Nothing personal

In May 2018, thanks to Paola Klechman and Lorena Quiroga — who, like me, had their identities substituted and sold by Doctor Bartucca — I arrived at the doors of the Human Rights Office inside the Civil Registry of Buenos Aires. As I mentioned before, by that time Lorena and Paola had been searching for years, so it was thanks to their earlier efforts that I eventually met Mercedes Yañez.The Human Rights Office, at least back then, was quite small. At one desk sat Mercedes; at another, Cecilia, who would later take her place after Mercedes retired.That office was dedicated to the restoration of biological identity. In other words, a person could go there with their birth certificate, and from that — along with the story they had been told about their adoption — an investigation would begin to identify possible biological mothers, who would then need to be visited in person. Based on the doctor’s name and the address appearing on the certificate, they could usually deduce in which hospital one might have been born (if the certificate didn’t already specify it). From there, the search continued in the Civil Registry archives, examining birth records around the listed date — which was often false.Among those records, the ones that drew attention were those belonging to young, single mothers, or to babies recorded as having died shortly after birth under suspicious circumstances. They also took note of the birth records of babies who later disappeared completely from the system — children who simply vanished from all official traces. It was like finding a needle in a haystack. But Mercedes, and later Cecilia, using their knowledge and intuition, searched through data that to the rest of us would be indecipherable, trying to locate mothers who, many years ago, had given birth in a municipal hospital in Buenos Aires.In May 2018, Mercedes handed me a list of fifteen women I needed to visit, along with very specific instructions on how to approach each one — the result of years of experience knocking on the doors of possible biological mothers. She emphasized how crucial it was to follow the procedure to the letter, since the success of any encounter would depend on it.The process went as follows: once you had the mother’s address, you had to go there in person, and alone. If someone other than the mother opened the door, you had to invent a pretext to ask to speak with her. It was essential not to tell anyone except the mother why you were there. You might say something like, “I have a personal message from my late mother, who was a schoolmate of Mrs. [so-and-so].”You had to remember that the mother might never have told anyone about the existence of the child she had over forty years earlier. The daughter might be the result of a rape she never spoke about, or of an affair she still feels ashamed of. Most likely, the mother had rebuilt her life, and that baby belonged to a very distant past. One had to proceed with great sensitivity — hence the small, protective lie.Once the mother appeared, you first looked for any physical resemblance. Then you would explain that you were searching for your biological identity, and that this was how you had come to her door. You could also describe how you’d reached her name (through Mercedes, Cecilia, the Human Rights Office, the Civil Registry, etc.), and reassure her that her information was strictly confidential. With luck, one might agree to a DNA test — though most would not.And finally, one last rule: never call by phone. When people tried that, the mothers would deny everything and never answer again, losing any chance, even, to see whether there was a resemblance.Fifteen women. Fifteen addresses. Fifteen doors. Fifteen stories. Fifteen encounters.During that trip in 2018, we never managed to begin such a journey. With Simon and my partner at the time, we decided to return to Sweden, regroup, and plan to come back in September. But when September came, my partner and I had already begun our separation. Then February arrived, and I didn’t have a cent. By May 2019, I still hadn’t managed to get back on my feet. Later that year, Simon and I decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money to return as soon as possible. We aimed for May 2020. By February, thanks to our friends’ generosity, we had gathered enough to pay for tickets and accommodation — we were ready.Then, in March 2020, the world shut down — and remained closed until March 2022. We tried several times to make the trip, but the Covid restrictions in Argentina were so strict that we couldn’t risk a fifteen-day quarantine when we only had funds to stay for three weeks. So we waited — until finally, in June 2022, we were able to travel.By then Mercedes had retired, so we reconnected with Cecilia. She reviewed our file and concluded that, of the fifteen cases, only five were truly plausible. Of those five, we managed to contact four, and I was able to visit three.Whenever I tell this part of the story, the next question is always: “What was it like?” I fall silent, searching for words. “What was it like?” I echo, and I see everything unfold before me — as if it were a film, as if it hadn’t happened to me. Until my body begins to feel the pain I don’t really want to remember. But it’s all still there, waiting to emerge.Life, in all its richness — its light and shadow, love and rage, helplessness and longing, hope and emptiness; the irretrievable years and the timeless flow of the universe moving intuitively behind every gesture of reality — and, at the same time, the Argentine reality: fierce, relentless. An unbreakable will, an unyielding resilience, and yet a deep wish for everything to simply end. A silent scream caught in my throat, a heart refusing to harden, humility before fate and protest against what lay before me. A deep yearning for someone to hold me and offer comfort, and at the same time the understanding that this path was mine alone to walk. The doors — only I could knock on them. Everything was to be found within me. All of it, at once. In this soul, in this body.I thought, at some point, that I would break — but I didn’t. Inside me, it seems, there was far more strength than I ever imagined I could have.

“What happened was a long time ago, Natalie. You’re the one who won’t let go of the past.”How I wish I could. Just let the past go. Be free, live in the here and now. My whole life—what now amounts to thirty years of therapy, thirty years of meditating, and seventeen in the twelve-step program—has been about trying to accept and let go. I can’t control the world, but I can take responsibility for my actions, for seeking help. The message has always been the same: Accept, feel, let go, and be grateful. Accept, feel, let go, be grateful. Become aware, act accordingly, give myself love, value myself, ignore the voices in my head that keep repeating the message of worthlessness. That message that breathes through every pore of my being. Before I even realize it, it’s there, whispering in my ear, offering explanations for why people around me behave the way they do. Always confirming the underlying belief. Blinding me to the complex, nuanced reality.Of course I know all this, so even feeling pain or anger makes me ashamed. How do I know if what I feel and perceive is real, or if it’s trauma? Where is my truth? What is real? And again: Why can’t I let go of this identity?Very recently, thankfully, I was finally able to attend a group therapy session for adoptees, organized by the same institution that provides free therapy to all adopted people, in Swedish: adopterad.com.For many years, I had been trying to find other adoptees and talk about the issues that affect only us. In fact, back in 2017, during one of my lowest points in depression, I decided to seek psychiatric help—even though I was already seeing a psychologist. I felt like I couldn’t go on anymore, so I had an interview with a psychiatrist who was supposed to refer me to another psychiatrist, where I assume I would get medication.This psychiatrist interviewed me for an hour. He asked me all kinds of questions, including what kind of help I was looking for. I told him directly: I would love to go to group therapy with other adoptees. He looked at me, puzzled: “Why?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “I have a lot of experience with twelve-step groups, and I know how helpful it is to hear other people’s stories.” “But why?” he asked again, “that will only make you identify even more as a victim. In fact, people with trauma like you become very egocentric because of the pain trauma causes.” “Yes, I know that,” I replied. “That’s why I already go to twelve-step meetings for adult children of dysfunctional families, precisely to break out of that egocentrism and listen to others’ experiences.”The psychiatrist looked frustrated, irritated. I was calm, not backing down. “And what do you think is going to change by finding your biological identity? Nothing will change!” he insisted. Then I, again very patiently, said: “I understand that for someone who isn’t adopted, it’s hard to understand.” To which he replied: “I am adopted, and I have no need to find my biological identity.”I looked at him, paused for a moment, and said: “Well, if you don’t feel that need, I understand why you can’t empathize with mine.” That answer, of course, irritated him even more. He tried to convince me that all I needed was therapy to repair my attachment pattern and said that the psychologist I was seeing wasn’t doing a good job.I’d like to add a small detail here: that psychologist was Martha Cullberg, one of the most prominent psychologists in Sweden, who has written multiple books. It became painfully clear how ignorant society is about this topic—and this person in particular. Not even this psychiatrist, who was adopted himself, could understand the level of trauma he was dealing with.Of course, not everyone needs to know their biological origin—but let’s just say it’s not that hard to understand that someone who doesn’t know might want to know.So, in the spring of this year, 2025, when I was finally able to join a group and meet other adoptees, I thanked the heavens and every saint from every religion and belief system, because at last, I could begin to understand myself a little more—through the stories of others. And just as I had imagined, reflected in each person’s story, I could see an immeasurable pain. And not only that—I could hear the same questions I carry within me: Why does this hurt so much? What has been happening to me? How can I change it? No one reacts like I do, no one feels the way I feel...I cried through the entire first session. And not from pain—but from gratitude. We were a group of strangers, adoptees from different countries, of different ages—but so alike.Accept, feel, let go, be grateful.In this search to accept myself, to understand what’s happening to me, to forgive myself—in 2018, the last time I went to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo with Simón—I asked for an interview with someone who could explain more to me about Argentina’s adoption laws. Because let’s not forget: we are never detached from the history that precedes us.This person explained the history of adoption law in Argentina. The law was officially enacted in 1948, granting adoptive children the same rights as biological heirs. So then, before legal adoption existed—what was there?From what I understood, there were “child circulation practices”, referring to those transactions in which the responsibility for a child was transferred from one adult to another. In Argentina, such practices have a long tradition, and various sources indicate that despite the lack of legal regulation, throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th, adoptions were carried out either by charitable organizations or informally between private individuals. These children weren’t “real” children—not biological ones—but at least they were given the right to inherit just like biological heirs.But what does that really mean? What is the stigma carried by being adopted? Or more precisely—what did I feel, when the people around me found out that I was adopted? What did my little girl mind perceive?The first word that comes to mind is: illegitimacy. Not truly being. Not truly belonging. Not truly deserving.In June 2002, I moved to Sweden. Far from Argentina—and although it could have been even farther or more different from Argentina—it truly felt like arriving on another planet. Not long after arriving, I realized the hardest part was finding myself. In Argentina, I had my role, my identity, my place. I was playing a character that expressed itself in a society which, in turn, reflected back what it saw in me. I saw myself in a certain way, and society reflected back the image I projected to the world around me.Now, in this new world, the reflection I received of myself was completely different. I became another character—one I didn’t identify with. I couldn’t find myself. I didn’t recognize myself. And I didn’t understand what this new society was telling me about who I was.Now, twenty-three years later, I’ve developed a character and an identity rooted in the reality that surrounds me. Basically, I’ve become Swedish. I’m still a fish out of water—but for different reasons than I was in Argentina. I’m a fish out of water because, quite literally, I come from a different stream.What I mean with all of this is that we, as people, are never separate from the reality around us, nor are we immune to the message society reflects back to us about who we are. I always say it: We are fish in the current, birds in the wind, trying to find our path, our story, which lives within a historical context shaped by invisible forces beyond our conscious efforts to break free from them.As I mentioned before, adoptees—or people with substituted identities—are surrounded by messages about why we didn’t grow up with our biological parents, from the very day we are born. Daily messages, from early on, like mantras repeated consciously or unconsciously everywhere we look. Mantras we hear and repeat to ourselves endlessly—about illegitimacy, unworthiness, and more. Silent mantras, etched into the retinas of our eyes, filtering everything through that lens and echoing the same message into eternity. Without even realizing it.“Do you think you would have been different if you’d grown up with your biological family?” people have asked me many times. “I don’t know. I’ve never not been adopted. This is all I know.”The number one cliché I always heard—and denied for most of my life—was that my low self-esteem came from the fact that my biological mother abandoned me. That meant I identified as abandonable. According to this cliché, I felt like I didn’t have the same value as a baby who grew up with their biological family. Defective from the start.“That can’t be,” I’d think. “It can’t be that simple.” Because if it were, why didn’t I instead identify as a deeply wanted baby? A baby so desired that my adoptive parents even broke the law to get me? The mantra of “abandonment” was much louder than the mantra of “deeply wanted child.” I internalized rejection and abandonment far more than the love and longing of my adoptive parents to have a daughter.How unfair. How different things could’ve been if I had internalized the love instead! What strength I would have now!But I’m just a fish swimming in the current of a given fate.The voices I internalized were those of my adoptive family, when they spoke about my genes; my schoolmates, who reminded me of the color of my skin; the teachers who treated me differently for not being blonde and white; my little first-grade boyfriend, also adopted, who told me we belonged together because we had the same skin tone. The voice of my mom’s friend who, referring to someone else planning to adopt, said: “How horrible! Who knows where those genes come from?” Other voices—of people who, upon hearing that I was adopted—would practically say “Poor thing...” The stares of the girls at the German sports camp who didn’t want to play with me because I looked different from them.The reflection society gav

