Triangle Sandwiches

Find out about my genetic history

Finding out about my genetic history has been a life goal of mine ever since I can remember and is probably the most intensely personal life goal on my life list yet, and the one that means the most.

I was adopted when I was only a few days old from South America and brought to live in England by my adoptive parents. The circumstances of my birth, of my birth parents and their situation are unknown and incredibly murky. Without going into all the details here, I can safely and unequivocally say that it would be almost impossible to find out anything about who my birth parents are or where I came from.

Identity is something that most of us take for granted. It is completely intangible but surrounds everyone like a dense gas cloud at all times. I believe that there is two parts to our identity - first, there is the 'you' that is constructed daily, partly by yourself and partly made up from the influences of the people and environment around you. Second, there is a more basic level to your identity - I am , born to , from , from . This part of your identity, I think, is less about you as an individual person and more about where you fit in to the fabric of life in a greater sense - the sense of belonging to a particular group of people. I imagine that for most people, this part of your identity is so base and natural, that you hardly think of it at all. The fact that you know that you are descended from your parents, that you know the very basics of your heritage like what country and race you belong to, that you might have 'your dad's nose' or 'your grandma's smile', that even if you don't subscribe to the beliefs or values or traditions of your family/race/religion, you know that you fit into some long line of continuity that has been passed down through generation to generation.

It is this side to my identity - as trivial and meaningless as it might sound - that I have always felt is missing. Missing is probably too unemphatic of a word. I can only think to describe it in the most cliche way I know - it feels like a constant hole inside of me, but a hole that is attached to a long heavy chain with a humungous dead weight at the end of it. The drag of this dead weight is always there with me - not a day goes by without me feeling its effects somehow, and occasionally, this weight will catch on something - maybe its on my birthday, maybe someone says something completely normal but that somehow rings in my mind, maybe its when I see the rest of my adoptive family together looking like such a perfect fit - but the weight will catch, and the hole will begin to stretch and stretch until the uncontrollable waves of emotion begin to roll.

The worst part of missing this part of myself, is that due to my situation, it's practically a given that I'll never be able to find it. I can only clutch at the most fleeting of straws - like visiting my country of birth and staring into the faces of a thousand strangers trying to find my reflection looking back at me, or by staring at my face in the mirror and hoping for some kind of movie-like mind shift where my face suddenly will morph into the face of my mother who tells me that everything will be okay. These futile attempts only serve to depress me into facing the huge, staggering improbabilities of ever finding a place where I feel I belong.

Then, a faint glimmer of hope appeared. I had heard of these genetic testing companies that will test your DNA and tell you some things about your ancestry. These tests are pretty far removed from the more immediate genetic concerns that I had - namely finding out about my biological parents - yet, in the absence of anything better, finding about my ancestral background had to be better than nothing. At the time, the cost of doing one of these tests was prohibitively expensive, so I put the idea to one side and waited.

A couple of months ago, I found the right genetic testing package for me, at a price that I could afford, and that would not only tell me about my genetic ancestry but that would also screen me for genetic diseases and health issues. This was also an incredibly important part of making this decision - I have no anecdotal information about my family health that doctors always like you to divulge - I don't know if there is a history of breast cancer in my family for example. I am flying blind, and finding out more health information would help to give me at least some peace of mind in that area.

So I sent off for my testing kit, and it arrived pretty quickly and to lots of excitement by me. It was incredibly simple to do - I basically had to summon up all the saliva I could possibly get my mouth to produce and hurl it into the provided tube until it was full! Easy! The hard part came with posting this package back. I was carrying round a package containing my own saliva for a good few weeks (I'm not even kidding) until I managed to find the right type of DHL depot to send back my "human materials". Yep, totally pushed me over the edge into 'weird lady' territory.

The lab took 6-8 weeks to process my results, which was an interminably long wait for me. You get your own log-in to the private area of their website where you can then check up on your results, and they said they'd email me when my results were available for access. This of course, did not stop me from checking the website constantly in case my email hadn't arrived/ Even though I knew that these results wouldn't really tell me anything particularly concrete, it was like taking the tiniest step forward in gaining knowledge about myself, it was me holding on for dear life to the only piece of relevant information that I could try and get. This information meant more to me than anything else.

Finally, my results were in. I was incredibly nervous clicking on the link to take me to viewing my results. I was going to go from knowing absolutely nothing about myself, to jumping (in my mind) a huge chasm forward in self-knowledge. And it could say anything.

So, turns out I'm haplogroup A, found in Native American populations. This basically allows me to legitimately say I'm a total badass Native American and claim my own Native American name (tbc!).

Here is some more information about me from the website for the hardcore reader:

If you've still made it down here, I'm very impressed! Anyway, to wrap up, I feel amazing that I've been able to further my self-knowledge every so slightly. I can't really describe how much it means to me to know this information. Finding out the health-related information is also incredibly useful and I'm really thankful that I got the opportunity to find it out. Next step is somehow figuring out how I can jump to my next self-discovery adventure! :)

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