What thing, experience or person has really contributed to the individual you are today?

   Who we are as people is drawn from our past experiences. I am not convinced that we have the capacity to influence ourselves in any certain way, and definitely not as much as many people might hope or presume. How we react to new situations (and thus what prospective ideas and situations we allow ourselves to get into) is determined by our histories with other situations we perceive to be related. Additionally, there are other forces not directly related to our experience as conscious beings, but linked to our biology that play a significant role in manufacturing the individuals we are today.

  My understanding is that genetics is our general guideline to living as we know it. We are biologically programmed to react in certain ways, to adhere to certain imperatives, and to reproduce. I speculate (and there may even be studies that support this) that even seemingly complex behavioral patterns (like love) can be explained by a sophisticated balance of chemicals and reagents in the brain passed down from ancestors via recombinant heredity. From this I figure that if  these complex behaviors - the ones we generally think of as fundamentally human, fundamentally "us" - are indeed just the products of chemical reactions in the brain, then the individuals we are today are really just reactionary shells. We are who we are by the grace of circumstance - victims of fate.

  I imagine then a classroom of students all given different writing implements, but assigned the same essay prompt. By virtue of the simple difference in the tool each person is writing with, every essay will be different at least at a basic level. Then you consider the environment, with some students sitting in the front of the class closer to the teacher and white board being more likely to stay focused than those with 5 rows of desks in front of them; kids sitting next to the windows, those that didn't catch breakfast that morning, and those with ADHD or dyslexia may also be less likely to focus on the task. Similarly and more generally, we are all influenced by whatever happens to be going on around us. Chromosomes as our pens, and socioeconomic status, geography, and everything else playing the role of the kickball game going on outside the window, we may fundamentally amount to nothing more than predetermined reflexive vessels of experience.

   Having now taken up way too much time seemingly ignoring the prompt, I'm going to try to pull it all together simply: every thing, experience or person contributes to the individual encountering he/she/it thereafter. In short, the person who has really contributed to the individual I am today is the person I was yesterday. After all, reminding myself of the first sentence in this post, where would I be without my informant?