My “Before”

Sunday 20 September 2026

Three weeks into Grade 10, and fourteen weeks since I asked a question on a Friday evening in June. Time to take stock, honestly.

What I have, on my desk and my laptop:

• The map, still growing one line at a time.
• The one-paragraph proposal, unchanged since August. I have reread it many times and I still have not made it smaller.
• A name, in pen. Co-Authored. With a tagline I keep coming back to: we don’t write our stories alone.
• The what I am not going to do list. Taped to my desk. It goes at the bottom of the homepage when there is a homepage.
• A write-up of the whole thing, version one, grown out of the map across September’s Sundays. It defines the project, the four pieces, the safety rules, and who I want to ask for help. It is getting long. Cutting it is an October problem.
• The five questions for the interview series. Written. Nobody has been interviewed yet, including me.
• Two emails, both sent on Thursday. One to Ms. Shafqat, asking her to be faculty advisor. One to Professor McLean. No replies to either, which is correct — it has been three days and one of them is away.
• Twenty-five blog posts. This one and the twenty-four before it. The honest record of how this started.

What I do not have: a glossary, beyond twelve outlined entries and forty to go. Episode 1 of Who Knew Me First? in any written form. A single confirmed advisor. A site live anywhere. An answer from anyone.

There are two more emails written and not sent, to Brilliant Beginnings in the UK and Family Equality in the US. They have been ready since the weekend and I am deliberately sitting on them. The reason is that what Professor McLean says changes how those two read the project — a yes from her makes every conversation after it easier, and a no tells me something I should know before I ask anyone else for help. Sending all of them at once would feel like doing more. It would actually just be doing it worse.

There is also a third one now, which I did not expect a week ago. Reading around the Cambridge research I found that the group there has been asking surrogates, for over twenty years, versions of the questions I wrote on a piece of paper in June — whether they think about the child, what the weeks after the birth were like, how they feel about contact decades later. I had assumed those questions had no answers anywhere. They have been asking them since before I was born. I am going to write to Dr Vasanti Jadva in October, and the only thing I am going to ask is whether the gap I think I found is real, or whether there is something out there I simply cannot see from where I am sitting. If it exists, I would rather join it than build a worse copy of it.

That last one is the strange part of this stretch. The project started inside my head and it is currently sitting in two inboxes, and only one of those belongs to a stranger. There is nothing I can do to make either of them answer sooner. School, at least, is very good at filling the waiting: Algebra II is getting proof-heavy, AP Physics has discovered that I need to be better at algebra, and swim season starts on Saturday.

One thing I want to write down before I forget it. I started the summer trying to find out who I am. Fourteen weeks later I have designed — though not built — a thing I would have wanted to find at twelve. Both of those are true at once. I am not sure they are the same thing. I am also not sure they aren’t.

The first Post-It is still on my desk. A website. By kids. For kids. Surrogacy-born kids. Under it, the second one. Co-Authored. Under that, a third one I added tonight.

It says: Wait well.

— D.