Yesterday, I did something uncharacteristic. Stepping away from the familiar bustle of London, I wandered into Rotherhithe. In the churchyard of St. Mary’s, I encountered a statue that made me stop in awe.
Carved from weathered sandstone, set upon a plinth shaped like a ship’s prow, stood the statue of Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, the ship that carried English Pilgrims to America in 1620. It’s a voyage every American schoolchild learns about. He’s rendered as St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, carrying an infant.
What struck me was the tension in that stone. Jones’s face is furrowed, etched with worry, his gaze fixed backward toward England, the Old World he’s leaving behind. The infant in his arms gazes forward with blissful hope, looking towards America. The captain bears the weight of departure; the child embodies the lightness of arrival.
I wandered through the graveyard, afterwards. The graves were recent: beloved husbands and wives, siblings, babies, sons and daughters. Dew glistened on the flowers laid on them. Time hit me sharply. Lives fully lived, lives cut short. I felt emotional, confronted by the brevity of our roles.
The word ‘roles’ lingered with me. Because isn’t that what we all carry? The roles assigned to us, often in childhood, that we perform well into adulthood, often to our graves?
Our families unwittingly write our scripts long before we become adults. One becomes the ‘funny one,’ another the ‘responsible one,’ another forever remains the ‘baby of the family.’ These early roles often turn into patterns we subconsciously repeat in every relationship we form.
Family therapists have identified numerous roles that emerge, which we enact as adults : the golden child who can do no wrong yet shoulders crushing expectations; the scapegoat blamed for everyone’s problems; the parentified child forced to nurture when they should be nurtured; the clown deflecting tension with humour; the lost child who shrinks into invisibility, and the peacemaker who sacrifices their needs to maintain harmony. Some roles seem benign such as the cheerleader, the nurturer, the thinker. But they limit our full expression. Even positive roles become cages.
Virginia Satir, the ‘Mother of Family Therapy,’ once wrote: ‘I am Me. In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine, because I alone chose it.’ Yet the fact remains that we cannot choose our families, nor the roles first thrust upon us. However, what we can choose is whether to remain trapped.
Friendships shift, bodies age, perspectives evolve. Yet many of us cling to old roles simply because they are familiar. Our loved ones expect us to stay the same, and stepping outside feels like betraying the person we’ve always been.
Ironically, growth demands precisely the opposite: the willingness to honour our past while breaking free of its shackles. We must learn to hold both the backward glance of understanding and the forward vision of becoming.
Like the statue of Captain Jones, we must learn to look backward with awareness while moving forward with intention. This requires honest self-reflection, painful introspection, and the courage to seek help when needed.
Captain Jones couldn’t reach the New World by clinging to the Old. Neither can we.
