My “Before”

Sunday 26 July 2026

The internship finished Friday. Yesterday afternoon I flew to Italy for a week of competitive swimming camp — two sessions a day, dry-land in between, and a coach who does not believe in easy sets.

Most of my suitcase was swim kit. But I brought my laptop and while I was waiting for the others to arrive at the camp, I spent the morning and part of the afternoon drafting a research plan, because I don’t want “this” (I still don’t know what to call it) to dissolve into good intentions while I’m doing 5k mornings.

It has three phases, and four weeks to do all of them in before Grade 10 starts.

Phase 1, camp week: mapping. The evenings at camp are mine. I’ve saved everything to read offline — the donor-conceived community sites, the academic landscape, the adult surrogacy-born voices who write publicly. Catalogue what each one does well and badly. Do not start building yet. Do not name anything yet. Map first.

Phase 2, the week I’m back: testing. Once I have the map, sit with it and check: is there genuinely a gap, or am I about to duplicate something that already exists? If there is a gap, what specifically does it look like? Can I describe it in one paragraph?

Phase 3, the rest of August: building. If, and only if, phases 1 and 2 say yes — start drafting the actual thing. A proper write-up of what it actually is. A name. The first emails to people who might help.

This is the rhythm I learned at the internship from watching the Ops managers. Cristina builds her weekly rota on Sunday and then runs the week from it. You don’t start running the week without the rota. You don’t start building the thing without the map.

If I sound like a small adult, I apologise. Two days out of the office and I am still talking like Cristina.

I am still not calling it a project. It is an idea with a reading list.

One more reason camp is not a delay. I do my best thinking in the pool, and I’m about to spend a week doing almost nothing but swimming. If the idea survives forty kilometres of freestyle, it’s real.

— D.