Assigned, Not Chosen

You've been carrying something you don't have a name for yet.

It's that feeling you get at family gatherings when you're surrounded by people who are supposed to be your people, and somehow you still feel completely alone. It's the exhaustion of being the one who always shows up, always holds it together, always fixes what's broken, and still somehow never quite making the invite list when something good is happening. It's the guilt you feel for even thinking about creating distance from people you're supposed to love unconditionally. It's the grief that doesn't make sense to anyone else because the person you're grieving is still alive.

You've been wondering if something is wrong with you.

There isn't. And I need you to stay with me while I tell you why.

I have been assigned to a lot of families in my lifetime.

Biological. Foster. Adoptive. Paternal. I have had bloodlines, court orders, and paperwork connect me to people who were supposed to be my people. And in almost every single one of those situations, for most of my life, I never fully felt like I belonged.

I am forty-three years old, about to turn forty-four. And it has taken me this long to finally say that out loud without flinching. Because there is something about admitting that family, the thing we are told is the most fundamental human bond, never quite fit, that feels like a confession. Like maybe if you had been easier to love, or less complicated, or less broken, it would have worked.

But here is what I know now that I wish someone had told me at fourteen:

It was never about you not being enough. It was about being placed where you were never meant to stay.

My story starts before I had any real concept of what family was supposed to mean.

My biological mother and grandmother sex trafficked me. I say that plainly because I have learned that plain truth heals faster than careful language. That is how I entered the foster care system at four or five years old. So before I could form a picture of what family was supposed to feel like, the people who were supposed to show me had already used me up.

I don't tell you that for shock value. I tell you that because I need you to understand the foundation I was working from. I came into every family that followed already carrying a wound I didn't have language for. Already bracing. Already waiting for the moment when the people who were supposed to love me would show me what that love actually cost.

When I arrived at my foster home, I understood exactly what it was. This is where I am staying. This is not my family. Even as a child, I felt the difference between being placed and being chosen. My foster parents were not cruel. But they were not warm either. And I knew, in that quiet way children know things nobody tells them, that I was a responsibility. Not a daughter.

My "foster" brother Calvin and I now as adults.

What I didn't expect was to find a brother there. Not a foster brother. A brother. We lost each other and found each other again as adults, and that reunion is one of the quiet gifts of my life. He didn't come with paperwork. He came with history. And that has been more than enough.

At eight years old, I was adopted.

And I understood the finality of what that meant even then. This was supposed to be it. My forever family. The mother, the father, the siblings, the cousins, the grandparents, the Sunday dinners, all of it was supposed to become mine.

Except I wasn't in the old photos. I didn't have the memories everyone else carried. I couldn't say "remember when we were little and grandma used to..." because I wasn't there for that part. And even as I built new memories, even as I eventually appeared in new photos, there was always this quiet feeling. Like I was standing just slightly outside the frame. Close enough to be included. Not quite close enough to belong.

Nobody in my adoptive family talked about the adoption. I think the intention was love. If we don't name it, maybe it will dissolve. Maybe she'll always feel like she was here. But here is what I learned about silence, it doesn't make the truth disappear. It just means you carry it alone, in the dark, where no one can help you set it down.

What I needed was someone to sit with me in it. To say, yes, this is real, and you are allowed to feel the weight of it. I needed permission to grieve the mother I never had and the father I was still searching for, without making everyone around me uncomfortable.

Nobody gave it to me. So I carried it. The way you carry things when no one tells you that you're allowed to put them down.

I want to pause here and say something I've never said out loud to anyone until now.

In my adoptive family, I have always been the one who gets called when something needs to be handled. When my father passed, I stepped in. Planned the funeral. Held my mother and grandmother together. Helped figure out housing, logistics, next steps. That was me. When cousins needed resources or guidance or someone to show up, that was also me. I have always, without fail, been included in the hard parts.

The celebrations? The trips, the parties, the gatherings? I heard about those after the fact. If I heard about them at all.

I don't know if it was intentional. But I know how it felt. And what I've come to understand is that I was assigned a role in that family too: the strong one. The fixer. The one you call when things fall apart. Not necessarily the one you think of when things are good.

Some of you know that role by heart. You've been playing it your whole life. And you're exhausted in a way you don't know how to explain because from the outside, it looks like you have everything together.

