Friday, April 02, 2010

Alien Baby: Genetics, Adoption, and How I Became Myself « TheGloss:

The results are interesting but they also underscore all the things I still don’t know. When people ask me how I ended up in New York, I can’t fully explain what made me leave Alabama despite the fact that no one in my family had. I probably played sports in high school because my parents encouraged it, but no one made me read books (my family doesn’t read much at all) and no one made me apply to college (my parents never went). No one made me pour myself into the hundred-and-one wildly disparate extracurricular activities—piano lessons, art classes, student government, cheerleading (rather unbelievably)—that now seem to have foreshadowed my professional interest in a wide of things that have nothing to do with each other. (On the upside, I am “well-rounded.” On the downside, I am “not focused.”) I don’t know where this comes from. No one in my family is like this. It doesn’t tell me why I’m terrible at managing details, why I’m a hyper-rationalist (sometimes infuriatingly so, at least to other people), or why I’m ambivalent about things being out of place and not in order and tend to be disorganized as a result, which is also infuriating to other people. The DNA test tells me nothing about this.