What if you lost your parents at a young age? Would you be different?

What would change if you discovered you have a non curable cancer? Would you be different?

These are a couple of examples I got in mind while discussing the same argument today.
The question was along the line of the “Is he because of the sad things in life he got, or he’d like this in any case?”

We can change, and this is key to me.
The way we change, though, may vary a lot from person to person, depending on the context too.
Losing parents at a young age is something you can’t quite foresee which implications has.

But for one thing I’m sure: whatever happens to us, it’s not the event itself that makes us change.
It’s how we react to it.

See the event as a ignition, something that starts a fire.
The event can or cannot be the source of a bad change, something like “turning into a shitty person” and it’s how we react to it that makes the difference.

Each event, if you take it outside of the context, doesn’t have emotional value. It’s an event.
You can detach easily if you see it this way, but once the event has a context in your life everything changes.
An event can change your mood to the worse, and yet, it’s not the event that did it, but it’s you.
You did allow the event to take a major place in your life.

You could’ve left it there, but you didn’t.