The question my grandmother answered before I even knew how to ask it.

There’s a woman in our village who everyone calls Tantine Rose. She must be in her late eighties, now, maybe older — age sits differently on people who’ve spent their whole lives in the salt air of the Seychelles. When I was small, she used to watch me from her doorway as I ran along the beach road and she’d say, every single time: “Ou, tu es comme ton père.” You, you’re just like your grandfather.

My grandfather was stubborn. Particular. Prone to long silences and then sudden, very direct opinions. She wasn’t wrong.

But my grandfather never left the island. I did. And somewhere between Baie Sainte Anne and a decade of working across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Madagascar, and Europe, I’ve had to sit with a question Tantine Rose would probably find ridiculous: how much of who I am was already there, and how much got built along the way?

What the village thought it knew

On a small island, people read you through your family. You walk into a room and before you say a word, you’re already someone’s daughter, someone’s granddaughter, carrying traits that supposedly travelled down the bloodline like a recipe passed through generations. Certain families produced fishermen. Others produced teachers. The stubborn ones were always stubborn.

There’s comfort in that view. There’s also a trap.

I watched a cousin of mine — quick-tempered, argumentative, someone the older women clucked their tongues at — go work on a cargo vessel for two years. He came back quieter. More careful with his words. Not because the sea had replaced him with a different person. But because being in close quarters with eleven other men for months at a stretch, nowhere to storm off to, had forced him to find parts of himself he hadn’t needed before.

The temper was still there. He just had more company now.

The thing about leaving

When I moved away for work, I expected to be changed by it. That’s what everyone tells you — travel broadens you, exposure reshapes you. And some of that is true. I learned to read a room differently in Pretoria than I did in Mahé. I learned that what reads as bluntness in one culture is just normal Tuesday conversation in another. I picked up habits, rhythms, a different relationship with punctuality.

But here’s what no one tells you: you also discover which parts of yourself are completely immovable.

I’m still my father’s son. Still particular. Still prone to long silences before a very direct opinion. I’ve learned to dress that differently — to package it in ways that land better in a Antananarivo meeting room versus a beachside conversation in Praslin. But the thing underneath didn’t shift. It just got a wider wardrobe.

Experience doesn’t build you from scratch. It finds out what you’re made of. The person who shows up under pressure was already in there — they just hadn’t needed to come out yet.

A colleague in Pretoria

I worked for a while alongside a woman who had grown up in a family where harmony was not a preference — it was a survival strategy. You didn’t disagree loudly. You found other ways. When she moved into a work environment that expected open confrontation in meetings, that valued debate as a sign of engagement, it looked for a while like she was struggling.

She wasn’t. She was translating.

What took her time wasn’t finding confidence — she had plenty. It was finding the version of her particular confidence that could be heard in a room that only recognised one frequency. Eventually she figured it out. And when she did, she was sharper than most people in that room because she’d had to think harder about what she actually believed, rather than just performing certainty.

The core was always there. The environment forced it to become fluent.

What the sea taught me without trying

The fishermen I grew up watching were patient people. Not gentle, necessarily — patient. There’s a difference. They’d wait out bad weather, wait for the right current, wait without complaining, because the sea wasn’t going to negotiate with them. You either learned its tempo or you didn’t work.

Was that patience something they were born with? Possibly. But I think it’s more that the sea selected for it, over years. The impatient ones found other work. The ones who stayed got ground into a particular shape by something much bigger than them.

Workplaces do exactly the same thing, just with less honesty about it. A culture that rewards aggression will surface aggressive people and slowly sand down anyone who isn’t. A culture that prizes caution will do the opposite. Most people adapt. Then they mistake the adaptation for themselves.

That’s the bit worth watching out for.

The question I actually think about

I don’t spend much time anymore on the nature versus nurture argument as a competition. It seems designed to produce a winner, and I’m not sure there is one.

What I do think about is this: which parts of me did I choose, and which parts chose me? When I’m being direct to the point of abrasiveness, is that my father’s stubbornness or fifteen years of working in environments that rewarded straight talk? When I’m patient in a difficult negotiation, is that temperament or the memory of watching old men wait out the tide?

I can’t fully separate those threads. I’m not sure I want to. But I think there’s something useful in the attempt — especially when you’re moving across cultures, roles, contexts, and the person you were in the last chapter doesn’t quite fit the room you’re standing in now.

Tantine Rose was right that I’m like my father. She just didn’t account for everything else that happened after.

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Has there been a moment when something you always thought was “just how you are” turned out to be more complicated than that? I’m genuinely curious — drop it in the comments.