Reaching out directly to the source of information about my illegal adoption would have probably been the most logical and sensible thing to do in this entire search. After all, I knew who they were—or at least who the person was that informed my mother of my existence. In fact, one of my best friends in Sweden, an Argentine son of exiles from the military dictatorship, gave me the idea, but I never dared to do it until May 2018. I’ll explain why.My mom and my dad, as I’ve mentioned before, were opposed to my search. The fact that I would go and ask their friend if she knew anything more about my adoption filled them with terror and shame. “Don’t you dare bother her!” they told me. And to be honest, I felt the same way. As ridiculous as it sounds, even though I had the right to my own history, the idea of knocking on someone’s door and asking what they knew about my past terrified me. Especially because everyone—absolutely everyone—since 2003 had assumed that I was the child of desaparecidos, of a disappeared person. That meant that my search would imply that this person was somehow involved in a crime against humanity. And I know—a crime is a crime, and the guilty are guilty, period—but for me, it wasn’t that simple.Maybe it was my constant Stockholm syndrome, my codependency, my denial, my fear of rejection, my fear of people being angry with me, my fear of conflict, my shame, my low self-esteem, or a combination of all of that, but I couldn’t find the strength within me to take that step. Until the DNA result from The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo came back negative, and that path was closed.If I was the daughter of desaparecidos, we would never find out.After Simón and my partner at the time convinced me to continue despite the negative result, the search had to take a new path. On one hand, it meant approaching the Human Rights Office and Mercedes Yañez, and on the other, going directly to the source—to the witnesses who truly knew what had happened in August 1977 when my family went to pick me up from Dr. Bartucca’s place.It took me a lot—an incredible amount—of courage to first contact the daughter of the woman I will call Marta for anonymity. Marta’s daughter had been my brother’s schoolmate, and every time I had met her, she had been so kind to me. I wrote to her, asking if she thought it would be okay for me to contact her mother and ask her about my adoption. She said yes and gave me her mother’s contact information.So, in May 2018, during one of our trips to continue my search, I gathered all the courage I had and went to visit Marta and her husband in their apartment in Palermo, Buenos Aires. I was terrified, not knowing what to expect.After so much time, so much anticipation, after having lived with a narrative of how everything had happened at the beginning of my life—what truth would emerge?They received me, of course, with all the warmth and kindness in the world. They hadn’t seen me in so long! After all, the couple had always kept me in their thoughts. Our destinies had crossed in the strangest way, creating an undeniable bond.First, we talked about my life in Sweden—how I handled the cold and the darkness, whether I actually could make a living making music, if I was married and had children… the usual things. I truly felt like they had been waiting for me.After a while, as we drank coffee and ate sándwiches de miga—those sandwiches I love so much and miss dearly since moving to Stockholm—Marta told her husband that she and I would go to the living room to talk. He wasn’t included in the conversation.“Interesting,” I thought, because for all those years, I had been sure that the husband—the man I had seen in uniform at their daughter’s wedding, the event that triggered this entire search—was the main figure in this story. But apparently, that wasn’t the case. At least, he wasn’t the protagonist of the story that Marta had protected in her memory for so many years, waiting for the day I would come knocking at her door.She, more than anyone else—far more than my own family—made it clear to me how important truth and memory are. Perhaps that’s why she had preserved it so carefully.This is the story she told me the day I visited her:In August 1977, Marta’s brother—who was a truck driver at the time—was on his route from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia (a stretch of just over 3,000 kilometers) when he received news that his six-months-pregnant wife had been hospitalized. Marta’s brother, whom I’ll call Ralf for anonymity, took the first flight back to Buenos Aires to be with his wife, who had to undergo an emergency C-section. Unfortunately, the baby didn’t survive.It turned out that she had been in severe pain for three days due to a perforated intestine, which the doctors had failed to detect. In that time, the baby had become intoxicated and did not survive. The family, understandably, was devastated.At that moment, Marta’s aunt—her mother’s sister-in-law and Ralf’s godmother—contacted him, telling him that there was a baby girl available for adoption. Since he had just lost one, she asked if he wanted to go pick her up.Ralf, who had just lost his daughter and whose wife was now in intensive care, fighting for her life with a gangrenous intestine, reacted with horror and refused the offer.Marta, meanwhile, wanting to help her brother and sister-in-law, who was in critical condition, went to my parents’ house to ask if someone could donate blood for her. She knew them not only from the kindergarten where her daughter and my brother went but also because her brother Ralf played handball in the same German sports club as my father and my uncle.That’s when she told my mother the whole story—including the part about her aunt Anita suggesting they adopt the baby—and Ralf’s reaction.That same day or the next, Marta received a call from my mother, who expressed interest in the baby girl up for adoption—me.My mother told her that she had been on the adoption waiting list for three years and had still not been assigned a baby girl. She asked for the contact of the doctor who had the baby waiting for adoption. Marta gave her the phone number and thought nothing more of it—until the next day, when she stopped by my parents’ house and, to her great surprise, found me there, wrapped up like a package.My mother told her that the night before, she, my father, and my brother had gone to pick me up. Apparently, they had spoken with the doctor in the evening and, around midnight, had driven to his address—a private clinic—to get me. They returned home as quickly as possible, knowing they were doing something illegal and aware that they had violated the military curfew. My mother recalled being terrified that someone would follow them and take the baby away.The next day, she took me to the pediatrician and had to go out and buy baby clothes. Everything had happened so fast that they weren’t prepared for my arrival.Marta didn’t know anything beyond that.She had waited 41 years to tell me everything she remembered.She even asked me several times if my parents had ever told me how it all happened, and when I told her that neither of them wanted to share anything, she was horrified.“And how are you supposed to heal if you don’t know your truth?” she exclaimed, in pain.Marta understood everything. She had preserved a piece of my story and waited for me—consciously or unconsciously—knowing that one day I would ask, and she would fulfill her role: to pass the information to its rightful owner.To ensure the truth didn’t disappear.To help me heal.Something so clear to her, yet denied to me by my family all along.A question that comes up from time to time—often with the best intentions—from people who grew up knowing their biological origins is: Why do I need to know? If I already am who I am, why does it matter what happened at the moment of my birth? Why does it matter why my biological family couldn't raise me? What does it have to do with me that my biological mother gave me away to strangers? What matters is the here and now, the love that surrounds me, the life I have built.I'll try to explain it, to bring some clarity to the matter.Surely, at some point in life, you've been in love. You felt your heart wide open, expanded, fragile, vulnerable, and surrendered. And it was impossible not to love. That person became the center of your universe, just like in love songs. You felt at home with them, safe, seen, as if their presence confirmed your existence.But one day, out of nowhere, in the midst of that vulnerability, the person holding your heart in their hands suddenly rejects you. They say or do something that makes it clear that the love isn't reciprocated. They leave. They disappear, without really explaining anything.At that moment, it's very likely that your mind, trying to understand what happened—so it doesn't happen again, so you’re not abandoned or rejected again, to avoid the feeling of betrayal, the helplessness and lack of control, maybe even the shame of having believed you were loved—starts to create theories or stories about what happened and why. Something to explain the other person’s behavior, something that could predict it in someone else in the future.Now, let’s translate that heartbreak story—something that hurt so much—into something as profound as the reality that those who were supposed to protect and love us more than anyone in the world, instead, gave us away to strangers. And we never know why, or what really happened.The mind starts crafting a narrative with the information it has to make sense of it. A narrative that, over time, becomes our identity. "This happened to me because of who I am." "I was abandoned, sold, mistreated because I am worthless. I have no value; that’s why I was abandoned and mistreated."Reality stops existing outside of us and becomes only a story we tell ourselves, a story we recreate. A reality that confirms what we believe, that hurts us, that abandons us. And within

Romantic relationships are a reflection of the attachment model with which we relate to others. As I mentioned before, this model is based on how our parents, or those who raised us, showed or taught us to connect with them. That's why, first and foremost, it's important to put my story in context. It's also important to remember that this is only my personal experience and not the absolute truth. And even though I've shared stories with other adopted people, finding many common points between their stories and mine, I repeat, this is only mine. My story, my experience. This is a sensitive topic for me, and it’s difficult to know where to begin. Maybe I can start with the question itself: How did all of this affect my partner? This is a question I’m often asked by partners of adopted people. Worried about how they can help, or how they can contribute to the healing of such a deep wound, they show great interest in knowing how my partner handled it at the time. Was he able to bear my painful search process? Was he there to support me through everything? And what happened to love and romance in the midst of such a profound task of healing? I’ll try to be as fair and impartial as possible, out of respect for all the support and love I received, which, honestly, wasn’t little. My partner of many years, who accompanied me through most of this search, is the one I referred to in previous chapters as John. The relationship ended abruptly and traumatically at the beginning of 2019, but for the first 10 years of the 13 we spent together, it was the most beautiful and healthy relationship I’ve ever had. John was the one who insisted from the beginning that I needed to search for my roots. He saw that emptiness inside me, and perhaps, because he subconsciously thought—just like many partners of adopted people—that if I found my biological origins, my wounds would heal, and I would be able to give him all the love he needed, he supported me in taking the necessary steps in my search. He was the one who always said it didn’t matter whether I was the child of the disappeared or not; that a tragedy had occurred at the start of my life regardless of who my biological parents were. It took me a long time to understand this, as in my mind, my mother had given me up and discarded me because I was an inconvenience in her life. But if I had been the child of the disappeared, the message reality conveyed to me was exactly the opposite. For John, it was clear that in most cases, a mother doesn’t want to let go of her baby, and that it must take very complicated circumstances for that to happen. He truly got involved in the search, traveled with me to Argentina, accompanied me to the Argentine embassy to submit the DNA, and stood by my side when I received the results. He learned to stroke my hair when I had panic attacks and even bought a smoothie machine when the anxiety from the search left me unable to swallow solid food, and I could only consume liquids. John was my best friend. He was one of those partners who helped with everything he could—from the logistics of buying the plane tickets to Argentina to enduring hurtful comments from my family and defending me when he saw that I didn’t even react to them anymore. In the course of the making of the  documentary, he, Simon, and I were a team. Each one of us had a role. The three of us were moving forward, slowly but surely. But as with everything in life, things must follow their own course, and the breakup of this relationship was inevitable. Maybe it was because he met me when he was 20, and it was time to explore other horizons, or perhaps because the search was like a dark cloud that overshadowed everything and eventually consumed the love he had for me. I remember in October 2015, after I had been called by the Argentine embassy in Stockholm to submit my DNA, I noticed his love for me slowly fading. I started to feel desperate, but I could understand him. Inside, a voice told me: “Who would want to be with someone like me? With this baggage, with so much trauma, with this constant exhaustion?” Of course, I tried to compensate by going to every possible therapy, so I could delegate the need for support and comfort to my self-help groups, and not have everything fall on him. I tried to maintain a positive attitude, to give him space so that my search didn’t take up all the room in our relationship, and most of all, I never really told him everything that was happening inside me, to avoid overwhelming him. My number one priority was to protect him as much as possible from what was happening inside me, so he wouldn’t get tired and leave me. Yes, I know, it sounds very toxic and self-destructive, but don’t forget what I’ve already shared. The codependency that adopted people have toward our partners is, I’d say, our hallmark. Breakups aren’t our thing. And being left, even less so. Often, the comment I received from people who knew about my search was something like: "You're so lucky to have John!" which only made me even more desperate. That "you're so lucky" implied to me that I didn’t deserve him. It made me feel like the days of our relationship were numbered. Almost as if they were saying, "You're lucky he puts up with you! I wouldn't!" As if John was doing me a favor or providing a service by staying by my side. I always told him that the search weighed on him too, that he should seek help, go to therapy, find a place to talk and seek support. He did for a while, but nothing too serious or deep. And how could my search not weigh on him? Seeing my pain and anxiety? It’s important to remember that we are human beings, and it’s normal to feel with and for each other, and it doesn’t even have to be a great love to feel empathy. Although in this case, it was—a great, great love. This, I can say with certainty:  For those who accompany us in the search, the search is happening as well. Even if they are in the co-pilot's seat, they are traveling the journey alongside us. Looking back, what hurt me the most about how everything ended wasn’t so much the fact that he and one of my best friends and confidantes ended up together, or that it took them six months to tell me, even though I had already ended the relationship. What hurt more was that, consciously or unconsciously, they both tried to blame me and convince me that the reason they didn’t tell me was because they didn’t think I could handle it. That I, with my search, my pain, and my past, was the reason they chose not to tell me anything until much later. From their point of view, I was sick, and they did me the favor of lying to me. And maybe this wouldn’t have been so destructive or made such an impact on me, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I believed them. I was the problem; I was the one burdening people. It was a "truth" that had resonated with me since the beginning of my life. The ghosts from my past were being confirmed by the two people who knew me best. My deepest fears were laid bare in front of me in the most perfect way.It was the perfect storm. It's impossible to separate the relational patterns from our childhood from how we relate as adults. With that same identity—the one that tells me I am a burden to others, the one I've been trying to distance myself from for so long—I entered my next relationship. And, of course, the result was very similar. With him, I tried to hide everything, and he always complained that I didn't share anything with him. But as soon as I did share something, it overwhelmed him, and he would become desperate. Then, he would use what I had told him against me, blaming me for the problems we had in our relationship. And I believed him, because once again, he was confirming a truth I had carried within me for so long. Romantic relationships are a reflection of the image projected by our inner mirror. We see ourselves through the eyes of our inner child, who tells us a story every day about what we deserve to receive. It’s often said that true love comes from allowing yourself to be seen for who you truly are, and being accepted in both strengths and weaknesses. It takes  courage to be vulnerable, to show your flaws and virtues. They say true love comes from loving yourself first, that you have to be whole before letting someone else in. That you need to be whole, to have integrated every part of yourself and forgiven every darkness, in order to love and be loved. It totally makes sense. So, does that mean I’m a lost case? And that romantic relationships just aren’t for me? Returning to the original question: "How did this affect my relationship?" Perhaps the more accurate question is, how did this affect me? Throughout my life, I've often walked through spaces of pain and loss. After the loss of my relationship with Joh in particular, weighed down by guilt, I chose to stay quiet, to isolate myself, and not rely on anyone. I stopped expecting from my partner what everyone says you should expect in a relationship. I learned to run, to not be emotionally present, and, if possible, to never trust or depend on anyone again. As my psychologist would say, the way that relationship ended confirmed what I had always believed about myself—that I am a burden. Since childhood, I learned to protect my family from my pain because they could never handle it. The adults around me had the emotional maturity of small children. I understood long ago that the best way to avoid being abandoned was to live a double life, where, in close relationships, I only show a version of pain that is organized and manageable, minimizing the chaos. It was confirmed to me so many times that when things get really bad and my world is burning to the ground, I’ll be alone, fire extinguisher in hand. My best solution became solitude and silence, also known as dissociation. As I’ve said before, my story is mine alone, and just because this is how I’ve related to my partners doesn’t mean that all adopted peo

