A short story |“I always knew I was adopted”

Something a little bit different today...

Today we are sharing a fictional first-person story written from the perspective of an adopted person. While the details are imagined, the experiences it reflects are drawn from themes that many adoptees recognise and describe in their own words.

We have chosen to tell this story in narrative form because not everything about adoption is easy to capture through guidance or explanation. Some experiences are better understood through reflection, tone, and the spaces between what is said. Fiction allows us to explore those quieter layers, including how early experiences can shape behaviour, identity, and emotional responses over time, even when adoption appears positive from the outside.

Stories like this are not intended to represent every adoptee’s experience, nor to offer conclusions. They exist to create recognition, invite empathy, and encourage listening without assumption. For adoptive parents, professionals, and others connected to adoption, reading adoptee-centred narratives can help widen understanding beyond frameworks and best practice, and remind us that lived experience continues to evolve long after the early years.

“I always knew I was adopted”

I always knew I was adopted. At least, that is the sentence I usually use when people ask. What I mean by it is that there was never a moment at the kitchen table where my parents sat opposite me, hands folded, voices careful. There was no before and after. Adoption existed in my life in the same way the table did. It was always there. Solid. Unremarkable. Something I did not question because I had never known anything else.

As a child, the kitchen table was where most things happened. Homework spread out too wide. Arguments about vegetables. Birthday cards opened and pushed aside. Adoption came up occasionally, usually in passing, folded into conversation without emphasis. I absorbed it in the same way I absorbed everything else, without attaching much meaning to it.

Adults seemed relieved by that. When I said, “I’ve always known,” they often smiled, as though I had said the correct thing. As though knowing early was proof that nothing had gone wrong.

At the time, I thought so too.

Family, to me, was not about origins. It was about routine. Who woke me up in the morning. Who reminded me to pack my bag. Who sat at the table with me when I cried over spelling tests that felt impossible. I felt safe because things were predictable, and predictability mattered to me in ways I did not yet understand.

At school, adoption first became something I had to manage.

It was never the teacher’s fault. The questions were always ordinary. Fill in your family tree. List medical history. Bring in a baby photo. Everyone else reached for the same assumptions without thinking. I learned quickly that my answers required a little more effort.

I developed a script. Short. Calm. “I’m adopted.” Delivered lightly, as though it explained everything and nothing at the same time. Most people nodded and moved on. I learned to offer the sentence early, before anyone could ask too much.

What I did not say was how my body reacted in those moments. How my stomach tightened slightly when forms landed on my desk. How I scanned questions for traps without consciously meaning to. I was good at staying composed, even when I felt exposed. I thought this was just part of my personality.

At home, nothing felt particularly wrong. The kitchen table still held everything together. Dinner still happened at the same time. My parents still asked about my day in the same way they always had. I did not feel unhappy. But I did feel watchful.

I became careful without knowing why.

As I got older, the questions changed shape. Genetics appeared in science lessons. People talked about who they took after, whose laugh they had inherited, which grandparent they resembled. I laughed along, but I noticed how alert I became in those conversations, how quickly I checked my reactions before anyone else could.

By the time I was a teenager, “I always knew I was adopted” had become a kind of armour. It reassured people. It reassured me too, sometimes. It suggested that everything had been processed already, that there was nothing left to uncover.

But teenage years have a way of pulling at loose threads.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table again, older this time, filling out another form. This one asked for family medical history. I stared at the page longer than I needed to. The house was quiet. Someone was moving around upstairs.

Nothing dramatic was happening, and yet I felt suddenly unsettled. I handed the form back half-complete. No one made a big deal of it. No one needed to. But something had shifted.

I started noticing patterns in myself that I could not quite explain. How strongly I reacted to perceived rejection. How uncomfortable uncertainty made me. How much I needed to know what was coming next. I liked control. I liked clarity. I liked things decided in advance.

When people described me as organised or independent, I accepted the compliment. I did not yet see those traits as strategies.

There was also the question of gratitude, hovering quietly in the background. Adoption was spoken about as a positive outcome, a resolution. I absorbed that framing without anyone needing to state it explicitly. It made it difficult to admit when something felt complicated, or when I felt angry without a clear reason.

So I learned to keep things contained.

Adoption became something I thought about in private, usually late at night, usually without words. I did not feel distressed. But I did feel unresolved. There was no obvious place to take those thoughts, and no sense that I was meant to still be having them.

Life moved forward. School ended. I left home. New tables replaced the old kitchen one. New routines, new people, new versions of myself.

Years later, I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office, filling out yet another form. This time, I was an adult. The questions were more serious. Family history. Genetic risk. Conditions that might matter later.

“I’m adopted,” I said, again, out of habit. The words came easily. The nurse nodded and adjusted the form.

But as I sat there, pen resting against the paper, I felt something familiar rise up. That old tightening. The sense of being slightly unmoored, even though nothing particularly bad was happening.

It struck me then that knowing I was adopted had never meant I was finished with it.

It had meant that adoption had grown alongside me, quietly shaping how I moved through the world. How I monitored myself. How I anticipated loss. How I stayed alert to shifts in tone and atmosphere. How I learned to be fine before anyone needed to ask.

Looking back, I can see that trauma did not arrive as a single event. It showed up in the way I learned to manage uncertainty, in how I stayed regulated by staying in control, in how much effort went into appearing settled.

None of this means my adoption was unhappy. Much of it was good. Much of it was loving. Both things can be true at the same time.

“I always knew I was adopted” is often said with confidence. It sounds like closure. But knowing is not the same as understanding, and understanding does not happen all at once.

It returns at different points in life. At tables. On forms. In quiet rooms where no one is asking anything of you.

I always knew I was adopted. What I am still learning is how that knowing shaped me, even when everything looked fine from the outside.

Closing reflection

Stories like this rarely arrive with clear edges. They do not resolve neatly, and they are not intended to. This one reflects how adoption can sit quietly in a life, shaping responses, sensitivities, and ways of coping long after childhood, even when much of that childhood was loving and stable.

For some adopted people, reading this may feel familiar. For others, it may not. Adoption experiences are varied, personal, and shaped by many factors. What matters is not whether a story matches someone’s own experience exactly, but whether it creates space to recognise that understanding adoption is often an ongoing process rather than a finished one.

For adoptive parents and professionals, stories like this can offer insight into how early experiences may show up subtly over time, not always through obvious distress, but through vigilance, control, or a quiet sense of unease that is hard to name. Listening to these narratives without rushing to explain them helps keep space open for conversations that may unfold gradually, and sometimes much later than expected.

If this story has raised thoughts or questions, it is enough to let them sit. Reflection does not need an immediate outcome.

Speak soon,

The Walk Together Adoption Team