My father is a gentle man. Curious, warm, the kind of person who can spend hours inside a book without noticing time pass. He never raises his voice. He never pushes. He moves through life slowly, carefully, as if not wanting to disturb anything.

He was raised to be humble and polite and unobtrusive, and he followed that instruction so consistently that it shaped his entire posture toward the world. He lives more comfortably in thought than in action.

One year, for his birthday, I drew him as I saw him. A sloth hanging from a stack of books. A peace sign behind him. An unfinished puzzle as a background. He was flipping pages, as if the answer to his dissatisfaction might eventually show up in print.

He laughed immediately. No defensiveness, no denial. He hung the drawing where other people could see it.

Only later did I realize the drawing wasn't just about him.

I had absorbed more than his curiosity and gentleness. I had absorbed his way of disappearing. Not by leaving, but by drifting inward. Staying busy in the mind while the body stayed still. Thinking instead of acting. Consuming instead of confronting. The rule was never spoken. If you don't push, you don't risk. If you stay inside thought, nothing can really touch you.

Even now I feel it pull me toward information when something heavier is nearby. A difficult conversation waiting, and I open an article. A decision sitting on the table, and I research one more angle. It doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels like comfort. It feels like home.

Here's the mechanism I couldn't see for years because it was too close. You don't just inherit your parents' values. You inherit their strategies. Their way of managing discomfort becomes your way of managing discomfort, not because you chose it, but because you learned it before you had language for what was happening. By the time you're old enough to examine it, it doesn't feel learned. It feels like who you are. You say "I'm just someone who likes to think things through" the same way my father would. And it's true. But it's also a strategy someone else built to protect themselves from a world that felt too much, and you picked it up like an accent.

That's why these patterns are so hard to change. You're not fighting a bad habit. You're fighting something that feels like your identity. Questioning it feels like questioning yourself. So you don't. You call it personality and let it run.

Understanding where it came from didn't make it disappear. But once I saw I'd inherited a strategy I never agreed to, it became harder to treat it as a trait. It's not who I am. It's a solution someone else found that I kept using because it was already installed.

I love my father. The drawing was affectionate, not cruel. But the gentlest people can teach you the most invisible ways to hide. And the hardest part isn't seeing the pattern. It's accepting that the person who gave it to you didn't know they were giving it.

The move I use now is to catch the drift at the point of entry. When I notice myself reaching for information, research, or thinking as a response to something that actually requires action or feeling, I ask: "Am I learning something I need, or am I hiding somewhere familiar?" The honest answer is usually obvious. And when it's hiding, I don't force myself to act. I just close the book, the tab, the article, and sit with whatever was underneath for thirty seconds. That's usually enough. The thing I was avoiding is almost never as heavy as the effort of avoiding it.

My father still reads. I still drift. The difference is I can see the pull now, and seeing it gives me the half-second I need to choose whether to follow it.