Ask Lemmy

My earliest memory is from when I was five because my memory isn't very reliable, but I can tell you a bit of what happened before that based on the things I was told.

There was some kind of medical condition that would run in my family. My birth parents, which included my mom who was in her 20's and my dad who was in his 60's, met because they were nuclear testing refugees and settled in a separate territory. They wanted kids but every time they'd have one, they'd notice the medical condition (which is said to be what later manifested in me in another way) take hold and got paranoid and probably had all seven of us because of that out of fear that too few would mean everyone would succumb to it, me being the youngest of seven sisters, a trait my birth mother also had. After me, they succumbed to the (still unclear) medical condition, it was some seemingly uncharted strand of the Epstein-Barr virus and it would manifest similar to the sleeping sickness. They're didn't die, just became not responsive to everyday contact.

There were different circumstances surrounding me and my sisters, so while I was adopted by a single adoptive mother, who is the foster sister of my birth grandfather (she actually wasn't even from the same culture so it counted as an interracial adoption) and took advantage of his unisex name to rename me after him (many people don't get the unisex memo though, they hear my name and wrongly automatically think "male"), they were adopted by a single adoptive father who then married my adoptive mother, making them my step-sisters as well (the reason I have one last name and they have others), something I'm simultaneously super grateful for as well as regret feeling distanced due to. We then moved to the US because there were no schools in the area in the Pacific where we were and because the same grandfather (whose home I inherited two years ago and who I had the biggest bond with) lived there.