[October 2026]

Life is a dance of questions. We are wired to be in connection and, given the many ways humans have become disconnected with each other, there are many things we are curious about when encountering one another. Who are you? Who are your people? Can you understand me and my community? Are you trustworthy? Are we the same or different or — usually the case —  simultaneously both the same in some ways and different in still other ways? 

These inquiries sometimes remain broad. Other times they are specific to race, culture, or any of the other many facets that make us who we were. To ask about someone’s race is to ask who their ancestors are. To ask about lineage. On the surface, this may seem a simple inquiry. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is very not. Now I am going to write for a moment theoretically, not necessarily about myself or my family. Set me aside for a moment. 

Many of us are accustomed to the comfortable fiction that lineage is neat and tidy. That it behaves under a microscope. That is part of why we might ask this question casually. We know, however, that something like colonization – for example – has been really messy. Continues to be messy. Thus, for many reasons, sometimes adopted babies have been passed off as biological and sometimes biological babies have been passed off as adopted. Some people were conceived through affairs, secret relationships, condemned marriages, or sexual assault. 

And often in families where one or more of these complicated things has happened, there are multiple versions of the narrative, each threaded with its own genre of silence. And often when that is the case, each person has come to believe the version of the story they need to believe for their own survival. To upset the balance of what someone believes for the sake of their own survival can be dangerous. Especially where there is severe trauma (personal/intergenerational), substance use, mental health struggles, or all of the above, it can even be fatal to those who are most vulnerable. 

Truth-telling is not to be taken lightly. To out a truth that upends someone’s life must be done intentionally, as healing medicine, not unceremoniously or as a bargaining chip. Timing matters. Context matters. Otherwise, in forcing a reckoning without consent, without the container of grounded process, we run the risk of perpetuating or deepening the kind of colonial violence that created these wounds in the first place. 

And that is why a seemingly simple question is, in fact, often not so simple. 

Now, let us turn away from the theoretical and back towards me. What am I about? While I will, of course, not understand everyone fully right away, I arrive now, again, always arriving, to this being alive… I bring willingness to listen and a commitment to ongoing transformation — for myself, for all those with whom I am connected, and for the communities/institutions I am engaged within. And I am grateful, always, for all the learning we have done/will do together. Let us dance with the questions, sans microscope.