Succession

A Mother’s Day reflection on inheritance, power, and the intentional development of selfhood. Using HBO’s Succession as a framework, this episode explores what parents truly pass down to their children, why internal architecture matters more than external positioning, and what it means to raise a child capable of surviving many different futures.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Yesterday was Mother's Day here in America. I know some of you are listening from all over the world, but here in America it was Mother's Day. And this was my third Mother's Day technically, depending on if you count the Mother's Day of pregnancy, which I do. That counts to me. So this was my third. And I've just been thinking a lot lately about what it actually means to shape a person. Not control them, not replicate yourself, not mold them into some perfect extension of your own ego, right? But really prepare them for life. Prepare them to become fully themselves. And weirdly enough, that line of thinking got me reminiscent, I guess, about one of my favorite HBO shows, Succession. Which is funny because on the surface, Succession is about billionaires and media empires and corporate warfare and deeply emotionally damaged rich people. But underneath all of that, I actually think it's a story about inheritance overall and what parents intentionally pass down, what they accidentally passed down, and what fails to transfer entirely. Now, if you're not familiar with the HBO show succession, it follows the Roy family, media dynasty built around a powerful patriarch, Logan Roy. And for his four adult children, who are all in one way or another trying to position themselves as his successor. And on the surface, the show is about money, business, power, corporate politics, media manipulation, all of that. So if you're into all of that, I highly recommend the show. But underneath all of that, the show is really about inheritance, literally, uh, about proximity to power, about what gets transferred from parent to child and what doesn't. Because what makes the show so compelling is that none of the children are complete enough to clearly inherit the throne on their own. So throughout the entire series, you watch them constantly trying to remix themselves into viability, forming alliances, pairing up, borrowing traits from one another, trying to become collectively what none of them are independently. And meanwhile, standing at the center of all of this is Logan Roy, a man whose peers recognize him as psychologically formidable, serious, internally solid in a way that his children never quite become. And to me, that's what makes this whole thing fascinating to watch, because the children inherit his world fluently. They speak the language of power, they understand the mechanics of influence, they know how to move through elite rooms, but there's still something missing. And I think that's why the show feels bigger than a family drama, because underneath, I keep saying underneath, underneath all of the corporate warfare and manipulation, it quietly raises a question. What does it actually mean to prepare someone to inherit something? And obviously, most of us are not coming from billionaire media dynasties. Most of us are not thinking about succession in terms of companies and private jets and board seats. So, in a lot of cultures, especially cultures without massive external wealth, legacy gets defined differently through language, right? I'm sure some one of you is a first generation of some culture and you can barely speak that culture's language and you get chastised for it, right? Recipes, religion, work ethic, discipline, ways of surviving. Internal transfers, I'll call them. And I think what I've been realizing this week, especially reflecting on Mother's Day, is that while some communities may lack external wealth, there can also be internal impoverishment, a lack of emotional regulation, a lack of seriousness, a lack of self-trust, a lack of coherent internal structure being passed down. You know what I mean? And what I understand much more clearly now as an adult is that my mother was actually, is actually, I should say, very wealthy internally. Not materially, internally. Because one thing about my mother is that she was always, I'll call it checkable. Not in a disrespectful way. I mean that if her words and her actions drifted apart, she corrected herself. She allowed herself to be corrected for that. When she said she was going to do something, 99% of the time she did it. And she always acknowledged that 1% of the time where she wasn't able to do it, right? It had to be like a wasn't able to do sort of thing. To this day, I use with romantic partners, especially the story of Christmas for me. Not one particular Christmas, but every single Christmas I ever had, like we didn't have it traditionally, right? Like, so to speak, we didn't have it. And so what my mom would do is buy gifts all year round and hide them at the top of the closet. Whenever she had like an extra $10, $15 in a check, she would buy something and put it away so that she never ever would get to Christmas season and be like, I didn't have it to get you anything, because she never waited until the Christmas season. My mom was notoriously like done Christmas shopping by October. That's how early in the year she would start that. And that's something that always stuck with me. Just one of the ways that my mom really took her word seriously, and she is still that person. And there was in general a seriousness to the way she moved through life, even without having very much. Like I would watch my mom budget carefully, make lists carefully, move through responsibility carefully. And looking back now, I realized those were inheritances too. Not financial inheritance, internal inheritance, ways of relating to responsibility, ways of relating to self, ways of moving through the world. And what fascinates me now is that my mother and I are actually very different people, which means she wasn't trying to prepare me for one specific external position. She was trying to give me internal architecture that could support many possible external positions. Integrity, critical thinking, self-respect, seriousness, a relationship to my own word. Things that would matter no matter who I became. And honestly, that's an incredible form of preparation because, honey, I have had quite a few external positions, we'll call it, right? And the reason I've been able to move through all of them to date is not because of an external inheritance. One, certainly not, but two, is also not because my mother prepared me for just one exact environment. It's because she transferred internal structures that could survive many environments. And now as a mother myself, I'm realizing how intentional that actually was. Because again, my mother and I are very different people. And I say that to say she was not trying to download herself into me. She was trying to prepare me. And by nature of the fact that we were always different, I'm now realizing how much protection that actually required from her. How many cultural pressures there are trying to flatten children into something smaller, more agreeable, more digestible, more easily assimilated. And I think that's what suddenly made the Roy Children make sense to me differently, because they inherited one very specific external position and almost no internal architecture to support it. The tragedy of the Roy children is not that they inherited nothing, it's that they inherited almost everything external and almost nothing internal. They inherited wealth, language, which we said earlier wasn't internal, but stick with me. Positioning, access, institutional fluency. They knew how to move through elite rooms, they understood the mechanics of power, they could negotiate, manipulate, strategize, perform, but they did not inherit groundedness, regulation, coherence, self-trust. And that distinction matters because Logan Roy himself clearly possessed some version of those qualities. You do not build something of