To find our way back to those parts of us that get buried beneath the world and all the other people within it, we need to lay bare what’s causing so many of us to get lost in the first place. Because this mass losing of self, this epidemic of alienation, isn’t happening by accident. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system actively designed to separate you from you.

I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

When I read that study, I thought immediately of my father telling me about trauma being in my mother’s blood. Add to that despair and detachment. Add to that an inability to follow rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt. Those are all things that are also true of me, in some measure. They are the qualities I most detest in myself. They are qualities that would make it difficult for me to be a mother.

About foster children pinballed from home to home, their own families sometimes unable to track their path. Things she’d been able to not know, until now. There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same. A most precious ransom, a cudgel over a parent’s head. It was whatever the opposite of an anchor was: an attempt to uproot some otherness, something hated and feared. Some foreignness seen as an invasive weed, something to be eradicated.