The family that adopts us is our world. In that world, we live, we breathe, and we grow. They are our reference, our starting point, our home. There's no way that whatever our adoptive family does won't influence us. Of course, it's important to remember that all families are different, all adopted individuals are different, all adoption situations are different, and all forms of relationships are different. It's difficult to generalize and simply say that if things happen one way or another way, the trauma will automatically diminish. But what I discovered in my case, and from what others have told me, is that the way the adopting family treats us, will either reinforce or heal the trauma of feeling that "I was abandoned because there's something inherently wrong with me," also known as that internal voice that, like a broken record, says, "Obviously, I was born to be abandoned and rejected. That's my fate, that's who I am." Those internalized voices, those beliefs, came from somewhere. It's not something children just came up with on their own. It's not something they choose. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I found myself battling my demons: my codependency, my inability to set boundaries, my inability to end the toxic relationship I was in, which clearly wasn't good for me, and my obsessive attachment to someone I really shouldn't be with. Despite years of therapy, all the books I read, and all the twelve-step meetings, there was something I still hadn't understood. How could it be that despite all the knowledge, all that mental clarity, I still kept repeating the same relational patterns? Could it really be that the beginning of my life had impacted me much more than I had understood? In 2021, I decided to find out once and for all when I discovered that free online therapy sessions were being offered in Sweden for adopted people. And this probably happened as a result of the data that came to light about the systematic theft of babies during the dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s and their sale to first world countries. Countries like Sweden, where an estimated 2200 babies arrived. The therapist who attended to me asked if I had already been to therapy and how I needed help. I got straight to the point, I told her that I had been in therapy since I was 17, but I felt I needed information on how adoption could have affected me and above all, whether this trauma could have been healed or at least mitigated with the family that adopted me. She asked me to describe a bit how it was growing up with my family, and it didn't take her long to confirm to me that beyond my adoption, my adoptive parents and the way they handled the fact that my brother and I were not their biological children, made the initial trauma of not belonging to their same genetic clan much more potent. Now, before I continue with the next story, I'm going to make a parenthesis. Having children is not easy. I've seen it with my friends. It's the greatest love and the greatest demand. It's the most beautiful and most annoying relationship. It's energizing and draining. And from what I can observe, it's the greatest vulnerability one can experience. As my friend said the other day: "It's as if your heart suddenly was outside your body." That's why I've always looked at people who decide to have children with great admiration. Returning to the topic, I'm going to use my own mom as a reference point and maybe some of you out there might recognize yourselves in this story. When she died in 2013, I felt like a part of me died with her. I was by her side until she took her last breath. She, who was so afraid of everything, shouldn't have been alone in such an uncertain moment. After her death, many people approached me telling me how much she loved us, my brother and me. "She devoted herself to you," they said. I would smile and agree: "Yes, my mom gave us everything." But inside, I wondered, how did no one ever see what was happening? For many years, I thought I was crazy and had imagined it all. Or that the real problem was just that I was too sensitive and everything affected me. That her behavior was normal, just a stressed-out mother. That my brother and I were unbearable, which is why she was always irritated with us. That if we had been better children, she would have felt better. Or at least if I was a better daughter. If I didn't ask for anything, if I behaved well, if I didn't make a fuss, if I understood and listened to her, if I didn't react to the abuse, the lack of boundaries with my body, if I didn't react to her hurtful comments, her hits. If I simply ceased to exist, maybe then she would feel calmer and wouldn't regret being a mother so much. I started therapy when I was 17 years old. I asked for therapy because I felt a great heaviness in my soul, something that many years later was diagnosed as complex post-traumatic stress syndrome. For those who don't know, this syndrome differs from post-traumatic stress syndrome, as it is a condition that can develop after a person experiences prolonged and repeated traumatic events, such as sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse, severe neglect during childhood, being victims of kidnapping, enduring constant harassment, slavery, labor exploitation, being prisoners of war, survivors of concentration camps, cult defectors, or cult-like organizations, among other things.Post-traumatic stress syndrome develops after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event. That is, the repetition of these events is what makes it complex, leading individuals to develop a series of survival mechanisms that differ from those of non-complex cases. Survival mechanisms include, for example: difficulties regulating emotions, suicidal ideation, explosive or extremely inhibited anger; selective amnesia, dissociation, chronic feelings of helplessness, shame, guilt, or stigma; accepting the aggressor's way of thinking, values, and rationalization; isolation, chronic distrust, anger, and hostility towards others; repeated search for a savior, lack of intimate relationships, and inability to self-protect; lack of faith or feelings of abandonment, powerlessness, hopelessness, and despair; and loss of the sense of reality accompanied by feelings of terror and confusion. In those therapy sessions specialized in adoption issues, the therapist also mentioned something I had heard about several times before but had never dared to delve into, out of fear of what I would find: The attachment theory. This theory describes the long-term dynamics of relationships between human beings. It also proposes that children instinctively form attachments to those who care for them, in order to survive, including physical, social, and emotional development. The biological goal is survival, and the psychological goal is security. Depending on how caregivers interact with children, they will develop different attachment patterns, such as secure attachment, insecure-avoidant attachment, insecure-ambivalent attachment, and also disorganized attachment. This pattern will serve as the relational template from which the person will then base their relationships in life. In the case of individuals with complex post-traumatic stress syndrome, it is generally observed that they develop insecure or disorganized attachment patterns. That pattern is characterized by, for example, the desire and need for connection and intimacy, but at the same time, the inability to receive affection and constant distrust. The therapist recommended that I read several books on attachment theory, and I did. Because the first step to healing is understanding what the problem is, where the wound is. Becoming aware of the path traveled and the aftermath it left behind to understand which part of oneself needs to be embraced, which little piece needs to be integrated, and which shame needs to be broken.Here comes one of those shames to be brokenAt the German high school I attended, in that normalized racist context post-World War II that I've already talked about, and in which it's more than clear that the ideology of European colonialism that so deeply marked the world was still reigning without any impunity, the following happened.When I was 14 years old, the older students began to call me "Berta" because of the color of my skin. This name, at least back then, was a name they used to refer to domestic workers. The idea was to make it very clear that I was inferior. That they saw it, that I couldn't escape it. That I was worth less than everyone else. Every day was torture. At night, I cried, wishing I didn't have to wake up the next day, and during the days, I pretended that none of this was happening. I dissociated from reality and smiled as if nothing was wrong. Because I could never complain or protest, since from home and from a very young age, it had already been made clear to me that my genes were defective, that they came from poor people or people from the slums, who, according to their racist beliefs, were of lesser value. The contempt from the other students was therefore justified. And I believed them. That truth, as I mentioned before, was already internalized. My soul cried inside, and outwardly I carried the burden of being a human being of according to their beliefs, lesser value.But it wasn't until 2008, when I entered the twelve-step program for adult children of dysfunctional families, that I began to understand the harm that they had caused me. Slowly, I began to break through the denial that my family was loving, and I began to accept that my family was broken from the start. Gradually, I started to believe my truth and recover from the depression I suffered in 2009, when I couldn't take it anymore and all I wanted was to die. This discrimination that I suffered is actually very common. You don't have to go to the extreme of growing up in the post-war German-Argentinian society for these stories to repeat themselves. The world