that skill without seriousness, without psychological force, without a relationship to pressure. His peers recognized him as formidable, stable, dangerous even. But somehow, his children inherited the machinery of his empire more than the internal architecture that built it. And I think that's why one of my favorite lines from the final season where Logan just looks at all of his children in the face and says, You are not serious people. Land's so hard for me. Because he's not insulting their intelligence, he's diagnosing the gap between the external inheritance and the internal inheritance. They inherited his language of power without the nervous system required to hold it. And honestly, I think that's the real job of the parent. Not simply to provide access, opportunity, impressive optics, but to intentionally transfer internal architecture, even if you don't fully embody it. A sovereign child is a child who remains connected to themselves, a child who can regulate themselves, trust themselves, think clearly, recover from distortion, hold on to their own mind in environments that reward fragmentation. Because external inheritance without internal inheritance creates collapse. And I think that's the part of succession people misunderstand. The goal is not to choose between internal inheritance and external inheritance. Ideally, a child receives both, right? But internal inheritance is what allows someone to survive many different external positions. An external inheritance without internal architecture becomes destabilizing. Because internal architecture is what allows a person to adapt, to regulate, to remain coherent across changing environments, and for the Roy children to spearhead a growing empire into its next generation. And honestly, I think most people are only preparing their children for one external inheritance. But my mother, may God bless her, whether consciously or instinctively, was preparing me for possibilities beyond the life immediately surrounding us. That required an enormous amount of fortification from her that I have not historically given her credit for. Because the second you prepare a child for possibilities larger than the immediate culture around you, the culture itself starts pushing back. I remember when my mother sent me to boarding school. I went to a private boarding school for high school. Again, stories for another day. And the women around her, our family, our community, basically treated her like she was abandoning me. Like she was a bad mother, like I must not love her, like she was letting me drift too far away from their comfort zone. And she had to absorb that pressure constantly. She had to hold the line through all of that emotionally so that I could become the type of person capable of making large leaps later in life. And I think that's what I understand now about fortifying the parent. Because once you realize your job is not just to download yourself into your child, but to prepare them internally for many possible futures, you also realize the world will constantly try to collapse those possibilities back down into something smaller, something safer, more familiar, more culturally acceptable. Because the world does not simply pressure children into conformity. It pressures parents. And by parents I mean unhealed adults. It pressures parents into betraying their child's nature for social comfort. It pressures you to make your child easier to digest, easier to control, easier to explain, easier to flatten. So that means the parent has to become incredibly fortified emotionally, mentally, spiritually, because you cannot consistently protect a child's selfhood if your own selfhood collapses every time the outside world applies pressure. And honestly, this is where I feel most incredibly grateful to my mother because part of what she already fortified inside of me is that I genuinely do not require social permission to become myself. Or at this point, just exist at myself as myself. People have known me for redacted number of years. They already know it's useless. That internal coherence, that refusal to collapse under social pressure, that's part of my inheritance too. But what I'm realizing now is that my responsibility as a sovereign parent becomes threefold, frankly. First, I have to continue developing my own internal wealth. I still have to become myself fully. So that's one. Second, I have to intentionally transfer internal architecture to my daughter without trying to turn her into a facsimile of me. So that's two. And then third, I still want to build real external inheritance for her too. Opportunity, stability, resources, expansion, private school, trust funds, right? Like I still want all of those things for her too. Because I don't think the goal is to choose between internal inheritance or external inheritance. I think the goal is to successfully pair them. And if you're a sovereign person who does not come from wealth, but is trying to both build selfhood and legacy at the same time, your job becomes enormous. And honestly, that job is enormous. I I can only just say enormous again, because if you are trying to become yourself fully while also building external stability while also intentionally transferring internal architecture to another human being, that is sacred work. So I guess this is an open love letter, appreciation letter, not just to my mommy and to myself as a mommy, but to any mom out there, right, in the spirit of Mother's Day, any mother out there. But I think what makes that assignment feel possible to me is integration. Because one thing I realized thinking about Logan Royce specifically is that part of why the internal transfer never fully happened is because he never actually spent very much time with his children. And this is not me making some argument that mother should stay home or abandon ambition, but it is part of why my own North Star has become integration. I want to build a life where my daughter is close enough to witness how I actually move through the world. Because ultimately, what I want her to inherit is not just information. It's the essence of how I carry myself, how I regulate, how I recover, how I think, how I move through pressure. Because I've realized that embodiment transfers through proximity. Children absorb ways of being long before they consciously understand ideology. And so now, when I think about succession, not just the show, I don't just think about what a parent leaves behind materially. I think about what survives repeated exposure to them, what gets absorbed, what becomes familiar, what quietly becomes someone else's internal voice. And I think that's ultimately what this episode has really been about. Not whether external inheritance matters, it does. Not whether opportunity matters, it does. Not whether parents should want more for their children, of course they should. The question is whether the child is being developed internally strongly enough to withstand, adapt to, and responsibly carry whatever external life they eventually inherit. Because my mother gave me internal architecture sturdy enough to survive many different external positions. And the tragedy of the Roy children is not that they inherited too much. It's that they inherited enormous external positioning without the internal coherence required to hold it. And I think that's what succession means to me now. Not cloning yourself into another person, not controlling their future, not producing a perfectly compliant child, but intentionally developing a human being sturdy enough to remain connected to themselves across many possible futures. I have preferences for what those futures might be, but since it isn't my choice how their story unfolds, it's my duty to prepare for any unfolding. So I'll end this entry by asking what are the kids inheriting from proximity to you? And even if you don't have children, if you're a bad bitch, you have sons, ignore me, ignore me, ignore me, ignore me.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Let me know. We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.