unrelated thoughts: on being an unruly adoptee
the podcast by wes unruh
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I do not think that I am an experiment, like the adoptee triplets Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman who were literally experimented on in the seventies and eighties, or that there has been a preponderance of surveillance of me… more than any other person in today’s society. But a life-long anxiety about my place in the world was made worse, not better, by the circumstances of my closed adoption.
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Idaho is not a large state, and there’s only so many people in it. I don’t think the state is run by heartless automatons, there’s a reason for these laws. But it’s absurd to deny me access to a document that only proves what I already know–my biological parentage is provably different from what they keep on file.
Throughout my search I would give up for months, convinced that there was nothing more for me to discover. But what I’ve learned directly from my biological mother and biological father did help anchor me into my own narrative, I found the threads of my own story. Before I came into contact with them, I was left pondering a series of unconnected and yet interrelated facts, struggling to see if there might be meaning within those bits of data. And in wrestling with these fragments of narrative I find a unique, almost absurdist void of meaning that challenges my very notion of selfhood.
The first fourteen or so years of my life were spent in the Magic Valley, living in south-central Idaho. My memories of the earliest years of my life are necessarily blurred. But the stories I’ve been able to piece together through a combination of research, memory, and conversation are jarring…
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My current name is Wes Unruh, but I was born “Boy Harper” in 1974, in Twin Falls, Idaho, at the Magic Valley Regional Medical Center, and I spent most of my life trying to learn that fact.
