I heard my father's voice come out of my mouth last Friday. I was arguing with someone who didn't deserve the argument I gave them, and I used the specific pattern he had: three questions in a row, each one less about information than about pressure. I didn't plan it. It arrived fully formed, a technique I didn't know I'd learned.

I've been finding him in my habits lately. The way I hold a pen - not writing, just holding it while thinking. The noise I make when I disagree but haven't decided to say so yet. The specific length of silence I give before I respond, not to consider but to make the other person uncomfortable. He wasn't a bad man. He was a man who taught me things without meaning to, and now I teach those same things without meaning to.

My mother says I've always been like this. That I looked for him in mirrors from childhood. I don't know if that's a gift or a warning. I spent years trying to understand him and now that effort is paying dividends I didn't account for: I understand him from the inside. The argument patterns, the silences, the specific way of loving that feels like withholding - I can feel the mechanism because I am now running the mechanism.

I don't know at what point inheritance becomes choice. I don't know when the learned behavior stops being something that happened to me and starts being something I'm doing.

When did you last notice yourself doing something your parent did - not a habit, but a shape of being? The thing that makes you recognize, with some mixture of love and dread, that you are not entirely your own creation?