Not becoming like your father is harder than you think. And you don’t even know how hard it is yet, because you don’t know enough about yourself.
Differences in opinions and tastes, everyday friction, bad moods, and stubbornness keep you focused on learning about your father. You build a collection of things you know about him, then grow to hate that collection, and then use that hatred as proof that you’re different from him.
As Philip Larkin puts it in This Be The Verse:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Because everyone’s default assumption is: I’m not the thing I hate.
But that doesn’t prove you’re different.
To learn more about yourself, you have to bump into things. When you cut your hand on something sharp, you learn how easily skin can be cut, how much pain a small cut can cause, and how quickly it can heal. You didn’t know any of that before you got cut.
You have to collide with other people to find out what kind of person you are.
You have to be provoked, humiliated, condemned, encouraged, angered, excited, hurt, disappointed, energized, numbed. You have to be envied. You have to have people resent what you have. Sometimes you have to go unnoticed, and other times you have to be noticed too much.
All of this happens when you come into contact with other people. Each of them has their own way of hurting you. One rubs you raw. Another leaves a bruise. Another gives you blisters. Another cuts you. Another burns you.
Only after you’ve been wounded by all kinds of people do the pieces of information you’ve collected about yourself begin to fit together, like a puzzle.
Only then do you start to see where people can fool you. What can make you cry. What can make you act against your own interests just because you want to react. What can turn you against the people you love. And what can make you abandon yourself in front of other people.
You learn where you shut down, and where you can’t keep anything to yourself. What turns you into a child, and what makes you unwilling to show even a child any mercy. What keeps you awake at night, and what makes you reach for a sleeping pill instead.
Once you’ve gathered all this information, you can finally start figuring out who you’re like, and how far you really are from the person you thought you were nothing like.
Most people who go through this process and realize they aren’t all that different from their fathers complete the puzzle at an age when it’s already a little too late to do much about it.
So whatever age you are, start gathering information about yourself. Don’t put it off until tomorrow.