ACQUIRED LIVING SYNDROME
jerry KWATCHEY@kwatcheyjerry128608
1 hour ago
#poetry
ACQUIRED LIVING SYNDROME
by SIMU
Most people are not living
they are performing a life they acquired.
A borrowed script.
A hand-me-down identity.
An existence molded by the loudest voices in their upbringing.
Nurture becomes the dominant puppeteer,
slowly tightening its grip around nature
until nature cannot breathe,
cannot whisper,
cannot rise.
What should have been instinct
is smothered by instruction.
What should have been individuality
is strangled by inheritance.
So people move through life
wearing glasses they did not choose
blurred, short-sighted, long-sighted,
distorted by the environment that raised them.
And through those lenses,
their beliefs harden.
Their fears solidify.
Their worldview becomes a prison
with familiar wallpaper.
They call it “truth,”
but it is only conditioning.
They call it “the right way,”
but it is merely the only way
they were ever allowed to see.
And because their entire identity
was built inside that borrowed vision,
anything outside it feels dangerous
wrong, offensive, blasphemous.
They reject not because they understand,
but because their lenses won’t let them.
This is the tragedy of acquired living syndrome:
that a person can spend their whole life
defending a worldview that was never theirs,
fighting for a perspective they never examined,
and existing as an echo of what shaped them,
instead of the voice they were born to become.
But the moment you question the lens…
the moment you confront the script…
the moment you realize nurture is not destiny
you begin to see with your own eyes
for the first time.
That is where real life begins.
A Reflection from the SIMU Collection.
