sobriety now, and I’m still finding the stuff that got installed early. That’s kinda crazy. But it’s not discouraging to me anymore, it’s fascinating when I stop and think about it. You get better at the noticing, and the noticing is everything.
That night with Mingo, I didn’t do anything heroic. I didn’t have a breakthrough. I just caught a thought before it became words, let it pass, and said “yep, sure is” to a friendly person who was right...
It was indeed a lovely night
The armor didn’t need to be on. I was safe. And in that very moment, I knew it.
That’s the work. Not some dramatic transformation or a bullshit mountaintop moment. Just a notch on the doorframe that says: I caught it this time, and I’m a little more aware than I was before.
You’ve got inherited patterns. We all do. The question isn’t whether they’re there. The question is whether you’re starting to notice them.
DO THE THING
Think about the last time you responded to something good with a disclaimer or a warning. “Yeah, but...” or “for now...” or “we’ll see.” Don’t judge it. Just notice it. Where does that thought come from?
Ask yourself whose voice it is. Not to assign blame. Just to name it. When you can see the origin, the pattern loses a little of its grip.
Separate the real from the inherited. What’s a legitimate response to a hard situation, and what’s the armor that got put on so long ago you forgot you were wearing it? Both deserve acknowledgment, but only one is serving you.
Find one thing today that’s just good. Not good despite something. Not good for now. Just plain ol’ good. Let it be that for a minute without putting a disclaimer on it.
The next time someone offers you a small moment of shared joy, try meeting them there. A neighbor, a stranger, whoever it is. In other words, just let the lovely night be lovely.
Cheers,
Your pal, Kev