Mercedes, like most of the people I crossed paths with in my search, with a couple of exceptions, initially treated me with a bit of distrust and distance. Almost as if she had said to me: "Did you come here to waste my time?" Sitting in her office, she showed me a stack of folders that were cases waiting to be picked up. "See that pile? Well, it's from people who came, left their birth certificate, and never came back. They made me search for nothing! Everyone wants to be saved, but nobody takes responsibility for their own lives! And let me tell you something, there's a queue, so you leave this here now and it'll be months before I have anything."It seemed that there was a queue for the investigation. Many people approached her office with their birth certificates, so Mercedes had a lot of work. I explained that I came from Sweden, that I was filming a documentary, and that as soon as I had a folder with all the information about the potential mothers I needed to visit, I would definitely do it, because otherwise, the documentary team would kill me. This wasn't just about me anymore. I was sitting there alone, but I came with a group of people following me. This wasn't a spontaneous outburst; I was on a mission. Because as we filmed and the years went by, I realized that child trafficking was so common, and those of us searching were so many, and the social consensus so wide, that what started as simply a search for my biological identity gradually became a need to make something visible that seemed invisible to most people. Mercedes explained many things to me, one of which is that I wasn't illegally adopted because an adoption is always legal. There's a document that says who the mother is, what time one was born, and where. Instead, I had a substituted identity. That is, I had an identity at birth, which was erased and completely replaced. And although growing up with people who aren't my biological parents affected my psyche in the same way it would affect anyone else who didn't grow up with their biological family for whatever reason, the substituted identity, she said, carries a special flavor that arises from the context in which it happens. There's a respect for the history of the newborn and for the mother who gave birth in the legal adoption, which disappears in the substitution of identity. The newborn, completely unprotected, is a product up for sale. The mother who gave birth generally lacks any rights or decision-making power. Consciously or unconsciously, we, the substituted, know this. Mercedes explained all this and more. She helped me put words to sensations and emotions that I've carried in my body for so long without really knowing what they were about. We also talked about the significant difference the family we grow up with can make, how the parents handled the truth, and managed their own distress.By the end of that trip in 2018, understanding our special situation, Mercedes prepared a list of fourteen women to visit. Yes. Not one, not two, not five. There were fourteen. We counted with Simón, somewhat depending on how much I could bear emotionally, and we concluded that it would be fourteen days of visiting mothers, plus a couple of days of rest in between. That would imply that our stay would be extended by almost another month, and we didn't have the budget to stay that much longer in Argentina. We couldn't do it on that trip, so I told Mercedes that we had to organize ourselves and come back as soon as possible. She looked at us distrustfully when we said it, but in the end, there was a documentary being filmed, with a production company involved, she knew that giving up the search wasn't an option. As I mentioned earlier, I can always count on life to ruin my plans. In that same year, 2018, after that trip to Argentina, the thirteen-year relationship I had with my partner, slowly but surely, came to an end. Besides having to deal with the practicalities of moving out along with the emotional fallout, I also didn’t didn't have the money to travel to Argentina in 2019, so Simon and I organized a crowdfunding campaign to be able to travel as soon as possible. On February 15, 2020, we held an event where I had a concert with my band , and between songs, Simon showed images of what we had filmed in the previous trips to Argentina. The event was a total success, and we raised the money we needed to travel. We planned to do it in May 2020, but we didn't count on what put the world into a lockdown less than a month after the concert. We didn't count on that supposed badly boiled bat soup. We didn't count on the whole world entering a lethargy for the next few years, or that Argentina would be one of the countries with the longest and strictest lockdown in the world.Just like many others did, it was time for me to reorganize. A time for introspection, time to wait, while the world adjusted to the pandemic. In Sweden, the restrictions were barely felt. Social distancing already existed before the pandemic, so there wasn't much of a difference. Live events like concerts were canceled, but in the face of the new reality, the message that this life is fragile, that it can end at any moment, hit people hard, and contrary to what I expected, I had a lot of work producing music. Everyone wanted to fulfill their dream of recording their songs. It was as As if suddenly everyone realized that it's in this life that you have  to fulfill your dreams, because there's no sequel to this movie.News from Argentina reached me through my dad, who unfortunately fell down the stairs of his house in 2021, which quickly worsened his health. Argentina was very difficult. The pandemic was making everything that was complicated before the pandemic even more complicated. In Stockholm, people asked me how things were going in Buenos Aires, how people were surviving. And I answered them what I've been answering since I moved to Sweden: "Argentinians are used to crises. They have developed the incredible ability to move forward in ways that one could never imagine from here." Indeed, I learned that despite everything that was happening, in Argentina, many other people with substituted identities had organized themselves and advocated for the right to biological identity. In other words, many people like me were tired of nobody helping them and were fighting for the right that all people have to know our genetic and cultural heritage, our biological parents, and the circumstances of our birth, among other things. Furthermore, they had presented a bill to Congress to receive government assistance in the search for their biological identity.Finally, on April 21, 2022, the Law of Biological Identity or Origin was approved in the Senate of the Province of Buenos Aires. That law is legislation that seeks to be a tool for those who have doubts about their biological origin. The purpose of this law is to guarantee people's free access to all information related to their own origin identity, which is recorded in the various registers of provincial public bodies, for which the State must provide the necessary means.In other words, the work of Mercedes, who only worked in the Capital, became a law that is slowly being approved in all provinces of Argentina. As I said before, happily, we are destined to evolve. When we returned in June 2022, post-pandemic, Mercedes had already retired, so instead, we went to the Human Rights Office to talk to Cecilia, her successor. Cecilia, like Mercedes, took her time to explain each case to us, and we could ask all kinds of questions. With patience and tenacity, Ceci helped us in every way she could, following the investigation to the last case.I saw Mercedes on the last day before leaving back to Sweden. As always, a hard and warm welcome at the same time. We met at a café in downtown Buenos Aires, along with Simon, who was filming the meeting. I was so happy to see her, I had so much to tell her! And she had so much to tell me! She ranted as always against the government and the country's corruption, demanding that people start taking responsibility for their lives and stop blaming everyone for everything. She talked about the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo as always, and she told me again about her own story and the disappearance of her brother before the military dictatorship of '76. Mercedes herself had survived so much. We cried together, laughed together, and before leaving, I said to her, "Don't you want to adopt me instead?" referring to the fact that my birth certificate is fake anyway. I didn't want to leave. If there is one person in the world who understands what I went through, what it cost me, what I've been carrying, and the emptiness inside, it's Mercedes. But time is a tyrant, so I had to say goodbye and continue my journey. Mercedes is an unstoppable force who never gives up. She's the kind of person I deeply admire, someone who, without fanfare or glory, did what needed to be done because it was the right thing to do. But where did that calling come from? Why did she dedicate all that time and energy to the substituted, to those whom nobody cared about? Before I left, I took courage and asked  her, and the answer was as beautiful as Mercedes herself. It went something like this: "Well, someone has to do it. This can’t continue like this."I remember the time she told me the story of her name, "Mercedes". "Do you know what it means?" she said. "Liberator of slaves."Within her, the desire for justice burns fiercely. Was it always her destiny to be who she is?Thank you, Mercedes, and thank you, Cecilia, for freeing all of us, slaves to our emptiness, slaves to our search.

The DNA result of The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo was negative, and as the judge in charge of my case said: “This case is closed now”. Even though Claudia Carlotto told me that since technology continued to develop, there was still a chance that a relative could be found in their DNA bank, for me the path was now closed.After receiving the news on that 30th of March, 2016, I didn't want to know anything else regarding my search, my expectations, or myself.More than anything I felt shame. For 14 years, I had convinced the people around me of my story, that I was part of a historical event, that I had relevance, that I was the answer to the search of a grandmother who was desperately looking for her stolen grandchild. I was special. I had even managed to convince myself of that. But now there was evidence. I was not. In my mind, and to the rest of the world, I went back to being just another adopted person, I had been given away, or sold. I was the daughter of a poor person, a mistake of someone who, unlike the middle and upper class, did not have access to the possibility of abortion. How did it occur to me that I could be anything else than that? Hadn't everyone already made it clear to me? Me and my supposed “slum-genes.” As I said before, I returned to Sweden and decided to lock myself in my music studio, dedicate myself to work, and pretend that I disappeared. That I didn't exist. That I better never ever even think about touching the subject of the search for my biological identity,I felt so ashamed…But what was happening to me? Because it wasn't just the pain and hopelessness of not having found a biological family, there was something else torturing my soul. I could hear the voices inside me when I closed my eyes. I could see the scenes of my childhood and adolescence repeating themselves over and over again and I couldn't find a way to defend myself from these “truths” that harassed me day and night. My partner at that time,  when he saw that I did not allow myself to feel the pain of the result of the DNA test, told me: “Whether you are the daughter of a missing person or not, it does not change the fact that a tragedy did happen when you were born”. He told me that the fact that I had not grown up with my biological family was hurtful enough. I didn't understand what he was talking about. I listened to his words, I could understand what he was saying, but didn’t comprehend its meaning. Why couldn't I feel compassion for my own history? Why did I revoke myself the right to feel my own pain and instead just felt shame?It was difficult for me to identify the enemy that was haunting me this time. An intelligent and stealthy enemy, which was hidden between the folds of my cerebral cortex and the muscular tissue of my heart, from where it pumped its poison permanently. What had found a perfect host in me was the racism that surrounded me from such a young age. An internalized racism that had been normalized in the form of an inner voice that repeatedly gave me the reasons over and over again why I was genetically inferior. An assertive and insistent voice that was almost imperceptible. A voice that was not mine. A voice that belongs to the world we live in that categorizes people as superior and inferior. An extended weapon of the ruling power that aims to maintain those differences, the structures of power and privileges, by dividing us between blacks, browns and whites, heterosexuals, bisexuals and homosexuals, women and men, “civilized” societies versus “primitive” societies, “developed” countries  versus “developing” countries and much more, since the European colonialism. Well, it was my way of surviving.It was what I had to adopt as a child in order to find a space where I could be accepted.Basically, my inner child told herself: “if you can't beat them, join them,” and despite the pain it caused her, she chose to reject herself and at least feel like she had something in common with the group of people surrounding her, at least something she could relate to. All that toxic discourse had taken root in me, but not in the classic way in which racism is usually expressed. That wouldn't have been difficult for me to detect. The racist discourse was expressed in the rejection that I felt towards the color of my skin, towards my curly and dark hair, towards my hips, towards the roundness of my body, towards the features of my face, the color of my eyes, the tone of my voice, my big mouth and my loud laughter. All this was, I had been told, clear signs that I was inferior.Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is the explanation that my Mexican friend gave me, when she told me why it had been so difficult for her to come out of the closet and recognize herself as homosexual. My friend told me that her family and the upper-class, Catholic society that surrounded her all her life, was strongly against homosexuality. What's more, homosexuality was associated with immorality, with perversion. Years later, even after she had settled in Sweden, far from the society in which she grew up, and extremely comfortable with the inclusion and open-mindedness of Swedish society towards the variety of gender and sexual orientation, she still felt that it was impossible for her to come out of the closet. And once she managed to do it, it was a slow process to get rid of the shame of her sexual orientation. Although none of the people close to her in her new life in Stockholm found it problematic that she was not a heterosexual woman, it took her years to accept it herself. The strange thing, she told me, was that she never ever felt rejection towards other homosexual people. She would never treat someone the same way she treated herself, she would never think the same way about other people. She would never look down on anyone for not being heterosexual. The homophobia she felt was only towards herself. The ego's survival mechanisms can be very intelligent and disguise themselves as whatever it takes to make sure that we are safe.Shame thinks it saves us from the searing pain of other people's rejection by rejecting ourselves first. Something like: “You don't need to hit me, I already hit myself. There is no need for you to reject me, I already know that I should not be accepted." Attack first, to avoid being attacked, and thus minimize or control the impact that the reality around us would have on our inner child, who so much wants to be accepted and seen. But of course it hurts the same,  everything impacts us the same. Here, a clear example:Like many other children, when I was little, my mother sent me to summer camps. The ones I was sent to belonged to the German community. Every day the bus picked us up, which took us to the German sports club, where we spent the entire day. There is a recurring scene from those times, from when I was 6 years old, that I will never forget. It describes how I, as a little girl, had already understood how I was perceived by the people around me. We were changing in the locker room, all the girls from the camp and me. I saw that they were looking at me and talking to each other. I saw how they avoided me, I saw how they murmured. So I approached a couple of them and said, “I know I'm from a lower class, a browny. You don't have to play with me if you don't want to." I don't remember exactly what happened next, more than seeing relief on the girls' faces. They didn't have to reject me anymore, I had already done it for them.  Already then, racism had been internalized. And the most interesting thing was that thanks to understanding the pain it caused in me, I would never in my life treat another person that way. Only myself. I was a mistake. I was wrong. Nobody else.Many years later, to this was added the unspoken message from the Argentine society, which indicated that I had a much greater value as a possible appropriate daughter of a missing person than if I was simply the daughter of a poor person. A message  that was felt and confirmed by several people who went through the same search process that I went through. Needless to say, racism exists everywhere. Without doing a deep analysis of why it is something so common among human beings, it is undeniable to see how easily it takes root and how it acts among us most of the time unconsciously and even in some people consciously and openly.Sometimes, people can stop to check whether their own thoughts or actions are racist, and correct their way of thinking and acting, and try to broaden their perception of the world around them, and sometimes they do not have the ability to do so. Sometimes, people are so used to seeing things the same way and their beliefs are so ingrained, that the mere fact of seeing things from another point of view gives them a migraine, a panic attack or an outburst of rage. “Because if there is no superior and inferior race, then where do we position ourselves and what value do we really have?” says the lazy ego that refuses to change or the scared ego that doesn't want to be rejected but wants instead to belong to the right group of people. To the chosen and privileged group. Personally, although I recognize myself as a limited human being who does what she can with the tools she has, I have to say that I prefer every day of my life to exercise my brain and expand my perception of the world around me. Question the supposed truths I grew up with and challenge my ego's fear. The world for me is much more interesting that way. Racism  never gave me anything  but pain and prejudice, and that life is not the one I choose to live. Once back in Sweden, that same shame, that internalized racism, was torturing me, consuming me. That's why my plan was to isolate myself, go to twelve-step meetings, go to my therapy, dedicate myself to work, and leave all this behind. But as I just mentioned, that was never my destiny. My restless soul was not going to let this one go. I wasn't going to let the fear in my ego have its way.

