I Was Special. I Was Chosen. I Was Part of the Adoption Charade
Some mornings the mirror is a customs agent. Papers, please. I present a face I didn't consciously choose and a biography I didn't audition for. Born into a longitude, assigned to a specific moment in history, stamped by the weather of a family system. Our personal this-ness is a miracle that also feels like a prank: here's your DNA, here's your surname, here's your destiny. Good luck.
What are the odds I get assigned this interior monologue, this oddball hunger for libraries and thunderstorms, these goosebumps for underdog victories and specific chord progressions. The older I get the more being-a-person feels like tending to a very specific violin. I didn't buy it or build it, but it's in my arms, and the audience is already seated. I can curse its quirks or I can learn its temperament and pull something like music through its stubborn wood. Which is to say, fate precedes preference. It's weird. It's weighty. It's wonderful when it works, and when it doesn’t, it's not so wonderful.
For most people that strangeness eventually fades into background noise. They forget the lottery they won or lost. But adopted people don’t get to forget.
The Adoption Industrial Complex of the '60s and '70s was a state-sanctioned charade. Less social service, more carnival sleight-of-hand, it was a system fluent in euphemism where grief was processed into contracts, truth was buried in virtue, and secrecy was protected by rigged laws. Birth mothers' names were buried away in vaults, their shame lacquered over in legalese, while infants were passed off as blank floppy disks, pliant, ready to be overwritten. Everyone nodded along, except the children, who carried the scar of their Primal Wound like contraband everyone knew existed but no one would name. Into that sideshow stumbled a young, grief-stricken couple barely out of their teens.
Just weeks earlier their first child was delivered stillborn, and the doctors told them they'd never conceive again. A loss this staggering, this disorienting and irrevocable, demands pause, reflection, the healing grace of time. But that's not what happened. Before they could catch their breath, they were jolted forward, rushed past sense, hurried past process, and waved through the velvet ropes into the strange bazaar of private adoption, a parallel universe with its own codes, jargon, and charity-scented logic. You'd think one adult in the room—a doctor, lawyer, social worker, even a relative—might have had the good sense, the clarity, the basic human instinct, to say, Slow down. Mourn first. Grieve before you leap. To offer the wisdom the moment demanded. Elegy over efficiency, lament over logistics. But no one did. Their grief was treated as an inconvenient obstacle, something to be paved over in the rush back to normal. Expedience ruled the day. With their lives still spinning out, the ink on their grief still wet, they signed on to adopt a baby boy who would be born just weeks later. The professionals handed them the script, not advice so much as catechism, to be memorized and repeated until it calcified into truth. Tell him early, tell him often, and above all, play the house slogan, on repeat: You were chosen because you're special; special because you were chosen. Chosen, special. Special, chosen.
To outsiders these words drift down soft like a lullaby, a sweetness they secretly want for themselves, I wish I’d been chosen, I wish I were that special. It's funny how desire has a tendency to skip lanes. Those who belong crave the drama of being chosen, while those who are chosen live with the ache of never quite belonging. For people like me, those words don’t land as lullabies at all. They never did. All I ever heard was a gag order disguised as a blessing, words polished into charm to hush the uncomfortable and soothe the guilty. All adoptees know, or at the very least, believe, that “chosen” is code for letting sleeping dogs lie. Don’t pry. Don’t ask. Don’t test. So we obey. But beneath the pageantry, our brains never stop whispering, you don’t belong here, and the what-ifs and why-me’s continually spin counterfeit lives as vivid as the real one. Gratitude is a brittle mask when what you really feel is rupture, drift, estrangement. This isn't my story alone, it's the story of a generation of adoptees.
For decades, what was dismissed as moodiness or fragility was more often the lingering aftershocks of that original severing. The fallout was predictable. And known. They looked away anyway. Adoptees grew up marked by higher rates of anxiety, depression, addiction, suicide, and a lifelong, private exile. More often than not these weren't quirks of personality or personal dramas; they were predictable wounds, denied, ignored, and buried on purpose. Let's call it what it was, a billion-dollar industry built on the convenient lie that infants forget. I can assure you, they DO NOT!
Several years ago, during a screening for ketamine treatment, the doctor asked me to recount my life story. He asked that I start from the beginning. “Well,” I said, “I guess I should start with being adopted.” He quickly cut me off, smiled kindly, and said: “You’re good, David. You don’t need to continue if you don’t want. All the adopted people end up here.” I was taken aback but not surprised. I’d heard versions of this many times before. In rehab twenty years earlier. In hushed confessions from others with the same invisible scar. From therapists who stopped pretending long ago this was a coincidence. The truth, we now know, is that the primal wound is very real, and it runs very deep. The trail is long, and the damage, often lifelong.
And yet, here I am. Stamped, scarred, improbably alive. By any measure, fortune's glitch, a one-in-a-million winner of a rigged carnival game. That young couple gave me their world. They gave me my siblings and cousins and friends who shared it with me. And in many ways, however tangentially, they gave me my children who hand me the deliciously impossible honor of shepherding them through their lives. You can call it luck. It is luck. But luck doesn't grant absolution. I'm still a product of a system that shuffled babies around like cargo and called it mercy. Yes, my number came in. I walked away with improbable prizes. But my gratitude is forever laced with a stinging guilt, haunted always by the ghosts of the millions who weren't so lucky. My other brothers and sisters.
This miracle, this prank, this violin in my arms is both a weight and a gift. And in the oddest way, it is precisely that strangeness, that sense that it could all have been otherwise, that has always pushed me to dream big and play hard. To draw from its cracked, temperamental wood a sound that sings. Not perfectly, not forever, but just enough to honor the crooked luck that put it in my hands.