I see you.

My twin brother and I have never had a real sibling relationship.

From childhood, I became the parent and he became the child. I was parentified long before I had a word for it. When he went to prison at fifteen, something cracked open in me. He was the only person in the world who shared my DNA and a womb, the only one who had existed alongside me from the very first moment. And that summer, I wasn't there. I had spent months consumed with trying to find my biological family in Bridgeport, chasing belonging the only way I knew how. I was gone the whole summer. And that was the summer he got arrested.

I spent years carrying guilt over that. A teenager searching for her family is not responsible for her brother's choices, I know that now. But guilt doesn't ask for logic. It just moves in and starts rearranging your furniture without permission.

What I grieved most wasn't the guilt. It was the relationship we never got to have. The best friend who was supposed to also be my brother. The person who was just yours. I didn't get that. And I'm giving myself permission to say so here, because some of you are grieving something that didn't die either. It just never became what it was supposed to be. And you are allowed to mourn that.

Now. About Bridgeport.

When I finally made it there and met my maternal biological family, I want to tell you the truth about what happened.

It was not what I thought it was going to be.

I had built this moment up for so long. This was going to be the place where I finally made sense. Where somebody looked at me and said there you are, we've been waiting. And instead, what I found was that I didn't belong there either. The environment. The things happening in that bloodline. The life unfolding around me. It was not a place I was built for.

And in that realization, something completely unexpected happened.

I felt grateful.

Grateful for foster care. Grateful for removal. Grateful for the system I had spent so much of my life resenting. Because I looked around and understood with my whole body: I cannot imagine what my life would look like if I had stayed. There are things that have happened in that bloodline that I was spared from. Things that would have shaped me in ways I might not have survived. And for the first time, I could look at the wound of foster care and see it as the thing that actually saved me.

I didn't belong in Bridgeport either. And that was okay. Because belonging wasn't waiting for me in any of the places I had been assigned. It was waiting for me in the life I was going to build.

I searched for my biological father's family for over ten years.

Ten years of believing that if I could just find him, something in me would finally click into place. I would feel complete. Like the missing piece had been waiting patiently for me all along.

When I found them, I found out my father had already passed.

I won't dress that up. It broke something in me. The reunion I had spent a decade imagining was no longer possible. The healing I thought was waiting for me in him wasn't available anymore.

But here is what was waiting for me instead.

Two older brothers. Ten years older than me. Brothers who loved me like a little sister from the very first conversation. And ya'll, for the first time in my entire life, I got to just be the little one. I didn't have to be in charge. I didn't have to carry anything. I got to just be held.

My two older brothers and I at my first family reunion

They don't physically cuddle me. But they emotionally cuddle my soul. And every single time I am with them, something heals in me that I didn't even know was still open.

I see people who look like me. Who move like me. Who laugh like me. And sometimes one of them will say you sound just like your father, or you look just like him in that picture. And I have to take a breath. Because I have never had that before. I have never had anyone look at me and say you look like us. You belong here. You have always been ours.

That sentence. Right there. Is what I had been searching for my entire life. Not a place. Not paperwork. A sentence.

You have always been ours.

I need to stop here. Because everything I just told you, that's my story. But what I really want to talk to you about is yours.

Because I know you didn't come here just to read about my life. You came here because something in the title reached into your chest and pulled. You came here because you have been quietly living with a version of this too. Maybe you've never spent a day in foster care. Maybe you grew up in your biological family with the old photos and the shared memories and the family group chat. And you are still nodding. Still recognizing yourself in every paragraph.

Because family pain is not exclusive to the foster care system. It lives in living rooms and holiday dinners and the silence between people who are supposed to love each other but have never learned how.

So let me say the thing that nobody is saying.

Nobody tells you that you are allowed to grieve a family that is still alive.

Nobody tells you that choosing yourself doesn't make you the villain. Nobody tells you that sometimes the most loving thing you can do, for yourself and for them, is to stop pretending you belong somewhere you don't.

I spent years showing up to families that had already decided where I fit. Earning my place. Making myself useful. Being the strong one, the fixer, the one you call when everything falls apart. And I kept showing up, not because it felt like home. But because I didn't know I was allowed to leave.

