I recently stumbled upon this quote by Michael Crichton: “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” It resonated with me. As an adoptee, I never really knew my story. And I always felt like I was standing in water with the ground constantly shifting beneath my feet. That got me wondering. How much does knowing about the past really affect how we look at the present and our place in the world? And what if we don’t know anything about our past?

I was adopted as a baby. All I knew about where I came from was what the nuns at the orphanage told my adoptive parents: that I was of Italian, German, and Irish ancestry and that my biological parents were college students who couldn’t afford a child.

Not having a past of my own meant that growing up, I didn’t really have any interest in history. The past had already happened and I was looking towards the future. The working-class Italian family that adopted me was very proud of their history as fairly recent immigrants. But it was their history; not mine. They used to joke that they had found me under a rock.

Then the day came that I found my biological mother. And it completely changed my relationship with the past.

My biological mother was a historian and genealogist. She had a website where she posted about local history and her family tree, which she had traced back ten generations to the 1400s, complete with a voyage on the Mayflower along the way. Seeing this, it dawned on me that I had a real past, that my being had started long before my parents got me.

My biological father, it turned out, had passed away about a year earlier. But finding out about him came with a huge surprise: His grandfather had been Black. My father had struggled with his racial identity, being “too white for the Blacks and too Black for the whites,” as my newfound aunt told me. He had possibly drunk himself to death.

This new knowledge about where I came from rocked my identity. Before, I had my story that I used to explain who I was. Even if it wasn’t technically my story, I still saw myself as the Italian kid from a blue-collar immigrant family who had worked his way to becoming a surgeon. But now, I seemed to have three different stories of three different ships. There was the ship carrying hard-working immigrants from Italy to make a life in this new world. There was also the Mayflower, some three centuries earlier, carrying the settlers from England who would be linked to the founding of the nation and, ultimately, American insider privilege. And then there was the slave ship, carrying people from Africa to spend their lives in bondage and who would never be treated as free and equal, even long after slavery had ended. Which of these was really my story? Or were they all mine?

As I got to know my biological mother, I noticed something interesting about us. Having had no past, I was always looking toward the future. But she never had any other children and, in a way, no future, so she was always looking back at the past. Our meeting seemed to complete each of us somewhat. She could now see her future in me and my children while I could recognize my past in her.

And my three different stories? Once I worked through the feelings of confusion, I realized something: I was finally standing on three very solid pillars of bedrock, despite a lifetime as an adoptee constantly feeling insecure. For the first time, the sense of the ground shifting below my feet had stopped.

I am who I am.