My worst trait? 

You mean, besides working too hard? 

Or being too self-critical about my performance? 

Sorry for the BS answer. I thought this was yet another interminable job interview. 

It’s not. 

It’s Anne’s workshop. 

But, like most job interviews I’ve been on, I’m struggling. 

I’m working with Anne to help unearth my authorial voice. 

Apparently, my writing voice lies in what I consider my worst trait. 

Oh, boy. 

You mean the fact – not my opinion but the absolute (to me) fact – that I could have been anyone? That I’m leading right now, in my mind, multiple lives? 

For instance, what if my mother had kept me?

My life would be different. If my father knew about me, my life would be different. If my mother had aborted me, my life would have been really different.

But, who knows? I may very well have been reincarnated already. Or I could be still burning in the fiery pits. Maybe I am burning in the fiery pits right now and this is what the burning feels like. 

Is this all a dream? It sure often feels like it. Whoa, dude. Welcome back to freshman year at Corcoran Hall. And don’t bogart that joint. 

 Hi, I’m Mike and I’m a multiplicity of options addict. 

 “Hi, Mike.” 

I would love to be a non-adoptee normie and think – this is how I am, this is where I come from and this is how things are. How could it be otherwise? 

Mike, why are you Catholic? Because I was raised Catholic. 

Why do you cheer for the Cardinals and not the, say, the Dolphins? Because we live in St. Louis and not Miami. 

Why did you become a lawyer? I come from a family of lawyers. 

Ah, blissful simplicity. 

My college companion Heidegger said we are all “thrown” into the world. 

But some are more thrown than others. 

As an adoptee, I’m a born existentialist. 

I look at the photos of my father hanging on my office wall and I try to reach through the picture to touch him, smell him, hear him. 

I close my eyes and listen for my my nonna and nonno’s voices at Christmas, my mother’s voice at PTA. 

Of course, in this alternate reality, we could very well have all despised each other. I may have still been the weirdo, the outcast. 

But in my mind it would somehow be more “solid.” More real. I would have a real diving board to jump off of into life, instead of this flimsy trampoline I keep falling back into. 

I crave limited options. 

That life could not have been other than this. 

My wife’s cousin’s boys work in their dad’s glass factory, a factory he took over from his father. I envy them all but I also rebel against this, what I see as, smothering predetermination. 

My worst trait? I ponder this stuff too much. 

Humor helps me puncture the seriousness of it all, the illusion of solidity. 

 But I often do want to take things seriously. I want things to matter. 

How can I commit to Life Option A when I know it’s all a fluke? Just one of innumerable options? 

What if, for example, the Green family had adopted me and I’d now be co-running the family law practice? 

Or Marvin a few streets over with his gas station?

Or or or…

Would I still feel this thrownness? The fluidity of it all? 

I look at my father’s photo and want to be his son and only his son. 

I was born his son but was taken away and turned into a Trupiano. I could very well have been a Bernstein or a Smith or a Clarke. 

I sometimes yearn for a cessation of these multiplicities. It often seems a fool’s errand to attempt to forge this single ‘I’. 

How to navigate this existence cognizant of its arbitrariness? 

 Or is this seeming arbitrariness actually predetermined? Is this fluidity something to be embraced? 

Does God/HP/Shiva/Yahweh want me to explore these innumerable options, to feel this karmic ache, this feeling of having glass between me and the world, but, also, to experience this tragic freedom? 

One thing should by now be clear. Right now, I am everything and nothing. Like Whitman, I contradict myself. Oh, well. Cut me some slack. I do contain multitudes, you know. 

You can see more of Mike Trupiano’s work at: https://miketrupiano.com/