By 2016, the search had taken me to Dr. Bartucca, to the trafficking of babies, to the social consensus that makes everything possible, to the tyrannical reality that decides the fate of babies born to poor mothers in municipal hospitals, to people's impunity, to the fear of our adoptive parents of losing us, and the wound that comes with having been trafficked, sold like a pet.And  while we're at it, I'm going to take a minute to explain or clarify the difference between a legal adoption and an illegal adoption, which is actually called “identity substitution”, because the original identity is completely erased and instead it is replaced with a new one. In the case of a legal adoption, an organization is almost always involved that controls that the baby or child who lacks adults who can take care of him or her is protected and treated with the greatest respect and care possible. Generally there is a record of where that child came from, place and date of birth, and sometimes you can even find the name of the mother or father in some file.  At least at a legal level it is known that there was consent from the biological parents, so that the adoption could take place. Depending on the country or system, the adoption procedure differs a little, but the idea is, essentially, that the rights of the child are protected and that their destination is a family that has the means to ensure that the child is provided for with material and emotional stability so that it can grow and develop as best as possible.Parents who want to adopt must go through a process where it is decided whether they are suitable to be adoptive parents or not and then they must wait until there is finally a child who is looking for a new home. Even after the adoption has been approved and some time has passed, the family is visited by social workers to check that the child is doing well with his or her new family. Identity substitution—which is generally called illegal adoption—happens in the dark, in secret, outside the law.It is all about erasing the information there is about the biological roots of the child. That is, who the parents were, where and when the child is born, and what place he or she came from, as if the baby magically and spontaneously materialized into existence. It is not known whether or not the biological parents consented to give away the baby, and it is not uncommon for that baby to have been stolen right after birth, faking its death. Those who manage the identity substitution system are generally doctors or midwives, who are not accountable to anyone, and do not have to respond to any law or regulation, other than the price set by the market. Adoptive parents are selected based on how much they can pay, or for other conveniences. At no time no one checks if they are fit to be parents, or if it can be assured that they will have the emotional and material stability so that the child can develop as best as possible. What's more, that child can be sold to anyone, to fulfill any type of purpose, because no one is going to check, sue, or imprison anyone. That child is the property of the buyer, and in the best of cases, the buyer is a middle-class couple with emotional and material stability and with a great desire to be parents and love to give. In the worst case scenario, that child will be an object that will satisfy its owner in the way he wants, which is also known as slavery. In both cases, the legally adopted person and the person with a substituted  identity (aka illegally adopted) carry the trauma of abandonment at some point. But in the case of having been trafficked, the person carries the trauma of abandonment and something else. Something that is difficult for me to put into words, something dark and perverse, as a consequence of having had a price, of having simply been part of a transaction. Something that comes from the fact that at the most vulnerable moment of our lives, we were used for the benefit of others, taking away all dignity, reducing us to a product. It is very difficult to get rid of that feeling, that identity, that of being a thing, an object. It is a very difficult challenge to build a healthy self-esteem on those foundations; to go out into the world with the necessary strength to confront life's obstacles, dream that the world is a kind place, and that we are worthy of a dignified life; that we are worthy of love. I don't think we are alone in this feeling. In the history of humanity, there have always been conquerors and  conquered, those who dominate and the dominated, opportunists and opportunities, owners and slaves, systems that sustain power dynamics that repeat the same patterns generation after generation, trying to keep everything in the same place, forever. And in the middle of that, helping to keep it that way, are trauma and desolation like an internal radio with a message that says, “This is the only way to survive. Better to look the other way, because the world was and will be always a mess.”All of that has always existed. But luckily, that's not all that moves this Earth. There are other forces that are less noticeable, but just as strong. That follow the laws of cause and effect. Like the pendulum, what swings to one side, will then return to the other side, what goes up, comes down. Everything in the Universe is in constant motion. There is no action without reaction. Nor is there any way that the human soul, no matter how much it has been broken, will  sooner or later reclaim its dignity. Defend itself against injustice. Will stop in the face of reality and say: "I've had it, this isn't working anymore, there has to be something I can do about this." Cause and effect. Action and reaction.As seen throughout history, and behind each social movement, the pendulum one day begins its journey to the other side, and it is time to change. Of course that will also generate a contrary reaction since change is uncomfortable, and the human brain, from what I understand, lazy.But one day, at some point the stars align, the forces come together, the pendulum changes direction, the timing is correct, and those people are born, whose souls clearly came to this world to make noise. To claim their rights, to put things in their right place. Moved by pain, with a blind force, they will search for their truth tirelessly, and thanks to these people there will be more consciousness in the world than there was before they inhabited the planet. In the story of my life particularly, they call themselves the “Bartuquitas”. The people who were sold through Dr. Celestino Bartucca. - those who organized themselves and opened a new path. Those who  did not let themselves be convinced by the lies they heard about their biological origin and began to look for some answers.In their pain, in their search, in their need to heal, to find peace, they gave me the opportunity to find mine.Because, in the words of Bob Marley: “You can fool some people sometimesBut you can't fool all the people all the time. So get up stand up, stand up for your rightGet up, stand up, don’t give up the fight!” It is inevitable, we are destined to evolve.Even if it takes us thousands of years. Simon, John and me had returned from Switzerland, from meeting Martin, my unwitting hero, and from having found out thanks to him that there were many people who were wondering about the trafficking of babies and the private clinic that Dr. Bartucca had.  My soul hurt, it was difficult for me to breathe. They had sold me like a pet. The only thing I wanted was to disappear. Turn off my brain and pretend this wasn't my life. Fall asleep and wake up in 100 years from now when the world has finally changed. I had nowhere to go with the new information. I had nowhere to find comfort.With Simon and John, we did not know how to continue the search, it seemed that we had once again reached a dead end. Then my friend Santi, who was helping us from Argentina, said: “Why don't you contact the girl who uploaded the video to YouTube? Maybe she knows something more.” I sent a message, thinking she would never reply, but to my surprise, she replied the next day. It was Lorena Quiroga, the same woman who had been a participant in the hidden camera to Dr. Bartucca. Lorena had been searching for her biological identity for years, so she gave me all the information she had gathered and told me also that she was not alone, that they were a group of people who had found each other and were sharing information. Lorena told me that her search began when she was 15 years old, that before that, her family had kept the fact that she had a substituted identity a secret. But as I often say, the truth always finds some way to express itself, and in her case it was thanks to a fire accident that she survived, that her unconscious saw the opportunity to communicate to her what she had inside. It turns out that some time after that accident, Lore begins to suffer from panic attacks and depersonalization-derealization disorder, which led her to go to a psychiatrist, who ends up concluding that what was awakened through the accident is a trauma that has to do with her early childhood. Lore, who had always suspected that she was adopted, was finally able to confirm it shortly after speaking with her aunt, who broke the family's pact of silence.  With the help of her aunt she then began her search and tried  to locate Dr. Bartucca, which, of course, was not easy. She wanted to know what else the doctor knew about her biological origin. Finally,  after many tries, she managed  to come to the doctor’s apartment, who looks surprised and irritated when he realizes that she had found him.  This was not the first time they had seen each other however. Lorena's adoptive parents were so grateful to have been able to acquire her that from time to time they went with her to visit him to express their gratitude.On that visit, a brave, 15 year old Lorena showed up alone at Celestino

“Identity is a right Naty”“The truth about your origin is your right Natalie”From the outside it is so obvious, so clear. Especially for everyone who grew up knowing their biological origin.Every so often I come across a series or movie where one of the characters is adopted and shortly after the viewer is presented with that truth, the character goes in search of their biological origin.  Without any problem, they get on a bus, train, plane, whatever, they arrive at their destination, knock on the door, one of the parents or relatives appears, they even sometimes do a DNA tests, and they continue then on their way integrating their new reality. That easy. And the family that raised them either helps them, or supports them, or never even finds out about the search. One can see a little bit of conflict, but nothing out of this world. Unconsciously all viewers think “of course they have to search, how can they go through life without knowing who they are?”Of course we have to search. How can we walk through life without knowing who we are?But then, what is stopping us? Or better said, then, what stopped me?I already said that one of the great challenges was confronting the internalized racism I lived with. Challenge the truths and beliefs that have infected the entire world since The European colonialism and instead give space to the notion that I’m just as worthy as everybody else, regardless of the amount of melanin in my body.Then, of course, we must not forget the whole story with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the Argentine military dictatorship, their crimes against humanity, and their systematic theft of babies. Nor losing my identity again and my German passport, plus the fear of the consequences that my father would suffer if they found a relative in the genetic bank at the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.One would think that all of that is reason enough to make me want to leave behind my truth and the search for my biological identity, but that was not all, there was more...The other reason was something I've heard from several adoptees I've shared my story with: We don't want to break our adoptive family's hearts.We don't want our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters to think that we don't love them, that they weren't enough, that we are ungrateful, that we actually always wanted to be somewhere else, growing up with other people.I can't speak for all adoptees of course. There are so many of us and there are so many versions of adoptions that it would be pure ignorance to generalize. This is just an observation, from having discussed it with other legally or illegally adopted people. But since it is something so recurring, I think it is an important detail to mention.The search for our biological roots has little to do with our adoptive family. If I base this on only my story, even though my family lacked the harmony and love that I needed so much, they were and will always be my family. Unique and irreplaceable. What's more, according to what my therapists have always told me, adopted children cling to their adoptive family very much, and are very loyal out of fear of being abandoned again. This will occur even when the adoption happens a few days after being born and, contrary to what many say, “Newborns can’t possibly remember anything about that” and think that the change of family should go completely unnoticed by the baby.In general, we adoptees are not very good, so to speak, with losing people or letting go. It's not our thing. Then of course we have to see how we handle it, but in general, wherever we get hooked, we don't let go.Personally, the most important bonds, psychological patterns, my culture and the general way of relating to the world, for better or worse, I inherited from my adoptive family. The search for my roots is not a search to replace my beloved dysfunctional family. That's impossible. Whether I like it or not, that is my family and that is the inheritance they left me. The deep love I have for them is unshakable.The search for my biological identity has to do with something else. At first, it was not clear to me what I was trying to understand, and as Mercedes Yañez, who for many years dedicated her life to recovering the biological identity of people like me, said, “Don’t think that by finding your biological origin you are going to solve all your problems.” At no time did I ever think that it would be like this, that if I found my biological origin, all my problems would be solved. What I needed to find was not just my blood or my genetics, it was something much bigger and inexplicable than that.After the last trip to Argentina, where I traveled to contact my possible biological mothers, it became clear to me that what I really wanted was to understand what happened. How could my mom let me go so easily? Did she ever think about me? Or was I really as insignificant to her as my adoptive family made me out to be? What I wanted was  to understand the context. Because even though it is cruel and heartbreaking, it is important to know what happened, how it happened and why it happened. It's putting things in their right place. When I thought that my parents had been killed by the military dictatorship, it was having to accept reality and the time in which they lived, human cruelty, sadism, total ignorance, the powerlessness of citizens before governments, the fact of that somewhere, in some file, the truth is found but there are people who still do not allow me to access it. I wasn't looking for justice, although I don't think it's bad that there are people who look for it. When that path was closed, and instead the search led me to enter another reality, an extremely cruel reality, such as the reality in which the women who could potentially be my biological mothers live, I had to again, when knocking on those doors, accept the heartbreaking reality of poverty, capitalism and the vulnerability of certain social classes. It was accepting that nothing makes sense, that for some reason I did not have to grow up in that context, and that life is a lottery... It was accepting as the lyrics in the tango “Cambalache” says:”That the world was and will be crap, I already know", that everything It's chaotic, that there isn’t much I can do about it and that I must accept my helplessness in the face of reality and be grateful for the luck I had. It was trying to place the pain and injustice in a place in me where it would not block me from the love and light that actually exists in my life. Being able to mourn the dead. To be able to survive my own story,Being able to accept and let go. Forgive and heal. So if that is my truth, and it is all there is, one would wonder why even bother? Why then put so much energy into this?Because there is something worse than a heartbreaking reality, and that is called fantasy. It is floating through the air of ignorance, it is being in denial, separated from the world, in a parallel dimension, in an inner world full of questions that are not silenced. It is having a compartment of the brain, heart, soul and body always secretly busy trying to complete a puzzle with missing pieces. As I have said before, I do not believe that all problems are solved by knowing our biological identity, but at least knowing what happened is feeling the ground under our feet. Even when that same ground  is cruel and unjust, it doesn't matter. It is still our ground, part of our history, our context.And our family, is our family. I assure you that I cried profusely when they died, that I miss them eternally and regardless of my age, I always continue to seek the approval of my adoptive mother and father.That is the beauty about adoption, love transcends blood and biology. Love is not stopped by dysfunction. It is the superpower that children have, for them the natural thing is to love. That's why our inner child’s heart always longs for mom and dad to see us. The child within always longs to return home.And that’s why, the search is not a family matter, it is personal.They will never lose us. What's more, if they help us instead of hindering the search, they will be able to share our truth with us. They will be able to accompany us in that difficult moment of accepting reality.Now that is something I would have loved to say to my mom and dad: “Fear not, my heart is endless and there is always room for you. You will never, ever lose me.”Family, have faith, the truth sets us all free, always.

