Nature, Nurture, Narrative

Having laid some groundwork in previous posts, I am now about to mangle a whole lot of words, with the hope that I won't completely lose everyone along the way.

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Your Nature is the sum of your inborn attributes. This can easily be thought of as genetic heritage, although it's being used in a broad enough fashion here that a certain geneticist may decide smash in my brains with a rock. How good are your eyes? How many limbs do you have? Are you male, female, intersex? How tall will you get if you receive poor nutrition, or good? Your nature doesn't provide utterly immutable facts - you can get corrective eye surgery,

Your Nurture is your treatment at the hands of the environment. This includes parentage and upbringing, and reactions to your Nature by others, although it never actually stops happening; formation continues throughout life. It can easily be thought of as your conditioning, in a physical as well as psychological sense (and if you're a psychologist, I apologize for the abuse of terms). Notably, from the perspective of this blog, nurture also provides you with language.

Your Narrative is the process of conversing with and conditioning yourself, and manipulating the environment to make that happen. Even at a very young age, a child can take on a role, re-interpret the world to better suit that role, and manipulate the world to suit. A child take on the role of Superman, decide that you are the villain, and grab a towel to wear as a cape. An adult might decide that he's a badass, interpreting others as wusses from that moment, and get himself a skull tattoo.

Now, there are no clear boundaries on these things. And they aren't objective categories; they're simply a useful way of sorting the world. But they're a tool that fits the purposes here almost perfectly.