I’d rather be honest than impressive

Thursday 11 June 2026 · London

I finished Grade 9 today. Or technically yesterday, but my brain is still on school time.

Most of my friends are talking about summer. Where they’re going. Who’s working. Who’s doing some camp in Maine for two months, my best friend is going to Tokyo to his grandma. I’m half-listening because I’m thinking about a different thing.

For the first time in maybe ever, I have a stretch of weeks where I don’t have to be at school, I don’t have a swim-meet coming up, I don’t have a band concert, and I don’t have a knee in a cast. (I had a knee in a cast for about a quarter of last year. Different story.) On Monday I start a six-week internship at a short-term rental company in central London, which I’ll write about somewhere else. But this weekend I have nothing. And in that quiet, a question keeps surfacing that I can’t quite figure out how to ask.

It goes something like this: I know how I was born. I’ve always known. So why does it suddenly feel like I don’t?

I was born in California, in May 2011. My dads chose to have me through surrogacy. A woman in Modesto carried me for nine months. I came out healthy. They took me back to London at two weeks old. End of story.

Except that’s the story I’ve been telling about myself since I was small enough to think a hospital looked like a spaceship. It’s the outline. It’s not really a story. Stories have texture. Stories have other people in them. Stories have a “before”.

What does my “before” look like? I genuinely don’t know. And I’m realising, today, that I’ve never sat with that question long enough to find out.

I have a long summer ahead of me. I think part of it is going to be about asking.

— D.