You Get To Choose Your Own Ending

I have my middle school bully to thank for my favorite tween book series, Choose Your Own Adventure.

To this day, nostalgia brims over my grey matter as I reminisce about all those recesses reading, ensconced in the library. But it wasn’t just a safe haven away from my bully. It was the first time I’d seen my story in print.

Before you jump to conclusions, this isn’t a book series about Asian adoptees. It’s not even about family, orphans, or identity.

Simply put, they were stories that gave the reader, me, agency.

As an adoptee, I’ve been gifted a unique kind of agency over my life. I don’t have a heritage to point to – to blame for my failings or to embrace for my successes. And while we all have agency, to some degree, to choose our own endings, I have the rare opportunity to choose my own beginning as well.

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Many of us are given something of a template to begin with. We can trace our curly hair back to a second cousin, and our temperament back to a great grandparent. We can point to an instance in which someone in our family loved a certain dish, and feel grounded in knowing that this is part of who we are. Proof that we belong.

But when we have to fabricate those connections, it’s harder to rely on them. It’s harder to trust that this similarity is because we’re family, and not because we’re just two people who happen to like donuts holes. Who doesn’t like donuts holes?

There’s loss in that sort of reality. But there’s also freedom.

We all get to choose our own endings to some degree. Human nature clings to the idea of free agency. And it’s easy to compare it to taking a long journey. One in which you know where you started as you travel farther down your path, trusting that your past will always be there to anchor you. We may not like where we came from, or who accompanied us along the way, but we can point to our origin and say, “this is where I’m from.”

Ambiguity in any scenario is uncomfortable for most. Ambiguity as the origin story feels both unsettling and liberating.

As I continue to unpack and understand the impact of being re-orphaned through the loss of my parents, I’m comforted by my memories that surround the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and how they made me feel like I belonged.

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My journey in this life started as a Choose Your Own Beginning story, an extra ordinary privilege (and challenge) of having agency before I even knew what my left toe was. It’s offered me sea legs to weather uncertainty, and a faith in my ability to choose deliberately.

There’s a great many things in this life that we have little control over. But with a little creative thinking, and a “choose your own adventure” mindset, that which stings initially can become an epic catalyst on the path towards our freedom.

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