Like many others, my journey of self-discovery has been a long and winding road. This road was paved with setbacks, triumphs, hard lessons, joy, heartbreak, and more than a few brushes with death. 

By the age of twenty-five, I was arrested nearly a dozen times, dismissed from college, disowned by my mother, and swore an oath to one day kill my father. 

Something clearly needed to change. 

By early adulthood, my life had entered a period of turbulence and self-destructive behaviors. Lacking any trusted mentorship, I was rudderless and faced the difficult task of changing course. 

But before I could figure out where I was going, I needed to understand what had brought me there.

My introspective tendencies led to constant self-reflection, but I struggled to make sense of it all. At the heart of my rumination were nagging questions: 

Why was I like this? 

Was it nature or nurture that had set me on such a destructive path? 

More importantly, could understanding the cause help me change where I was headed? 

The nature-versus-nurture debate asks how much of who we are comes from our biology and how much is shaped by our experiences and environment. For much of my life, I focused almost entirely on nurture. I examined my childhood, my parents, my relationships, and the experiences that had shaped me.

There was plenty to examine.

But it wasn’t until I reached my thirties and began struggling with crippling anxiety and other health issues that I started looking seriously at the other side of the equation: nature.

More specifically, my DNA.

What I discovered provided some of the missing pieces of the puzzle, bringing sudden clarity to things about myself I was desperate to understand. Several genetic variants appeared relevant to my physical and mental health, including biological pathways involving neurotransmitters such as dopamine and adrenaline.

Genetics didn’t provide all the answers.

In fact, some of the clues led me down rabbit holes, and many of the solutions I tried didn’t work at all. But for the first time, I had another lens through which to examine questions I had been asking my entire life.

That changed everything.

Over the next decade, I immersed myself in genetics, trying to understand the complicated interaction between my biology, environment, lifestyle, and experiences. The deeper I went, the more I realized there would never be a single explanation for who I was.

Genes weren’t destiny.

Neither was my childhood.

My life had been shaped by an extraordinarily complicated interaction between nature and nurture, along with the choices I made along the way.

Understanding that didn’t absolve me of those choices. But it helped me understand them. And gradually, it helped me understand myself.

That is why I decided to write this book.

This isn’t a book about genetics alone, nor is it an attempt to provide a scientific explanation for every mistake I’ve made. It is the story of a lifelong struggle to understand myself and the clues I uncovered along the way.

Some came from my childhood.

Some came from experience.

And some were hiding in my DNA.

To understand what I eventually discovered there, though, I first had to understand the life those genes were helping me navigate.

That story begins long before I knew what COMT, MAOA, or MTHFR meant.