“Your birth certificate is fake”, “your adoption is illegal”, “if they ask you at school, your mother is from  Argentina”. Since I was a little girl, they told me that I was adopted and that it had been an illegal adoption. According to what my parents said, the story was the following: A mother from my brother's kindergarten had told my mother that there was a baby who needed to be adopted, so my mother went  with my father and my brother to the other side of town, close to downtown Buenos Aires, to pick me up at a doctor's private practice. They were always afraid that people would find out about it, because they thought they were going to be put in jail for it. It wasn't until 2018 that I found out that the crime of baby trafficking expires after 12 years, which is completely absurd, but then again, so is this world. No 12 years old or younger child is going to go around suing their own parents for having illegally adopted or appropriated them. In case you wonder about the legal consequences the doctor would face, well, that’s even milder. He would just have to face charges for birth certificate fraud, which is considered a misdemeanor.Big difference in the case when this happens in the context of the appropriation of babies that has to do with the military dictatorship, which is classified as a crime against humanity and never prescribes.  The doctor who sold me, filled out the birth certificate with the name of my new father and mother and a date of birth that we don’t know if it is the right one or not. According to my mother, when they asked him about my biological origin, the doctor menacingly responded: “Do you want her or not?” And at that time, during the military dictatorship, everyone knew better than to ask any questions, so without any further ado, they took me home. And it was not until The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo asked me for my birth certificate that I never thought about that doctor or the relevance of my forged papers. I had already moved to Sweden and little by little started my new life when one day, a friend called me and told me that The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo asked me to contact them. It turned out that the doctor who signed my birth certificate was already being prosecuted in other cases so it was very possible that I was one of the granddaughters they were looking for and therefore asked me if I could come by and leave a DNA sample. That was in 2002.The doctor who signed my birth certificate, Celestino Bartucca, was the reason why all this started.Many years later, when I approached the human rights office of the civil registry of the city of Buenos Aires to continue my search, I found out that Celestino was a doctor that was, in the words of who was in charge of that office at that time, Mercedes Yañez, ”very prolific”. It was known that for years he not only sold babies but also performed clandestine abortions in his private clinic. And if that wasn’t enough, he was also the head obstetrician at the Santojanni municipal hospital. Yes, Celestino was apparently a very hard-working man. In fact, there were so many children sold by him that they formed a group with around 30 people who call themselves the "Bartuquitas". All of them with what is called a “substitute identity” and delivered or better said, sold through Celestino. But Celestino was not acting alone. It is impossible. Selling babies is not as easy as it seems. Or actually it is, but it requires people because of all the logistics involved. For example, midwives are needed to deliver babies. They were the ones who either convinced the mother who was about to give birth to give up her baby with the promise that the baby was going to have a better future in a middle class family, or also for example robbed them by faking the death of the newborn. In addition, there was also a need for people to contact middle-class couples who would want to buy the babies. Like any company that sells a product, there are people who have the raw materials, in this case the poor mothers who go to municipal hospitals, those who buy the raw materials, that is, the midwives, there is the seller, in this case Celestino, which is in charge of legalizing the procedure by falsifying the documents and finally the buyers, middle class people who want to have children and either got tired of waiting for the legal adoption process, or they know that they are not going to be allowed to  legally adopt, or they simply don't care at all and just want a baby and that's it. In any case, business is good in a country like Argentina. Babies can be worth up to the value of an apartment, depending on whether they are white and blonde, white with dark hair, or those who are less worth like me, with brown skin and dark hair. Anyway. I guess we shouldn't forget the police in the area where Celestino worked, who probably knew perfectly well what was going on. All these people were part of the same machinery, without forgetting perhaps the most important part:The social consensus. Because without social consensus, this does not happen. I know, it's complicated. Nothing is black or white. A social situation as difficult, at least as the way it was in Argentina when I was born, an economic situation that never improves, social classes that seem like social castes, the great need and absence of social security and in the midst of all this, the poor mothers, totally defenseless against a system that does not value them and sees them as pariahs. This context easily gives rise to all of this existing, having existed and continuing to exist. I grew up hearing all my life that I was lucky. “Because imagine where you would be now if you hadn't been adopted.” And it is partly true. The difference between eating and not eating greatly influences a child's growth. The stress of parents from having to fight every day to keep a family afloat with the most basic needs also greatly influences how that child is formed. The education I received, and in my case the passport I inherited, which allowed me to move to Sweden without any problems, also influenced my life. But then, if it is so, why do I feel within me such a need to know what happened at the moment of my birth? Why do I want to know what the story was behind my purchase, that even though it is a hard story, full of injustice, darkness and cruelty, I still prefer it before continuing with the emptiness of uncertainty? Why not instead write an ode of gratitude to Dr. Bartucca to his family and his henchmen? Why don't I just feel gratitude towards my parents, my history and the social consensus that made all of this possible?Why are there groups on Facebook of people desperately searching for their biological identity and their truth, no matter what that might be?And what did my parents think when they went to pick me up at that doctor and as my mother said “they had promised us a blonde girl”? “If we dress her well and wash her hair with Helena Rubenstein's shampoo for blonde hair, she won't look so dark and no one will ever ask where she came from?”Or could it be that no one, absolutely no one really thought this through and what this all would mean?Yeah. I know. Nothing is black or white.And even though it hurts me to my core, I want to believe that everything is part of everything.And that in some inexplicable way, in this life, there is a plan for everyone.Even for Dr. Bartucca.

After seven years of not having any contact, we got in touch again thanks to social networks. He appeared on Facebook one day and we became friends there. At that time, 2009-2010, I was recovering from a burnout that left me isolated at home and from which I more or less rehabilitated little by little and with a lot of patience. One day I saw that Martin had posted something about the military dictatorship and I dared to ask him if he thought he was the son of the disappeared too. I told him about my suspicions and that I had approached the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo before moving to Sweden, but that I didn’t leave the DNA for them to find a match at their DNA bank. He, with the self assurance that characterizes him, answered me: "I don't think I am a son of  a disappeared person, but I'm about to travel to Argentina. Do you want me to find out if you are?" I answered yes, not really understanding how he could find out such a thing, and at the same time not daring to ask him. Martín traveled to Argentina and returned a few weeks later, but I wasn’t ready to hear the answer. It wasn't until a year later that I worked up enough courage to do it and his response was: “I was afraid you would ask me, because the answer is hard. Yes you are. I, on the other hand, am not." We talked about it via Skype chat. I kept asking him questions, but he told me that this, was the only information he had been given. I asked if I could speak directly to them, and more importantly, who "they" were. “Nata, these are dangerous people. Don't get involved" he replied.It was first in 2018 that I understood what he meant. Since he arrived in Switzerland, Martín has been working in security, thanks to his past in the police and military. And thanks to the fact that he worked very hard and consistently, he achieved a very good economic and social status. Basically, Martín, after surviving Argentina, reinvented himself and rebuilt his life. A bit like me, if you take away economic success and social status.After he told me what he had found out, we lost contact again. I always take very strong news very calmly, and at that time, I was just coming out of my peak of depression, and I wanted to dedicate myself more than anything to producing my music and rebuilding my life from a healthier place. I was 33 years old and had released my first single produced by me, "No te doy más" through my record company "El Sol y la Luna music". -If I may say, quite an achievement for someone who two years before could barely get out of bed, answer the phone or leave the house. The road to rehabilitation from a burnout, or any type of depression or trauma is long, complex, and you have to have a lot of patience and perseverance. In my case, at that time at least, it consisted of training, going to my twelve-step meetings, meditating, and going to talks by my friend Jeremy Halpin, an expert in Chinese medicine, about the connection between energy, the body, the emotions and the soul.I was determined to recover, and dealing with the search for my biological origin was a luxury I could not afford at the time. In theory, I understood how essential a person's biological identity is, but the whole thing was so overwhelming that I didn't see a reason to go there. I decided that it was the moment in my life to build my future the way I wanted to build it. It was already 2012 and it was time to invest in my career, have economic stability, and eventually later on, if that was what we wanted with my partner, even think about having a family. But as I usually say, I can always count on my life to ruin my plans. 2013 arrived and with that February the death of my mother. The search could not wait any longer. It was written in the stars. From that year on, the noise inside me would stun me until I listened to it. Slowly but surely, the door opened, and I felt like Alice in Wonderland tumbling down the rabbit hole.I already talked about what followed. It was going to the Grandmothers of  Plaza de Mayo and eventually leaving my DNA at the end of 2015, to see if my biological family was in their genetic data bank.That year I had won a scholarship from the Swedish Arts Grants committee, to work with the argentine artist Kevin Johansen and I took the opportunity to travel to Argentina and stay until I received the result, which as I already mentioned was negative.I returned to Sweden in April 2016 to resume my Swedish life with a plan: I was going to lock myself in my studio, get depressed and work. That great emptiness and hopelessness that the result had left me was going to consume me, and I was going to let it. I was not going to resist, I was not going to have more hope, I was not going to try to find the positive side of all this, or try to understand what I learned from it. I was just going to sink into my pain and self-pity.But Simon, and John, my partner at the time, had other plans. The two came together one day to my studio and ambushed me saying: “That's it? Are you going to give up?" They insisted for a long time, they gave me all the reasons why I couldn't give up, they very seriously explained to me that if I did I would regret it in the future and after all, if we had already come this far, why not continue a little bit more? That someone had to know something more. Somehow there should be another way to continue the search. Why not hire a private detective?To which I finally said: "Well, maybe there is someone who can help me."It is in this part when I tell this story, that a character from the Mexican television children's program “Chespirito” appears in my head. A superhero with whom I grew up, who wore a huge heart on his chest as an emblem, the red Cricket. The scene was always the same, someone was in trouble and said "And now, who can defend us?" and out of nowhere he appeared, and everyone yelled "the red cricket!" " El Chapulín colorado" to which he responded "You didn't count on my cleverness" "No contaban con mi astucia!"and saved the day.So there, when Simón mentioned the private detective I thought: “I'm going to call my Red cricket”. I sent Martin a message right there and of course he answered within minutes.  Thus we resume the adventures of Naty and Martin, the red cricket.I told him everything that had happened. Everything.The story with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the documentary, my sadness. And Martín, who is a born hero, without hesitating for a minute, decided to help me.  Simon, John and me, traveled to Switzerland in October 2016. We only stayed a couple of days, I brought him a copy of the file that Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo had on my case and Martín as soon as he read it, sent a message to a contact in Argentina who could provide us with information about the doctor who sold me, Celestino Bartucca and the address where I was supposedly born. Within an hour we received the answer: “There were many people who asked about that address and that doctor, especially cases that had to do with the theft of babies during the time of the military dictatorship”. He also sent us the link to a YouTube video of hidden camera footage of Dr. Bartucca, where it was made clear that the sale of babies was very common and hardly penalized. Who had uploaded it on youtube was Lorena Quiroga, a participant in that video. A brave woman who, also being sold by the doctor, was looking for her truth.We returned from Switzerland and my soul was aching. They had sold me like a pet. Reality is more beautiful when one imagines it than when one confronts it. But I also came back with a new inner strength thanks to the fact that Martín, who really had no reasons to do it, had used his contacts and dedicated his precious and scarce time to us for a couple of days. Faced with such a heavy reality, a hero stood up and changed the course of my story. A hero would take off his disguise and show himself for who he really was and lift me out of the mud.  We met again in Paris, when we went with Simon to meet Ignacio Carlotto, the recovered grandson I talked about before and Claudia Carlotto, coordinator of Conadi, and again when we traveled to Argentina together in 2018 and found out about baby trafficking and tried to connect the military dictatorship with Dr. Bartucca. The last trip to Argentina was made by Simón and I alone. Of course I missed Martin, but I also understand that for whatever reason, he may have had to put his time and energy into other things. Martín and I swim in the same water and although in many ways we are very different, somewhere inside of us we are very similar. When he looks at me I know that he sees me and when I look at him I believe or hope that he knows that I see him too. Being able to do part of this journey with him was a luxury, being able to inhabit his aura was fascinating. There are people like that in the world, with so many layers and facets and depths that are endless. Martin is one of them. A hero who blends in very dark places, but who will always be who he has always been, that boy I knew, who played detective at recess, the one who defended those who couldn't defend themselves, the one who loved justice since a young age.His soul will always be his soul. And I will always know that it is there. It doesn't matter which path he takes in life. Martin will always be my unwitting hero. My red cricket. My Chapulín colorado.

