A room with two doors.

As an adoptee I have a strange chance, don't I. A chance to choose my family; my parents. It might be a choice that's semi-blind, but both they and I have the opportunity to open the door to that room, that holds all our demons combined. Whether or not they choose to step into it from the other end, I will have to fight.

It's only the illusion of choice, of course, like everything else in life. But that illusion seems more and more like an integral part of "being human". It forces contemplation, appreciation and responsibility onto us, which we seem to need to be happy.

So I'll play along. I'm making the choice. I'm opening my door. Let the demons out to play, I'm finally ready.

the choice of What If

Tomorrow I am off to meet other Korean adoptees, mostly Swedes but also from other parts of the world, and to listen to a bunch of them talking about, well... us. I asked myself "why", just before, and I'm not sure. I think, because I want to determine just how big a part of me this really is.

But as to "how big parts of us things are" it's a little arbitrary, wouldn't you say? Would I be this hopeless unmotivated game geek with author dreams if there had been nothing wrong with my leg? Or would I be a world famous dancer and model with posters in half the male population's bedrooms? Could anyone say that the two are the same person? And would my leg problem be the "defining" in my life, if we knew for a fact that the other path would have happen had it not been? Since there's so many other "defining" moments. Had I not gone to school away from home at 16 I might not have failed and lost confidence, but I might also have withered into a voiceless mouse in a corner without the support and inspiration of the people I met there. Or, everything might have gone exactly the same. So who can say which choices actually made a difference in our lives, and which don't. Maybe the big choices don't really matter, and some random small ones end up dictating our lives.

Well, the choice to go to this seminar will probably not lead to any life-defining changes. Unless I meet the most violently handsome Korean guy with whom I elope and raise sixteen babies, or a giant robot decide to invade Stockholm just tomorrow and beam me up into space. While those two would certainly be fun, it's the tiny little realistic "what-if"s that really scare/excite me. Like, what if I meet someone who is actually a younger sibling of mine, adopted away as I was, and we would possibly never know.

You know, thinking about that, any younger adopted Korean could be a sibling. Okay, so if that violently handsome Korean guy is not older than me, then I'll say goodbye and thanks for the fish. Do not want to go near that possibility, especially with a prospect of sixteen babies.