Both/And

Three years and eight months ago, a home DNA test I took “just for fun” revealed that the man I believed was my father—for sixty years— is not my biological father.

When people ask how I’m doing now, I never know quite how to answer. The devastation isn’t as acute as it was during that first year. The grief no longer crashes over me every day. It now feels more like a low hum that mostly runs in the background.

If you’re walking this road yourself, know this: there is no timeline. There are no stages of healing. Healing is more like a spiral. Over time, the pain and grief recede, only to reappear at random times. What has surprised me most isn’t that the pain has changed. It’s that I have.

Before my DNA discovery, I wouldn’t have described myself as an anxious person. Looking back now, I can see that anxiety had been woven through my entire life. It felt so familiar that I mistook it for my personality. Now I don’t believe it was mine. I believe I absorbed the unspoken shame surrounding the secret before I could even speak. Children don’t need explanations to sense what the adults around them are carrying. Realizing that has been unexpectedly freeing. As I’ve let go of the shame that never belonged to me, much of the anxiety has loosened its grip as well. That has been one of the unexpected gifts.

The longer I live with this new understanding of myself, the more this experience feels like a profound both/and.

The first two years were a nightmare. There is no softer way to describe that time. But once I found my footing again, I began revisiting my entire life—my relationship with my mother, with the brother I grew up with, and with the man listed as my father on my birth certificate, who died when I was three. Suddenly, so many things made sense that had never made sense before.

Growing up, I desperately wanted to fit in with my mother and my brother. I wanted their love and acceptance so deeply that when I couldn’t quite find my place, I reached the only conclusion a child can reach: There must be something wrong with me.

That belief quietly shaped decades of my life. It influenced the relationships I chose. It showed up in my career. It fueled a relentless cycle of striving, self-improvement, self-sabotage, and self-judgment. As a young adult, I became a self-help junkie, convinced that if I could just fix myself, I would finally feel whole. In many ways, that work paid off. I’m now married to a wonderful man who is the love of my life. My daughters have grown into remarkable women. I learned compassion, presence, and emotional awareness.

And yet, no matter how much work I did, one belief refused to leave. Something is wrong with me. By the time I discovered I was an NPE, I already knew intellectually that this limiting belief wasn’t true. But on a deeper level, I obviously still believed that this was true - until my NPE discovery.

I realized there was a real, tangible reason that I never completely felt like I fit into my family of origin. It wasn’t because I was defective. It was because I belonged to a different paternal family. What I had spent decades interpreting as a personal flaw was, in part, the lived experience of carrying a truth my body somehow knew long before my mind did. That realization changed something fundamental inside me. Not overnight and not without grief. The grief remains. I grieve the paternal family I will never truly be a part of. I grieve sixty years living without the truth. Sometimes the confusion still resurfaces.

But for the first time in my life, I no longer believe there is something fundamentally wrong with me. That sentence still amazes me. The groundedness, compassion, and presence I spent years trying to cultivate now arise with far less effort—not because I’ve become a better person, but because I no longer spend so much energy trying to become someone else. That’s why I can no longer describe this experience as simply tragic. It is tragic. And… It has been liberating. Both are true. Every part of this experience has become both/and.

Pain and relief.

Grief and gratitude.

Confusion and revelation.

Agony and freedom.

My identity shattered because of this experience… and this experience made it possible for me to embody a new identity that feels more authentic, confident, and self-assured. Now, betraying my authentic self feels far more painful than disappointing someone else. In my sixties, I became an award-winning artist. This fall, I’ll add another identity: published author.  More importantly, I spend my days doing more of what I genuinely want to do, instead of what I think I should do.

I know it is possible to change an identity by releasing deeply held limiting beliefs. What I still don’t know is whether an identity has to shatter before it can truly be rebuilt. I choose to believe the shattering is not necessary. Because if that’s possible, perhaps we don’t have to wait for life to dismantle us before we finally become ourselves.