Your Influence on Others

There are pieces of us everywhere

When I was eighteen, I shared a tiny apartment with a friend. She painted the kitchen walls dark blue with red trim and was so mad at me when I opened a liter of Coke that sprayed all over her painted walls. How different I was then, drinking Coke and not caring about the color of my kitchen.

Heather & I a bit later in life

But when the phone rang in that same kitchen (the old-school kind that hung on a wall that anyone could answer), we used to love the fact that no one could tell us apart.

“Hello?” I’d say, practicing my grown-up voice.

“Heather? Is that you?” I would just grin, satisfied that I’d passed for her age that was three years more sophisticated than mine.

When she answered calls meant for me, she could also fool people. We were morphing into each other and enjoying fooling the world with our newfound personalities.

I guess it’s hard to find your identity at that age. I was in such a hurry to move away from parental oversight and sisterly influence and find out who I was that my first task was to try to become someone else. My roommate was the nearest example.

We wore long fur coats (horrors!) that we found at Goodwill and drove around in her equally horrible boyfriend’s old Cadillac. We were young old ladies driving a float through our personal parade. I impressed her and her father for dinner one night with a roasted chicken filled with lemon and garlic, and she introduced me to her Stevie Nicks albums and Anais Nin books. We were learning to human from each other.

I’d started this practice earlier from living at home with sisters without realizing how handy it was. When I needed to present socially but didn’t feel up to the task, I’d invoke the mannerisms I’d observed in one of my older sisters. I couldn’t pull it off for long, but it worked so well on a temporary basis that I couldn’t believe nobody ever called me out. “Stop acting like her!” no one ever said.

But two people morphing into one are eventually going to disentangle from each other. The self wants to emerge. In our case, the bad boyfriend pushed her hard enough that she started reacting to me in a similar fashion and I abandoned her in that dark blue kitchen.

Today, all these forty years later, I still catch myself sounding a word, or curling into an expression that I know came from her. I can’t stop it. A part of me was formed through her. I am sure I also carry mannerisms from my sisters and parents too, but those who share genes are expected to do so. It’s a surprise to see a lasting change like that from a friend.

I wonder about ticks or habits I think I’ve developed that really started with ancestors. My father, a pianist, had a habit of “playing” musical scales with his fingers through air as he walked. His thumb would fold under as a makeshift keyboard and his fingers would move quickly over the thumbs, practicing piano wherever he went. I don’t play the piano, but I catch myself doing it too. I either key the flute, or an old stenograph machine learned in court reporting school so many years ago. While my instruments may be different, the habit surely came from him.

Shaping Lives

Parents expect to see their effects on children, but I notice that we imprint ourselves upon each other even when we’re not related. Once when I was moving, I passed my musical instruments along to a neighbor. Although he’d never played, those instruments inspired him to learn, and he eventually formed a band that today, some twenty years later, still performs. He told me he’d had my bass guitar rebuilt and promised to never get rid of it.

I encouraged another friend to have a baby even though neither of us had ever planned to. For some reason, I envisioned her in this new role, and she’s expressed gratitude for my encouragement. I’ve heard stories of others who’ve suggested a career path or life partner for someone else and the idea carried these people through new life experiences.

We help shape each other. We become each other a little, and sometimes we leave bits of ourselves behind for someone else to polish and remake anew. I think of myself as stubbornly independent. Many of us do. Maybe that keeps us from recognizing the influence others have on us. Perhaps the idea that someone can shape us is a bit frightening. We want to decide who we are. How else would we be unique? But maybe the influence of those we’ve had chance encounters with is part of what makes us uniquely us.

Observing vs. Influencing

Whatever it is, we do maintain our own will. So if you’ve absorbed something from another person, you can reshape it over time if you wish. You can decide to stop influencing others entirely and just enjoy the show the world puts on for you. Or you can be free to speak honestly when you feel inspired to share an insight with someone dear.

I’ve been enjoying that process more with my nephews as they age. Say what you like about babies. It’s young adults who are the most fun. Exploring life through their eyes as new adults in a world that’s different from the one we grew up in is a joy to watch and to participate in if you’re lucky enough to do so.

Being human even in such an imperfect world is a thrilling experience. My gratitude for it grows with age. Thanks for sharing your brief mortal life with me. I’ll be back next week.

p.s. Writing this piece reminded me of how my handwriting also morphs—something I wrote about recently here. And since writing this piece, I learned about an entire field of study I’d never heard of called graphology. It is an analysis of a person’s handwriting to determine their personality. Fascinating. Thanks to Sandra Fisher who writes Graphology Signposts here at Substack for introducing me to this world.