I was not the type of gift that came wrapped in pretty paper. Instead, I was packaged in a thin wrap-around shirt, tied loosely at my right side and a pair of beige bottoms. Almost a newborn, 30-days old according to the birth date listed in the parchment paper document labeled “Certificate of Transfer of Child.” I was brought from Indonesia to Sweden where I became someone’s daughter—for a second time.

My adoptive parents brought me home to their ground-floor two-bedroom apartment where tulips and dandelions grew outside the kitchen window in the late spring. They soon discovered an infected area on my left thigh. It sat open like a mini crater on my evenly brown skin, filled with a yellow fluid that was a reaction to the smallpox vaccination I had received before I arrived. My mom cleaned it out, careful not to make it any worse, allowing the scar to be minimal. And while this small wound may have seemed large at the time, it would be the smallest damage this gift arrived with.

After many years of losses and an unimaginable emptiness large enough to swallow both my parents, I was the child they were never able to naturally have. They had found a way to bridge what was missing in their lives, at a price. To them, I was a gift. They were not rich. They were average Swedes, working jobs that gave them more stability than meaning. It wasn’t how they had imagined creating a family. However, by the time paperwork was filled out, interviews checked off, and checks deposited, the story had shifted. Everything happens for a reason, and I was meant to be.

Like any other gift, I came with a return policy written on the last page of my transfer documents. It stated that if my parents could not properly fulfill the conditions they agreed upon—providing me security, and love, and guaranteeing my physical needs—they were obliged to pay the cost necessary for returning me to the orphanage in Jakarta. Like a gift receipt, there was no mentioning of the transactional amount, the price of me. And generously, there was no deadline given.

Nevertheless, I was loved, and I was cared for. I was held when I cried, fed when hungry, and comforted when tired. I was encouraged and cheered on when I held a spoon for the first time, took my first step, and spoke my first word in a language not native to my tongue. All of it documented in pictures and albums that would eventually rid all the evidence of ever being someone else’s child. The small wound on my thigh closed tightly, leaving only a scar in the shape of a crushed snowflake. I was as good as new if only on the outside.

It started when I was only a year old, my body acting and reacting in ways that seemed misaligned with this neat package. First there were allergies, my skin breaking out in hives and rashes. Each year there was another item to avoid: fish, tomatoes, oranges, shrimp, rose hip, strawberries. Then came the stomach aches around five years old, curled up on the kitchen floor with my knees hugged to my chest afraid something in me was going to explode. My parents rushed me to the hospital each time, all signs pointing to a ruptured appendix. Once we got there, the pain vanished like a ghost. Poof.  “We can’t find anything wrong with her,” the doctors shared after running several tests. We were sent home and told to monitor what I ate. There must be something that was introduced to my body for it to react this way. No one ever mentioned the things that had already been taken away.

I never asked how much I cost. As a child when my dad was alive, I didn’t care. After he passed away when I was nine years old, replaced by my mom’s new man and a stepfamily a year later, I cared.

“You bought me!” I screamed at my mom.

“Anna, that’s not…” she tried.

“I fucking care.” I threw my words in her face. “It’s your fault I feel like this cheap ‘thing.’”

I didn’t apologize. I was sorry, but not for what I said.

The stomachaches had by now turned into other aches randomly appearing throughout in my body. Some days I felt like I was on fire, other days filled with ice. I was melting and hardening all at the same time. It was too much to fit into the package I once arrived in, spilling over the edges. I didn’t know how to express it other than to be loud, reckless, and ultimately to disappoint. No matter how much I tried I was never loud enough and the person who was left most disappointed was me.

Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night to make small cuts on my arms and legs, letting myself bleed out what I could not find in words. Watching the blood burst to the surface with such ease, I was filled with both awe and fear. As I sat there in my twin bed next to the turquoise nightstand lamp, I realized that this was bigger than what I had space for. It left me with no other choice than to fight or those fears looming inside what once had been soft baby bones would metastasize.

I fought for decades, leaving my body exhausted. I couldn’t go on like this, so I decided to listen. I listened to the weight of my breath, the beat of my pace, and to the discomfort echoing all the way back from youth. I started to unwrap layers of what once had been a neat package, tearing through tissues and textures. There, underneath it all, I found what I didn’t know I had been looking for: pieces of my true self. My body had tried to show me all along, ever since the first day I arrived with that small, infected wound on my thigh, that I was not meant to be a gift, packaged and perfect. Resisting, objecting, and often hurting, my body was reminding me of who I was before the paperwork and documents, before the photo albums and cheers, before the crushed snowflake scar.