Some Mornings The Mirror Is A Customs Agent
Some mornings the mirror is a customs agent. "Papers, please."
I present a face I didn't consciously choose and a biography I never auditioned for. Born into a longitude, issued a name, assigned to a specific moment in history, stamped by the weather of a family system. Particularity is a miracle that also feels like a prank. "Welcome home. 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 here in my arms, and the audience is already seated. I can curse its quirks or I can learn its temperament and coax something like music from 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, well, 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 and implicitly chose not to see.
Into that circus 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, hurried past their grief, and rushed 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, clarity, and basic human instinct to say, Slow down. Mourn first. Grieve before you leap. To offer the wisdom the moment demanded. But no one did.
Expedience ruled the day. Their grief was treated as an inconvenient obstacle, something to be paved over in the rush back to normal. With their lives still in pieces, and the ink on their grief still wet, they signed on to adopt a baby boy who would be born just weeks later. That baby was me. The professionals handed them the script, not advice so much as catechism, to be memorized and repeated, until it calcified into truth. They were told: Tell him early, tell him often, and above all, play the house slogan, on repeat:
You're one lucky little boy.
Where others were destined, you were chosen.
Chosen because you're special; special because you were chosen.
And don't you ever forget it.
To outsiders these words drift down softly 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. Every adoptee knows that “chosen” is code for letting sleeping dogs lie. An equally absurd, domestically sanitized version of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." Don’t tell anyone you’re confused, hurt, scared, or angry. Maintain the peace. Protect the story. So we keep it in. We push it down. And we comply.
But beneath the pageantry, something else takes root. A mind tuned for hypervigilance. A baseline skepticism. An omnipresent, quietly contrarian posture toward belonging itself because when your earliest attachment was severed, reassurances don’t feel comforting; they feel conditional and provisional and uncomfortably revocable. People can insist you’re home all they want, but something in you never stops scanning for the exit. The nagging whisper never goes quiet — this can all be taken away. And alongside it, the what-ifs and why-me’s spin parallel lives as vivid and persuasive as the one you’re living. Gratitude is a brittle mask when what you actually feel is rupture — drift, estrangement, the sense of having arrived without consent or a map. This isn’t just my story. 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. To start from the beginning. “Well then,” I said, “I guess I should start with having been 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 deep. 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 casino 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 or fortune. It is lucky. And it is fortunate. But neither luck or fortune grants 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, dig deep, 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 fortune that put it in my hands.