This weekend was a multitude of feelings and emotions. I feel like I'm 15 all over again. I'm visiting with my birth family more and more.. this weekend, our 'nuclear' famliy was all together in the same place for the very first time. It was a farewell party for my birth sister Candy. Birth mom, birth dad, birth sisters... all together. As I always have done, I was trying to fit in. Why do I do this? Why have I ALWAYS done this? Why has it NEVER, not once, not EVER... felt like I actually belonged despite my efforts? Is this a feeling that is life-long for adoptees? I don't fit with my adoptive family, I don't fit with my birth family. I don't fit ANYWHERE. Even in my relationship... I don't feel like I "belong". I feel like, through no fault of my own, everything good that happens will eventually come to an end. I will live my life full of memories. Memories of what was, memories of dreams. I will live my life as a fraction of what it could be. Who am I? Where do I belong? Maybe I'm too scared to let myself belong anywhere. Always the chameleon. Changing my colour to fit that of those around me. Some have called me 'original'. I don't. In my mind, I'm the biggest fraud there is.

There are moments, fragments of my life, where I don't feel this way. When I know, definitively, what purpose it is I have devised for myself, when I experience life from a place of strength and certainty. I thought that meeting my birth family would be one of those... instead I find myself a child again. A teenager - but with no rules. I can drink, smoke pot... do anything at all as I flail through the emotions, the doubts and the death of dreams. Coming to terms with the reality of a family that I never knew. An origin that is shared. An experience that is not.

Maybe that is the work of reunion? Maybe that is the experience of reunion. It is my experience. Is that where I belong? In my own experience?