Do Our Personalities Pilot the Way We Live Our Lives?

One afternoon not long ago, my body mocked my pretensions, toppled my carefully constructed persona, and forced me to rethink who I am.

I was lounging at the dining room table late on a Sunday afternoon, perusing the local newspaper and wearing my favorite home-alone attire -- faded linen capris, a baggy yellow T-shirt, and ancient bedroom slippers. I had a cup of ginger tea going; somewhere in the background, NPR's American Routes played a bluesy riff by John Prine. As far as I was concerned, life didn't get much better than this.

Just then, I heard slapping footsteps on the stairs leading up to our front porch. The screen door whined open. Voices. Muffled laughter. Youthful. Female. More than one.

The next thing I knew, I was on the second floor of our house, breathless, half-crouching in the hall. I had no sense of "going upstairs." I knew only that in one moment, I was loafing in the dining room and in the next I was on another floor, panting.

From my guard post at the top of the steps, I heard my daughter, Darrah, then 22, enter our front hall in the company of two other young women, their speed-of-light discourse punctuated by raucous laughter. Now I recognized the other voices; they belonged to friends of my daughter whom I'd known since they were in the sixth grade. Both were warm, engaging young women who I'm sure would have liked to say hello to me.

But all of that occurred to me later. In that moment I knew only: I'm safe. Noiselessly, I crept into my bedroom and closed the door. I attempted a few ordinary activities -- gathering laundry, making the bed -- that would allow me to feel like "myself" again. But my heart was still knocking. No amount of routine chore-doing could change what had just happened: I'd just charged up the steps at lightning speed to escape my daughter's friends. Look at you, a voice inside me whispered. You're a grown woman with a husband and a young adult daughter. You're a homeowner, a writer of books, a crack filler-outer of financial-aid applications. You could not have just done this.

But it seemed that I had.

I had some partial glimmer of what was going on. Even as I fled the dining room, some part of me flashed on a tight huddle of preteen girls on a playground, giggling under the hard sunlight of noon recess. I saw myself approaching, heard the talk dissolve into whispers and then amp up into hooting laughter, whereupon, at some invisible signal, the girls turned and dashed away. It went on like this for four years -- my persistent, helpless courting, their predictable, gleeful rejection. Now, decades later, I sprinted up the steps of my house and felt terror and grief rise up in my throat.

The truth is, I'm no stranger to running. I've done it a number of times before, though until that afternoon, I'd generally made my getaways on a smaller, less dramatic scale. Whenever I'd beat a hasty retreat, usually from other people, my customary response was to turn on myself afterward in shame and disgust. But this time, I didn't. Maybe the sheer extremity of my flight from the dining room -- the raw, biological force of it -- interrupted my usual descent into self-recrimination. The experience felt elemental, even cellular. I understood that I wasn't in control. I was filled with a sense of mystery, and then curiosity. What could make me do this?

Confronting Temperament

Well before I fled from a couple of benign 22-year-olds, I was aware of the reality of temperament. From earliest childhood, I'd been jumpy and vigilant, prone to register every rustle, tic, and cough of my environment. I've long known, too, that I'm introverted, publicly chatty but privately solitude-loving, forever seeking rooms and gardens where I can be alone. Still, until my recent sprint to the second floor, I didn't think much about temperament, which is generally understood as a set of behavioral and emotional propensities that's inherited and enduring. Predispositions were all well and good, I believed, but they seemed to me mere background data, not nearly as influential or interesting as the drama of my childhood or my considerable efforts to remake myself since.