Never Underestimate the Power of Recessive Genes

In the Punnett Square of life,
we are all nothing more
than our basic nucleotides
and our filthy, sexual, Darwinian urges.

Marionettes at the mercy
of Nature and Nurture,
no one escapes their own genetic blueprint;
no one gets to choose.
No matter the persuasive power
of ethos or desire or willpower or fate,
the dominant gene
will always, always be expressed.

So when you look at me
and my recessive mess of frizzy hair and mental illness and Type-O blood,
and then compare that to my sister –
with her dimples and her widow’s peak and her neurotypicality –
you kind of have to feel
like I got the short end of the stick.

And, yes,
I may have lost the genetic lottery
with my damaged, small-breasted, inferior alleles;
but I am a miscreant
who has looked Death in the face
and Evolutionary Biology just loves a mutant.

To survive, you see,
is simply a matter of adaptation
while nature picks off a selection of the weak;
but to live
is an entire odyssey of overcoming
in order to transcend
the hand of cards we are each dealt at birth.

I will never overwrite the DNA responsible
for the darkest kinds of ideation
that haunted my darkest days;
but through years of Herculean therapeutic effort
I have managed to find a life of joy.
I have managed to survive.

Never underestimate the power of recessive genes.

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Only as Sick as Your Secrets: Notes from Residential Eating Disorder Treatment,” a forthcoming memoir with Watertower Hill Press, “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novelette with Emerge Literary Publishing, and “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things,” a poetry collection from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks.