This is a wonderful essay. Weirdly, I think the drive to find a “real” family exists in a lot of kids, even ones who aren’t adopted. There is this fantasy that there is some Disney-movie family out there where your quirks are cute and everyone is extraordinary, and gets-along, and you somehow fit in just fine. A musician I greatly admire recently talked about how her young adulthood was spent trying to “find her tribe,” trying to create from scratch a family that just made more sense than her own. But it’s hard to make that work.