That is the part nobody talks about. Not in therapy. Not at Sunday dinner. Not in the family group chat that is somehow always active but never actually says anything real. We talk about loyalty. We talk about blood. We talk about how family is forever. But we do not talk about what it costs you to stay somewhere that was never really yours. And we do not give people permission to put that down.

So I am giving it to you now.

You are allowed to put it down.

Going no contact, or even just creating healthy distance, is one of the most misunderstood decisions a person can make. Because it rarely comes with a clean villain or a single dramatic moment. Most of the time it comes with a slow, quiet accumulation of moments where you realized you were giving everything and receiving very little. And then comes the guilt. The second-guessing. The voice that whispers maybe I am the problem. Maybe if I needed less, expected less, showed up differently, it would work.

That voice is lying to you.

Choosing yourself is not the same as abandoning your family. Creating distance is not the same as being cold or ungrateful or difficult. And grieving a relationship that isn't healthy is one of the most honest things a human being can do.

You can love someone and still choose not to be in close relationship with them. You can honor where you came from without staying somewhere that is keeping you from where you are going. You can grieve the family you had, the family you wanted, the family that was supposed to be yours, and that grief does not make you weak. It does not make you bitter. It makes you human.

Grief is not weakness. Grief is love with nowhere left to go.

And sometimes the bravest thing you can do is feel it instead of performing fine for everyone around you.

You have been performing fine for a long time. I can tell.

You can stop now.

I am standing in the most contented season of my life. Not because everything is perfect. Not because every wound is fully healed. But because I finally understand something that took me four decades to learn:

Family is not something that happens to you. It is something you build.

I am the matriarch of my maternal biological line now. The oldest living person on that side. And I take that weight with both hands. I think about every cycle that was handed to me and what it means to be the one who stands up and says: this stops here. Not in my home. Not in my bloodline. Not on my watch. My grandchildren are going to have a different story to tell. And that is not a small thing. That is a revolution that starts quietly, in one woman's decision to do things differently.

The family I have built is the first family I have ever fully belonged to. It took time to feel that. Healing is not linear and it does not follow anyone's schedule. But I feel it now. And I am not taking a single moment of it for granted.

And to the people who are in the early stages of building, it will not be perfect. You will carry some of your old wounds into your new spaces. You will have moments where the old fear shows up and tries to convince you that this too will fall apart. Do the work anyway. Choose your people anyway. Let yourself be chosen. Slowly, one honest conversation and one kept promise at a time, it will start to feel like home.

So here is the definition I have spent my whole life earning the right to offer you.

Family is not the people who share your blood, your last name, or your legal paperwork. Family is the people who choose to see you and keep choosing you, even when it costs them something. It is built, not assigned. It is proven over time, not declared in a courtroom. It does not require matching DNA. It requires showing up, freely, on purpose, again and again.

Family is your brothers who emotionally cuddle your soul from six hundred miles away. It is the friend who has been in your corner so long you cannot remember life without them. It is the people who celebrate you, not just call you when something needs fixing. It is the circle you chose, and who chose you back, without obligation, without paperwork, without anything but love.

And sometimes, listen to me, sometimes the most important member of your family is you. The version of you that survived every system, every silence, every family that didn't quite fit, and decided to build something true anyway.

That person deserves to be chosen too. Starting with you choosing yourself.

To my foster youth and adoptees, you are not broken because no family felt like home. You were placed in systems, not families. That difference matters and it deserves to be named out loud.

Your grief is real. You do not have to perform gratitude over it. You do not have to pretend the forever family felt forever just because someone worked hard to give it to you. And if you made it to reunification and found that it still wasn't home , if you got there and realized you didn't belong there either, you are allowed to hold that complexity. You can be grateful for where the journey took you and still grieve what it cost you. Both things are true at the same time. You do not have to choose.

And to everyone else, the ones quietly navigating a family that doesn't fit, the ones wondering if they're allowed to make the hard decision, the ones who have been the strong one for so long they've forgotten what it feels like to be held...

You get to choose your people. Your family already exists. Some of them you haven't found yet. And you are allowed to build something real, something chosen, something that belongs to you completely.

You are allowed to redefine this.

You are allowed to belong to yourself first.

The fairy tale was never going to save you.

But the truth?

The truth will set you free.

And that is exactly what you've been waiting for permission to believe.

Ya'll be encouraged in these Unashamed streets. - Sana