What's in a name?

I haven’t written anything here in ten days or so.  Again, this is primarily because it has been hard to put pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard, on this subject recently.  I feel very much like I’m in mourning, though the lost life in this case is my own, and it is what should have been rather than literal death.  Even so, I feel very much like someone close to me has died unexpectedly and I have been left trying to deal with it.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the person I was supposed to be and wondering how he might have been different from the person I am.  One of the many problems with being adopted as an infant is that I have no pre-adoption personality.  I have no idea what parts of me were shaped by the adoption and what parts were part of my natural wiring.  I certainly display some classic characteristics of an adopted person: I’m a people pleaser, I don’t make friends easily, I tend to have a few close friends instead of a lot of friends that are perhaps less close, I’m uncomfortable in crowds and large groups, especially of people I don’t know, the list goes on.  However, I can’t say for sure that all those things are a result of my being an adoptee or are simply part of who I am and would have been no matter how I grew up. 

When I first started talking with my mom I wanted to find out if she had a name for me and if so what it had been.  I’m going to stick with my trend of not using names here, but I’ll use some initials.  My initials are CAS.  Since my biological father didn’t want anything to do with me at the time (and nothing seems to have changed there) I likely would have ended up with my mom’s last name.  Using the names she had chosen for me and her last name, I would have been CWS.  Not the same first or last names, but similar initials anyway.  The foster home I spent three months in between the hospital and going to my adoptive parents also had a name for me.  It was Corey, so everyone involved in this mess really seems to have been determined that my first name should begin with C.  Thankfully Corey didn’t stick.  I feel especially good about that since I don’t particularly like the name and I grew up in the 1980’s, the era of the actor/drug addict Corey Feldman/Corey Haim child/teen star duo. 

I know who CAS is, or at least I did up until late last year.  I haven’t always been happy with him, but I did understand him.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call CAS’ childhood unhappy, it wasn’t, at least not overall.  I wouldn’t in truth be able to describe it as happy either though.  I think the best description I can provide of his life, both as a child, and throughout much of his adult life, is lonely.  He didn’t really fit in with other kids very well and that meant he often didn’t have friends.  That trend has continued, he gets along fine with people, but he doesn’t really fit in with many of them.  He has lived in the place he lives now for over three years and can’t honestly claim to have made a single friend.  CAS finds it extremely difficult to be separated from his family, which is full of people who seem to get him and accept him.  The only person here that really gets him is his wife. 

I often find myself wondering who CWS would have been.  Would he have been the same as CAS?  Would he have been completely different?  I won’t ever get to find out who he was because he was murdered by adoption.  That sounds a little dramatic, even to me, but I don’t know how else to describe it.  The person I was supposed to be was prevented from becoming and the world got me instead.  I hope that was a good deal, but it often doesn’t feel like it to me. 

There will never be any answers and I hate that.  Adoption stole my identity and my family.  There is no question the person I became after that happened was influenced by it even if I didn’t know it was happening.   I’ll never know who CWS was, my mom will never get to know him, my brothers and sisters will never get to know him.  They get me instead, and while I my wear his body, I feel like an imposter because I missed his life.  I keep missing it, every day that goes by is another I will never get back and it breaks my heart a little more every day.