One evening last spring, I was flopped on the front room couch participating in my daily ritual of scrolling TikTok, when a filter came across my feed: Which Brother/Sister Are You? I tapped to see the grid of bemused content creators sharing their results: The Smart One, The Rebel, The Whiner, The Animal Lover. Craving the forgotten rush of a Buzzfeed quiz, I tried it out for myself. The purple blocks of sibling titles, a clairvoyant roulette wheel, spun above my head before abruptly halting on my result: “The Adopted One.” 

I let out an uncontrollable, disbelieving cackle and immediately texted my sister.

“KAITLYN,” followed by my incredulous face. “How does it knowwwwwww?”

A few minutes later I got an “OMG hahahaha” followed by a very sweet looking selfie of her, the youngest in the family, sitting under the title “The Annoying One.”

“Lol well we know it’s accurate,” I teased. 

“We need to do Chris now!” she urged. I found a picture of our oldest sibling, and just about died when “Mom’s Favorite” came to rest above his smiling face. I immediately sent it back, along with an “I SHIT YOU NOT.”

“TikTok knowsss,” she replied.

We had long held that our older brother was by far our mom’s favorite, evidenced by his specially homemade birthday cakes and ability to speak his mind without consequence. But my mom swears up and down that she doesn’t have a favorite child and my sister hasn’t really been the annoying one since she was about 12. There is no denying, though, that I am, and have always been, The Adopted One. 

I was The Adopted One when I was a child sneaking into my parents’ closet looking for my birth certificate. It was there that I learned to swallow disappointment on my own, as I discovered their names printed where my birth parents’ should be. 

I was The Adopted One when I scanned every crowd I found myself in, longing to see myself reflected in the faces of strangers.

I was The Adopted One when every new friend or family member realized, “Oh my god, you could marry your brother!” (Oh my god what if I accidentally marry my brother?) and I watched as everyone laughed at my lack of belonging.

I was The Adopted One when in ninth grade science I tried, by way of my attached earlobes and green eyes, to reverse engineer my biological parents. 

And I was The Adopted One a year later when I discovered the photo album that my birth mom had sent with me when I left her. Unable to see her lobes behind her curly hair, or the color of her eyes that were downcast as they gazed upon my infant self, I latched onto how similar our eyelids looked in a downward glance.

I was The Adopted One when I gave birth to my daughter in the same hospital I was born in, attended to by a nurse who started working there the year I was born. Did she know my mom? Did she know me?

I was The Adopted One when I stared at my three-month-old daughter happily screeching on a rainbow-colored playmat, and struggled to fathom what could have torn my first mother and me apart.

I was The Adopted One when I sat alone at my kitchen table, and the family tree I swore I didn’t care about glowed on my laptop screen, pulling up sobs deep from where I had buried my ancestors.

I was The Adopted One when, standing at the foot of a bridge in my hometown, where my birth mom and I had spent our lives as strangers reflecting each other’s faces, I embraced her for the first time in 32 years.

I was The Adopted One when I was a secret guest at my biological father’s funeral, known only to a few others and the priest, who attempted to console me from afar by sharing one of my father’s favorite phrases, “God don’t make junk.”

And I am The Adopted One when someone asks, “How many siblings do you have?” and I don’t know whether I’m supposed to say 0 or 2 or 3 or 5.

I am The Adopted One when my birth mom is right there and my heart clenches in longing and fear around the questions that scream inside my chest.

I am The Adopted One when I stare at my daughter’s downcast eyes, and I marvel at the third generation of identical, gentle awnings of lashes that rest above our high, round cheeks.

I am The Adopted One when I choose to speak loudly, but only in small spaces.

And I will be The Adopted One when my time with my first mom is over, and I am left alone to make sense of our shortened time together. 

I will be The Adopted One when I decide if I will bide my time and wait for my parents to die to say all of this outside the loving confines of my people, or watch my honesty knock down what remains of the beautiful façade of family, of my childhood home, crushing me beneath the weight of all the things we’ve brushed under the rug.

I will be The Adopted One when I discover for myself if someone who is so familiar with the expansive fragility of family can ever really belong.

Damn, TikTok’s algorithm is getting really good.