The power of staying with your own perspective.

James Baldwin once wrote about the power and unique gift of one’s “inheritance” in the abstract sense – meaning non-material legacies passed down from our ancestors. In the context of the book “Just Above My Head” (1979), he argues that you can truly live a meaningful life only if you acknowledge, respect, and stay true to your own story.

And yet, many of us still fall into the unhelpful belief that the grass is greener elsewhere.

It’s interesting to consider how we spend the first half of our lives not just discovering ourselves but also learning, mimicking, turning to the outside world within the cultures of our homes, schools, workplaces, and, more recently, virtual reality, to figure out what works, how to survive, and what we need to do to “succeed” in the typical and most known sense.

Most of the time, this looks like a good education, healthy relationships, financial stability, and fulfilling work. Ambitions are modelled for us to set us up for the best that life has to offer, and often these are worthy goals and markers of conventional success.

In the pursuit of these prescribed goals, the less-than-desirable also occurs – family struggles, romantic mishaps, or professional pursuits that don’t quite fulfill. There are so many versions of what we believe takes away from a perfect life, and these can mark us irreversibly.

We end up feeling handicapped, confused, stagnant.

But the good news is that your specific combination of accomplishment and struggle can become a source of power if you’re intentional. A life trajectory, when it’s truly your own, isn’t just a timeline of events — it’s a pattern of meaning. No one else carries your exact blend of lineage, memory, desire, luck, timing, and choice. That alone is a kind of wealth.

Family history — the good, the bad, the ugly — leaves us with stories of survival, rupture, ambition, and silence. Those stories give us strength and maturity. Unfinished emotional business can sharpen your future awareness and offer you models for living to replicate or consciously refuse.

As we grow, we evolve to discover innate talents and tendencies that shape our tastes, relationships, work ethic, and goals. Once identified and pursued, we can turn these into not simply lives that feel aligned, but also into something that gives back to our communities and the next generation.

Whether in our creative work, our families, or the way we show up professionally, the forms our contribution can take are endless.

All the above can turn from individual self-expression to stewardship and true contributions once we’ve matured.

The gift here isn’t simply random life lessons, but depth. That depth forms the foundation for the second half of our lives and the lens through which we create.

Life is long and often complex, and in social, political, and cultural climates that constantly reward replication over originality, it becomes easy to dilute ourselves — to compare, to compete, to mimic what appears to be working for others. But culture is not shaped by duplication. It is shaped by individuals who are willing to stand inside the full weight of their inheritance and use that to shape what exists around them.

“What only your life can give” is not a perfected version of someone else’s ambition or a romanticization of trauma. It is your particular synthesis of history, rupture, instinct, taste, discipline, and choice directed with intention. When we stop attempting to escape our story and instead cultivate it, we stop asking where we fit and begin defining what is missing. What is missing is the perspective that only we are positioned to offer.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope what you have read has somehow educated, informed, or inspired you.

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