One of the things that I never get tired of repeating is that , if there is something I have learned over time, it is that in life, things are not black and white, people are not simply good or bad. Life is not like a Hollywood movie, where the characters lack nuance and the bad guy is easy to spot from the beginning of the story. Reality and people are much more complex and are full of gray areas, explanations and stories, which is why it is sometimes so difficult to understand what is really happening.  Although one might be faced with an uncomfortable truth and the brain would really like to simplify, classify, judge and discard, sooner or later one will have to accept that everything comes from somewhere and everything is going somewhere. Like fish in the stream of water formed by the history of humanity. And in those waters we try to swim a unique route, but never out of the current that we had to live in. Simply put, we do what we can with the destiny that was given to us. Apparently Martin and I met as soon as our families adopted us, that is to say they acquired us. His sister and my brother went to kindergarten together at the German school where we would later go too.There the two mothers met, each one with their respective brown baby and I imagine they compared adoptions. We have known each other since then. We went to kindergarten together, too, and then we were in the same class in elementary school. Martin was my first boyfriend in second grade, along with another Martin. Yeah, apparently back then I was polyamorous. Martín told the other Martín that he and I actually were a better fit, since our skin color was similar. We were the two little browns in a class full of whites and blondes. In fact, you could see who was adopted at my school, because they were generally the little brown ones, with the occasional exception. At recess Martin played detective, and always played the vigilante hero character. He was taller than the others and it was known that one was not to mess around with Martín. My mom told me that when he was little he used to go to school with his sister by public transportation. My brother and I would take the school bus. "How brave" I always thought. Martin was born to be a hero. Next to him I always felt soft and completely harmless. After elementary school, Martín disappeared from my radar.He did high school at the military school because he chose it, which for me, at that age, was unthinkable. The military high school sounded like a punishment, something where children who need discipline are sent. He followed that path and I followed mine, in the secondary German school Goethe Schule. I saw him from time to time in the summer and winter camps organized by the German community. The “DAL-Deutsche Argentinische lagergruppe” camps, which I understood much later, had a remnant of the dark times of Germany and its “Hitler Jugend”. There, we met with Martin. He had already gone since he was a boy. I only joined when I was 14 years old. Of course back then, none of us saw it that way. At least for me, it was with the happiness that one feels if one likes to camp and be in contact with nature, something that I still feel today.It consisted of sleeping in a tent, bathing in the river, cooking for the whole group, gathering wood for the fire, hiking for several days, sleeping under the stars and singing at night. There I learned to play songs on the guitar by artists like Leon Gieco, Seru Giran, Sui Generis, Creedence, Rod Steward, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens and traditional German songs that are still associated with a time in Germany that is better to forget, or better said never, ever repeat again. The "DAL" taught me to be close to nature, to love the nights and the stars, to feel a longing for something beyond reality, it taught me to dream.  Many years later, already living in Sweden, I realized the dark history of the German community in Argentina. As I said before, nothing is black or white. In the midst of that darkness, surrounded by a society that was so keen in separating people by color and genetics and Martin and I, so obviously not belonging with them, I learned to see the stars, and to play songs that I still play today, needless to say, the German ones are definitely not included in that. Both things, the songs and the stars continue to save me even when reality overwhelms me. After I was 15 years old, Martin didn't come to the camps anymore. Every once in a while he sent me letters, because there weren't any traces of cell phones at that time, and he would tell me how life was going for him in high school. Martin seemed to live a life full of adventure, while mine was the boring life of an overprotected middle-class teenager. Apart from the constant fights and violence in my family, absolutely nothing was happening in my life.Years passed and I knew little about Martin, except that after high school he joined the Federal Police of the province of Buenos Aires, which, at least at that time, had the worst reputation of all the police forces. It was said that they were the most corrupt, bloodthirsty and heartless. That it was always best not to have anything to do with the police. And our paths would have continued apart, if it hadn't been that apparently my fate had to change abruptly, with the rape that I survived on August 7, 2001. As the crime took place in the northern area of ​​the city of Buenos Aires, my case went to San Isidro, which was the police station where Martin worked. He, who was actually in the narcotics section, told me that that day in the stack of files that had been placed on his desk, there appeared a case that he would not normally be assigned to. A rape case. And when he looked closer he realized it was me.Reality beating fiction again.Of all the police stations, of all the detectives, of all the desks, Martin had to be the detective on my case. I remember the first meeting with him to talk about what had happened. Me carrying the typical shame that characterizes each and every survivor of sexual abuse, eternally grateful that he was the one I had to tell the details to. Something in his eyes told me that for him I was not just another case. Something told me that he was on my side, on my team.That's how we got in touch again. As I mentioned before, after the rape, on an adventure tourism trip I met the 35-year-old Swede with whom I would fall in love and for whom I would move to Stockholm in June 2002.I sold everything and left. I needed to start a new life, in a new place, far from who I was, far from my story, far from the character that I played in the reality in which I lived. I knew little about Martín during those years. That they set him up and that he had ended up in jail was one of them, and that he later moved to Switzerland to rebuild his life was another.Just like Al Pacino did in the movie “Serpico”. It was first in 2010 and thanks to Facebook and the fact that I spent a lot of time at home and on social networks thanks to the fact that a few months before my post-traumatic depression had peaked and I suffered a burnout, I saw that one day he posted something about the military and the dictatorship and out of the blue I asked him: "Do you think you also are the son of the disappeared?" "I don't think so," he replied, "but if you want to know, I'll find out for you""Well, yes, thank you" I replied.It had been approximately seven years since we last spoke, but as always, I felt that our lives followed a parallel path. As if our souls before being born had agreed to meet up when we were on this side, and accompany each other, so as not to lose ourselves completely in this confusing world.This is how Martín returned to my radar, like the unwitting hero that he is.I didn't know it at the time, but a few years later, thanks to him, hope would return to my body.For the second time.

Since I first found out I was adopted, around the age of 5 or 6 years, every time the subject is brought up in any possible situation, what follows directly after is some kind of comment that tries to direct my perception of what happened at the beginning of my life to a place of non-importance – trying to normalize it.Needless to say, 99% of people who have done this, are not adopted and grew up with their biological family. For example: "But your biological origin doesn't matter, what matters is your real family". Or: "Think how lucky you were. Imagine where else you would be now if you wouldn’t have been adopted". "Mom is not the one who gave birth to you, but the one who raised you". Or the classic: "you are looking for excuses to play the victim and not take responsibility for your life", or "you choose to identify yourself as adopted because it is what you know and who would you be without that identity?". Or even, "we all have problems, I also sometimes wondered if I was adopted”. In recent times, since I started telling people about the search and the documentary that we began filming in 2015, the most frequent comment has been: "Don't let this define your life, try to live instead."All these comments, I believe, were never made to harm me. As I understood after my rape, when people feel powerless in the face of injustice, what they try to do is control the damage caused by the unchanging reality, since there is no way to change society and reality as a whole. Just like the comments after my rape that pointed out directly, or indirectly, that I could have done something to prevent it – or that I could have done something to prevent the trauma it caused – many people have tried to do damage control of a cruel society that they are part of, by putting the blame for my pain on me.To illustrate more clearly, what happens is something like this: Imagine that for a reason that you can't control, you step on a floor that is on fire and burn your feet.So people's reaction would be:"Why did you walk on that floor?" And not "Why was that floor on fire?"As the burn-wounds heal, these people push you to walk again."It's over, it's in the past, how much longer will your rehabilitation last?" And not: "how are those wounds?"While the soles of your feet continue to hurt and it is difficult for you to walk, they’ll comment:“I also once wondered if my feet were burned, we all have problems sometimes”, instead of: “I can't really imagine what that pain is like, but I'm here if you need to talk”.While looking for different ways to disinfect the wounds so that they can heal once and for all, some people proclaim:“I think that you really like to identify yourself as the burned one, you like to play the victim”, instead of: “You can do this! One day at a time, you will heal"And every time you are filled with frustration and you wish you were someone else, and not have to go through all that rehabilitation process:“I think you actually like to be the burned one. Who would you be if you weren't that? You know that there are people that are burned far worse than you, right?" Instead of just giving a hug and encouraging: "You're moving forward, keep going, we love you just the way you are."In the event that the anxiety caused by the pain of the reality that one is trying to avoid makes one look for ways to escape from it all and keep one’s self entertained by, say, working too hard, never staying still, seeking toxic relationships, or eating poorly: “Stop running away! Your problem is that you don't confront your pain! You do not accept your past! You don't let go!"Instead of a simple: "How are you?"And the last and most frequent one: "Don't let this define your life, try to live instead." There is so much information in that comment that I don't even know where to start. The phrase that comes to mind is: "What John says about Peter, says more about John than about Peter"For example, how and when could I not let this define my life? Perhaps at the time I was born? Should I have just stood there and said, "No, I don't want to be adopted." Or when society repeatedly pointed out, since I was a little girl, that I was different, should I have responded: "No, I do not allow any of you to define me as different!" Or when my mom repeatedly told me that I had “slum genes”, should I have stopped her right there and said: “First of all, I don't think that the “slum gene” appears in the human genome. Secondly, what’s wrong with being from the slums? And thirdly, in the event that there was such a gene, according to science at this time, it is the habitat that activates different characteristics in people, that is, if my so-called slum gene was activated, it is thanks to you.” I was illegally adopted as a baby. I did not grow up with my biological family. I don't know what the reason was, but that was my fate. That is a fact. I didn't “let it” define me, because I had no choice. The verb “let” in that sentence implies that I chose it. Babies don't choose. They exist. Adults have more options. The identity I received from a society like the Argentine/German one is one that was given to me. The reason why this identity was given to me has to do with many other very complex factors, which have a lot to do with ignorance, consciousness or lack of it and the times we live in. It's not personal, but it happened to me. That I have spent part of my adult life trying to get rid of that identity, and have tried to find an identity that is broader, more inclusive, and in line with who I really am, is my choice. That is my will.  That's why I decided to search for my roots; to understand, accept and eventually let go, all in due time.  That I did learn from my rape. Traumas shape us, until they no longer shape us, until we rebuild ourselves, until we become more than the sum total of the parts that made us. The most important thing is to accompany one’s self at every step, with compassion for the person who bears the pain. In the same way that one would accompany a best friend, by acknowledging courage, frustration, sadness and strength.With this, I don’t want to say that it is not true that sometimes I feel like a victim and I want to curl up on my sofa and never leave my house again. Or that sometimes the pain and pity for myself do not allow me to see the great things in my life, the love, abundance, beauty and creativity. No, that happens to me too.But when people tell me to try to live my life instead, I wonder if they think I'm a millionaire and don't have to go to work and do whatever it takes to live my life like any other grown up person.No, nobody pays my bills so I better take care of myself and stay healthy.Luckily, and probably thanks to the 12-step program, I found a way to still get out of bed every day. If that would change, I would look into other options, such as medication. In the case that "trying to live" actually refers to "trying to enjoy life", well that's a bit more difficult. But believe me, it's not for lack of willpower. Sometimes the wounds just won’t leave me alone. Besides, enjoying life and feeling grateful for what one has, isn't that a challenge for everyone?Oh, and why don’t I heal faster?I don't know. I think somewhere in all of this there is a plan. The other day, I was thinking, without really deserving such a comparison but just to use it as a very clear example, that hadn’t it been for the pain that Martin Luther King felt, what would have happened to the social change that his civil rights movement led? Perhaps it is necessary for us to be exactly who we are, and to walk the path that we are going through in exactly the way we are doing, because in our healing, in each story and each path, there is everyone’s healing.I don't know.I only know that I will not stop being sad because someone tells me to do so. The only thing that would happen then, is that I would stop opening up, talking, sharing. I would instead get depressed, convinced that I deserve my loneliness. Convinced that I deserve my abandonment. And that it's all my fault.And then I would curl up on my sofa and want to disappear. To stop living my life is not an option. I will always do what I can, with the strength and tools I have, like everyone else.Now, on behalf of all of us who are on a heavy path such as the search for our biological identity, I ask you dear people for understanding, hugs and patience.Don't worry about the rest, we've been rootless and defined by it since the beginning of our time, and we're pretty used to it by now.I can assure you, we will live despite it.

