“But let me try to describe it, at least a little bit. Meeting your biological family, seeing siblings who've just learned you exist, walking into the homes of your biological parents, even just having a drink or two with them — it's like stepping out of the life you know and into an alternate history of yourself.
If you are the biological child of the parents who raised you, you probably can't understand this. We all wonder "what if," certainly, especially for things that didn't quite go our way in the past. But those "what ifs" remain just that: unvisited other selves who disappear into the mists as quickly as we conjure them up.
What makes a just-met biological family so very powerful is the fact that all those what ifs become real. You'll hear stories about the wild parties your grandparents threw, or what a brat your sister was as a child, or what soda your father preferred to drink, and it will be so, so easy to see yourself in the middle of those stories, even as you know you weren't there. Because you almost were. This is the person you could have been, but for one decision somebody else made for you.
For the most part, I've found, adoptees prefer the lives they were raised in, but the connection to that other self can be intoxicating…
We're all, every single one of us, trying to discover who we are. Sometimes I think being an adoptee was beneficial for me in that regard, because I got to realize, later in life, that there would never be an easy answer, an escape pod from my home planet, a giant who came to the door and delivered me to Hogwart's. Instead, I, like everybody, was going to have to fill in the blanks myself.”
This is all really interesting to read, these reflections on belongingness and what makes us who we are.
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