Sincerely, Your Genes

I hope this letter reaches you well.

I wanted to start out by saying you're a cruel, tubby, god-fearing, peetard braceface, and it's all my fault.

I thought your midterm presentation painting Columbus not as a sailing frontiersman of North America, which he wasn't the first to find, but as a curator of a social underclass through his revolutionization of slave trade, was brilliant.

You could tell everyone thought you were awesome, and you knew you'd made it. Things would be different now.

You were doing so good up until you got to the part about him probably being a Jewish Spaniard. It was obvious, and you knew in your gut that no Italian sailor lived his whole life without being able to write any actual Italian. The problem is, I didn't build you to talk in front of a group.

Public speaking is your country's number one fear because I made you to fear being stared at by a crowd. Up there alone and defenseless, I made you to run away from threats like that, so that you could survive and make other, smaller copies of me that could live on after you died. I can hardly be held responsible. Ignore my warnings and your limbic system short circuits your frontal lobe, causing you to leak out a nice little ammonia-scented puddle of sadness around you. That's a bad human, but like I said, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry everyone laughed at you as you slipped and fell in your pee puddle trying to flee the classroom. It's just another bad side effect of survival. When I was making your ancestors, and the slowest one of you got snatched by whatever was chasing you, it was always a huge relief to the rest of the group. The class's amusement at your tragedy is just their collective solace that pee pants city wasn't happening to them.

You're sitting next to Polly 'Skidmark' Gordon in the clinically-lit, brick box of a principal's office waiting for spare pants, probably a lost and unclaimed pair of tear-away windbreakers from last year's football team. She's saying people will forget by the weekend when there's someone else's tragedy to laugh at and be thankful for, and she grabs your hand to let you know not everyone sucks. The problem is, you're really stressed and nervous from peeing your pants and falling in a pee puddle and it's making your palms real sweaty. Polly reels back, yelling at you for not washing your pee palms before storming off. Really, truly, very sorry about that one. Like kicking you when you're down. See, and you'll laugh about this one day, but when you're on high alert, I prep your body to fight or flee in all these weird little ways, one of which is to activate the sweat glands on our palms. The fluid makes a makeshift friction in your skin pores that helps you grip surfaces and better escape danger, however, it does not make it easier for hot, sophomore girls to sympathize with you. It makes them think you're gross. Again, my bad.

Humiliated, your brain in turmoil, you fling an f-bomb at the grandmotherly administrator emerging from a closet with your fresh purple pants as you exit the school. You're going to kill me, but I'm responsible for that reaction too. See, I made you so that your ridicule craves revenge, because being wronged activates the same parts of your brain as when you're thirsty and someone tosses you a water bottle. It’s an urge to solve a problem, and it won't let up until you find a way to release that terribleness back out into the world again. She doesn't know it, but I made you yell at her to balance your brain.

I'm sorry you're sulking on the couch, mad at the world and ashamed of yourself, unable to rejuvenate and insulate yourself from the coming week of jeers and chiding remarks. See, the best cartoons don't play on Sunday because Sunday is god's day, which admittedly is my doing too. Religion just sort of happened because I needed to survive, so I made you really good at finding danger, even when there wasn't any. It's why you see faces in the clouds and sticks as snakes and not the other way around, because my survival depends on your ability to flee threats. I made you see patterns then worship them, because once large groups of you started trading with groups you didn’t know, you could only trust them as far as their religion lined up with yours. You were all held accountable to something bigger than you that you didn't understand, and it helped me help your predecessors survive when groups knew they'd be divinely punished if they weren't cool to each other. I even made you kind of crazy by letting you find meaning where there was none, making up answers from random pieces to calm the parts of your mind that need order. But please understand I just did it to survive. It's my cross to bear.

Because religion is preventing your Rocket Power and Rugrats Reruns you try to forget about your problems by tearing into that brown sugar and butter sandwich, which, and I know this is looking like a pattern, is my mess up again. I made hunger a switch so you'd know to go find food, and unfortunately I haven't had time to change your taste buds from when your relatives lived in the woods. I made it so you’d crave sugar and salt and fat, because they were once rare pickings, but now, now you're always craving what your mom stocked right in the pantry. I gave you a GPS tracker and all it's helped you locate is your early-onset diabetes, and I'm sorry. I know it’s a raw deal, sugar.

I was born in a time where danger was everywhere, and most of what I do to keep you alive now keeps you from living. It takes a while for me to change, so during this time of transition I only hope you can give me a break. I'm doing my best, but I'm just a glorified stoplight responding to what's thrown at me. I'm a bad carrier pigeon riding on your chromosomes and all I can do is defecate your DNA from one generation to the next. But you know what, you're still alive because of me, so you're welcome.

Sincerely,

Your Genes