I learned I was adopted when I was four years old. My parents didn’t mean to tell me yet, but someone else told me and I asked them about it. They did intend to tell me eventually, but I don’t know that they had decided when the perfect time would be.

Four was as good an age as any. The news wasn’t shocking or devastating. I understood the basic premise: my biological mother couldn’t care for me, and my birth parents couldn’t have children but wanted a child, so I became theirs. I thought it was kind of a cool story, something that made me special and different. As a four-year-old, I didn’t really have the emotional capacity to delve beneath the surface of this new information. Over the years, what it means to be adopted would gradually unfold, coloring all aspects of my life and personality. Thirty years later, I’m still learning how it affects me.

I don’t remember ever not knowing I was adopted. Maybe I literally always knew — I lived through the experience as a newborn, after all — or maybe I’ve just forgotten the time when I assumed my adoptive mother had given birth to me like my friends’ mothers had given birth to them. I probably didn’t think much about the origins of life at that early age. From the time I was in preschool, the knowledge of my adoption was always with me.

My adoptive parents knew nothing about my biological mother, and as far as I know, she was given no information about them other than that they were good people. They didn’t use an agency. My biological mother’s doctor went to church with my parents, and he arranged the whole thing. It was much simpler than the typical infant adoption — there was some investigation by the local social services agency, but there were no photos or bios or videos in which the adoptive parents try to make a good impression so that they will be chosen by a birth mother. Although my biological mother had decided to relinquish me a couple months before I was born, my adoptive parents did not know my race, gender, or health status until I was born. They knew there might be a baby available, and then they got a call telling them of my arrival and instructing them to pick me up in a few days.

My parents had no information to share with me about my biological family. They weren’t secretive or shameful; they just didn’t know anything. This was common at the time, and closed adoptions were the norm under Pennsylvania law, where I was born and raised. I knew I would have the option of searching for my birth mother when I turned 18, through a structured court process, but I also knew that her privacy was strongly protected and I might never be told anything at all, not even a medical history.

It is a strange thing to know nothing of one’s origins. For decades, I wondered, whose eyes had I inherited? Were there other people walking around out there with the same nose as me? Did genetics account for my love of drawing? Had I passed by close relatives without ever realizing it? Or would I instantly know them if I saw them? Were doppelgangers just coincidences, or was that acquaintance’s friend’s cousin who looked just like me actually my sister? It was sometimes fun to imagine the infinite possibilities (maybe I was royalty!), but having no clue about my origins created more than just a strong curiosity for information. It left a giant hole in my identity.

We are all shaped by both nature and nurture. For me, however, the nature part of the equation was a complete mystery. I could have come from anywhere. I could have been kin to anyone. That makes the process of developing a sense of self in childhood and adolescence an even messier and more challenging ordeal than it normally is.

I remember as a kid thinking that I didn’t have a consistent appearance. I would look in the mirror each day and see a different face than the day before. I actually wondered how anyone knew who I was when I looked like a new person every day. This may have just been one of those bizarre things kids think, but looking back now, I wonder if this notion was reflective of an unstable identity, a feeling of being unmoored. Unlike most people, I had no ties to anything before my third day on this earth. I lacked the common thread of family stories and the genetic link of shared physical features and personality traits. It was as though I had not been born at all, but dropped into the world by a stork.

Of course, I identified with my adoptive family. My large extended family has always treated me like one of them, and to my parents, I was their daughter. But I never really felt like I belonged. The family folklore and cultural traditions just never quite seemed to resonate with me. To this day, though I love them and am glad to have them in my life, I don’t feel as connected to my adoptive cousins, aunts, and uncles as I imagine most people feel to their family members. We have a shared history to an extent, but I don’t have the solid sense that I am one of their tribe. Like many adopted children, when I was growing up, I never really felt that my parents understood me or that I had much in common with them. This, of course, left me constantly wondering if my biological family was more like me.

Compounding the difficulty of forming a complete identity is a sort of shadow self lingering beneath the surface: who would I have been had I not been given away? As the 90’s Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors portrays, a small turn of events could arguably change the entire course of any person’s life. But the experience of being taken from one family and placed into another is so significant that some adoptees have a sense that their “true self,” the person they were meant to be, is a separate life unlived, a person never really allowed to exist. Yet they are usually given no space or context for grieving this lost life. Meanwhile, they develop a sort of false self to fit into the adoptive family, a family in which they may never feel a true sense of belonging.

In her book The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, adoptive mother and therapist Nancy Verrier notes that low self-esteem is common among adoptees and theorizes that this is caused by the separation of the mother and baby shortly after birth. Although the child intellectually understands that her mother relinquished her to give her a chance at a better life and that the adoption was not her fault, the baby experiences the separation as a rejection. On a subconscious level, the child believes something must be wrong with her to cause the one person who was supposed to love and care for her to abandon her. This deeply rooted belief often is not consciously recognized, but it shapes the adoptee’s self-image throughout her life. Verrier explains that adopted children can also create a false self that they show to others as a way of protecting themselves from further rejection, which can lead to social anxiety and a fear that their real, “bad” self will become known. I’m still working to unravel this, and I’ll write more about it in a future post.

I ultimately sought to fill in the gaps in my knowledge by searching for my biological family in my mid-20s. Stay tuned for the next post in this series to read about what I learned, how it affected me, and how I’ve adjusted to having two families. (Spoiler alert: I’m not royalty.)

As an aside, the PostSecret Facebook page posted a secret about adoption this week, and I thought the ensuing discussion in the comments was fascinating. Please note that in these posts, I am writing only for myself. Other adoptees have had different experiences, and while research shows commonalities among adoptees, not all adoptees fit the image that the statistics would suggest.

If you enjoyed this post, please share. To ensure you don’t miss future posts in this series, subscribe to receive notifications of new posts by email.