Years passed and as I have said in previous episodes, when my mother died in 2013 and after hearing that one of her last wishes was for me to find my truth, always thinking that I was the daughter of the disappeared, I finally took the courage to speak to my dad. It was important for me to inform him what I was going to do, because of the consequences it would bring him.To my great surprise, his response was positive. I had waited thirteen years to have this conversation. I had prepared myself in every possible way, expecting any kind of reaction from him except this one. It looked like in those thirteen years, he had had time to think about it and change his mind.  His reaction was so surprising to me, that I, who never run out of words, was speechless.  It was February 2015, I was about to return to Sweden, but since Conadi had sent emails to me a few months before asking me if I felt I was ready to leave the DNA, I decided to visit them to ask some last questions before going back to Sweden and leaving it there. I wanted to go back to my home, to my friends, to my psychologist, to my work, to my place in the world safe and sound from everything, to be able to process the whole thing better.The questions I had were trivial to the rest of the world, but important to me. For example, if they found a family in their gene bank, how long would it take until my last name was changed? And is my Argentine passport automatically changed? And my ID? And what would happen to my German passport? And my residence permit? And my bank account? And my bank cards? And how long would the whole process take?If I was going to lose control of my identity, I wanted to know at least on a practical level what it would mean. After all, a part of me is German, the one that looks for structure and predictability. I went to Conadi with my friend Adri, who had accompanied me the first time I went to the Grandmothers because he insisted. I was actually planning to go on my own.  Thank God for those wise friends who know me and my little capacity to ask them for help and insist on showing up, ignoring my poor judgment. We arrived at Conadi and they took us to the office of the person who was in charge of my case. It all started well. When we came in, he already had my file open on his desk. I don't remember how the talk started, but I did tell him that I had come to ask him a few last questions. I told him that I was going to leave the DNA in Sweden, to which he said: “Why don’t you leave it right here, right now?”.  I calmly tried to explain why, but my answers seemed to irritate him. I didn't understand what was happening, but since I was so used to giving explanations in my life, patiently and without getting upset, I tried to be clear and stay calm.Having carried all this trauma inside all these years, in a world that doesn't seem to understand much about it, one of the solutions I found is to explain the necessary so that people around me, in the absence of understanding, at least leave me alone and I can continue in peace with my internal processes.So sitting there that hot afternoon in that office at Conadi, seeing that man´s irritation, I tried to stay calm and explain to him why I wasn't going to leave the DNA then and there, but everything I said seemed to irritate him even more. To the point that he started threatening me. And since I would not let him convince me, nor get upset by what he told me, he finally concluded our talk by closing my file saying: "If you do not leave the DNA now, I cannot guarantee you that we won’t force you to leave it" to which I replied: “What you decide to do or not to do, is out of my control. Do whatever you have to do, cause I'm going to do exactly the same, which is to inform myself”.  Because that is my duty as the adult that I am. Get informed, take responsibility, gather strength, and do what I can within my human limitations.Everything was so unreal, it felt like I was in a movie. He was sitting on the other side of the desk, reclining in his chair with my file closed in front of him, like in those scenes where a prisoner, or criminal, or suspect, or even an alleged terrorist captured by the authorities, is about to be interrogated, then to be thrown into the dungeon. And I was there, trying to prove that I came in peace, and that I didn't want any problems. Trying to show my innocence. This scene felt so extremely wrong, taking place in the last place one would expect it to be played out. The meeting lasted for almost an hour. Me and my friend, also horrified, got out of the building as quickly as possible. I swore never to go near The Grandmother of Plaza de Mayo or Conadi ever again. I thought: "I'm going back to Sweden and good luck with trying to find me."  Of course when I told my acquaintances what happened they didn't believe me. Especially in Argentina. And I understand why. After all that the Grandmothers, whose children disappeared during the last Argentine military dictatorship suffered, after having to fight for every millimeter of justice, tirelessly seeking the truth in the hope of recovering their grandchildren, it is impossible to conceive that they could allow any of this to happen. We all do that. We put people on pedestals, we need immaculate heroes. Perfect heroes, almost with divine characteristics, because something has to be holy in this world. Specially in Argentina. Someone or something has to be able to be beyond the corrupt and unfair reality. Someone has to save us. But in the act of elevating others above everything else, we forget that we are all just mere humans, we are fish swimming in the stream of the forces of society that surround us, erring and learning all the time. We are not infallible, nobody is. We all do what we can with what was given to us, in the times we are born into.  To believe that an entity like the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo is perfect and infallible is crazy.  They have done great things. In their tenacious search for the truth and justice, they have accomplished incredible things. And to them we owe so much, but they are not of divine origin. They are people like everyone else, learning, making mistakes, trying. As I mentioned previously, the Foreign Ministry contacted me in August 2015. The judge told me to leave the DNA because a case had been opened.Before leaving the DNA I traveled to Argentina because it was my father's 75th birthday and I wanted to attend the party. At the airport on my way back to Sweden, when they saw my passport, they took it away without giving me any explanation and returned it to me after a while, also without giving me any explanation. That time I almost missed the plane back to Sweden. Even in 2016, when I had already left the DNA, upon arriving in Argentina, at the airport,  they held me in a migration room until they could contact the judge in my case. In the same room they held another individual, suspected, I think, to have a fake passport.Yes, that's right, they kept me in a room, like a criminal.  Within an hour, when they were finally able to speak to the judge, they let me go. It was very difficult not to feel like an object all these years. An evidence-bearing object. An object that was stolen in a state of total vulnerability, an object that was sold to a family, an object that had only to feel gratitude for growing up in that family.  An object that had to give up its identity in the name of the justice of a country, in order to find its other identity that was so badly longed for. The news that they had not found a relative in the Grandmother’s gene bank was not given to me personally. They sent me an email the Wednesday before Easter. They didn't tell me yes or no, just that the result had arrived. I had to wait until Monday to get it. Can you imagine the anxiety of those four days? When I called the judge on Monday, his secretary answered instead saying: “Oh, didn't I send it to you? The result is negative” And he explained to me that they would basically drop the case and stop looking.  I asked him to please withdraw my name from immigration, because I didn't want them to hold me back again at the airport when I left the country, and he, surprised that they had done it, explained to me that what they should have done instead was simply notify the judge every time I entered or left the country, nothing more. He apologized for that, and assured me that there would be no more problems. Thus ended the chapter of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.With one more detail, which I think is very important to mention. In 2016 I traveled to Paris with Simon to meet the pianist and recovered grandson, Ignacio Montoya Carlotto. He was touring Europe and Claudio Carlotto, his aunt, and head of Conadi, accompanied him. It was an incredible meeting, which filled me with inspiration. Ignacio is a very intelligent, sensitive, talented person, and with a wonderful sense of humor. And Claudia, who told me that in times of exile she ended up in Sweden and hated it, was warm and understanding. She told me that she had heard what happened with the man in charge of my case at Conadi and apologized to me on camera. She told me that he no longer worked at the Grandmothers and that the meeting I had with him should never have happened. That she was very sorry for what happened. And that’s how things are done.  We all make mistakes. We're just humans trying to do the best we can. Nothing else. Pedestals have never been helpful for anything. Instead taking responsibility for our mistakes, become aware of our part and making amends, yes. That is our true salvation. Or rather said, that is our only salvation.

The day I went to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo my legs were shaking. I went there with a friend who held me the last few meters to the door of the building. I made my “spontaneous presentation” at the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo-which basically means that I presented myself there saying that I had suspicions that I was the daughter of a disappeared person. Back in the days there were not many of us who did it. Back then, it was apparently unusual but  changed with the Kirchner presidency that came the following years and today, thanks to a lot of campaigning, it is well known what to do if one suspects to be the daughter or son of a disappeared person and wants to go to Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.For me it was like coming out of the closet. I made myself visible, according to my family to a possible enemy. As I mentioned before, at that time you only heard stories about how they persecuted people and once they suspected that they had found a son or daughter of a disappeared person, they did not stop until they got a DNA sample from that grandchild and incarcerated the family that raised them. And of course, they had reasons for doing this. In most cases, these babies were the children of detained-disappeared women who were pregnant and who were kept alive in clandestine detention centers until they gave birth. Sometimes these women were even tortured despite being pregnant. The dictatorship had set up  a secret regulation to establish the procedure in these cases and organized clandestine maternity hospitals inside or near the clandestine detention centers, with doctors and nurses under military command. Once the delivery occurred, the mother was murdered and false documents were made for the baby, erasing its original identity. The babies were then delivered to couples who, many times, were accomplices or accessories in the murder of the biological parents and the suppression of the identity of the children. On some occasions, the children were registered as their own by the appropriators and, on others, through illegal adoptions. (Wikipedia)  For some reason and logic that I still have a hard time understanding, it made perfect sense to kill the mothers, but not the newborn babies. From what I understood, they believed that newborn babies could be saved from the left-wing ideologies of their biological parents, if they were raised by right-wing people.I don't remember if I went to The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo once or twice that year. I do remember meeting Estela de Carlotto, the president of Abuelas, Abel Madariaga, secretary of Abuelas, and I think even Claudio Carlotto, coordinator of Conadi.I remember being able to chat a bit with Abel and Estela and feeling that I was in the presence of great souls, people with integrity, who, because of the things they had experienced and seen, had courage in their eyes. They talked to me about identity, that it was my right and that we all need to know where we come from. For the first time, I felt like someone knew what was happening to me.They asked me to bring my birth certificate so they could start an investigation and determine if there could in fact be suspicions that I was the daughter of a disappeared person. If so, they would ask me for a DNA sample to compare it with the DNA samples from the National Genetic Data Bank (BNDG) where all the samples of the relatives who are looking for the children of the disappeared by state terrorism are stored, and from all the people who suspect they are the daughters or sons of the disappeared, and have already left their sample. At absolutely no time was there any talk of coercion.A few days later I asked my dad for my birth certificate and as I said before, I don't remember much about that day, except that it was probably Sunday because the entire family was at home, and the reaction of all of them consisted more than anything in screams, anxiety, chaos and threats. I, who was never a rebel, nor a person who would ever impose my will, nor one of those who don't care about starting a conflict, did not give in and insisted on having my papers.I left my birth certificate at Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and soon after moved to Sweden, following that Swedish Viking I fell in love with. The one who seemed so brave, wise and sure of himself. The one who, unlike the world around me, advocated for human rights.I arrived in Stockholm on June 9, 2002, four days before I saw Argentina lose in the World Cup against Sweden, which added even more to that bizarre feeling of having moved to the other side of the planet. Shortly after I settled in, I received a message from my friend Dario who was my contact with Conadi. He had been contacted by them, telling him that they had important news and that I should call them. For those who do not know what the Conadi is, it´s the National Commission for the Right to Identity, which promotes the search for sons and daughters of the disappeared and people born during the captivity of their mothers, during the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship, in order to determine their whereabouts and restore their identity. They are basically the Grandmother’s detectives, the ones who do the investigative part.I took courage and called, like someone who wants to know but doesn't really want to know. They told me that the doctor who signed my birth certificate, Dr. Bartucca, was already being prosecuted-I remember that word "prosecuted" for other cases. Since this was a strong indication that it was very possible that I was the daughter of the disappeared, they asked me to leave the DNA when I was ready to leave it. Again, no coercion.I remember sitting in the living room of that huge apartment in Kungsholmen, the area of ​​Stockholm where we lived, in a state of shock, not knowing what to do with myself. As soon as my Swedish boyfriend got home from work I told him what had happened, but he didn't seem to understand at all what the call I had had earlier with Conadi implied. It seemed there was a good chance that I would find a biological family. In other words, if I left the DNA, my identity would be changed and a process would begin to determine what role my father and mother played in my appropriation. “This is as far as my love for justice goes” I thought “Someday, if the laws change, if I can make sure that nothing happens to my parents, I will leave my DNA”.So years went by, convinced that if I left the DNA I was going to find my biological family and at the same time terrified that I would be forced to leave it and lose so much.In the years that followed, the Argentine government changed and awareness of what happened in the last military dictatorship grew. Also awareness of women's rights and social inequality. I'm not saying this because I sympathize with any political party. The reason why I noticed a change is that my mom began to talk to me about these issues when she  would call me. My mother who did not read a book unless it was about cooking recipes, who at some point questioned whether the Earth was really round and who had television characters like Mirta Legrand and Susana Giménez as a cultural reference - If you don't know who they are, well without wanting to be cruel, I can say, they have not been banners of the high culture and sophistication of the country - well, one day she began to talk about the Grandmothers and feminism. If this information and change of attitude had reached my mother, then there really had been changes in the Argentine society! Without telling anyone, every so often I would send an email to Conadi, asking if the laws had changed. It was the only thing that worried me. Was there any way that I could restore my biological past without having to destroy my present? For me, and perhaps for many others in the same situation as me, the price to pay to obtain the truth of the past was very high. Losing my identity to impose another twice in my life sounds quite unnecessary. I wasn’t a little girl that had been appropriated by a couple for a few years and would go back to my original family when this was happening. When this started I was already 23 years old, a fully-fledged woman. With all the cultural heritage of my adoptive family. A rare cross between a German hybrid because of my dad, an Austrian because of my mom and an Argentine because of the country I grew up in and my genetic heritage. Carrying a last name impossible to pronounce for most Spanish speakers and a strange love for the North European.I always absolutely adored my family. Dysfunctional as it all was, despite the violence and neglect of my parents, I loved them with my entire being, as all children love their parents. When my mom passed away from cancer in 2013, I was by her side until her last breath. And when I hugged my dad before leaving for the airport on June 30, 2022, knowing that it would be the last time I would see him alive, inside I felt like I was dying.Giving up my last name, my history, my inheritance, my family, because at the moment of my birth the chaotic world that surrounded me made the decisions in accordance with an ideology of that moment and in this way forever determined the course of my life, is a lot to ask.I was not prepared to lose so much. Then there was the matter of possible consequences for my family. I couldn't imagine them going before a judge to testify and being mistreated as they surely would be, simply because they "got the wrong baby". As my dad told me: “If I had known where you came from, I never would have adopted you. I don't agree with that ideology."So I took my time. The desire to know my biological identity was interfered with my fear of all the things I would lose if I found my origin. The right to my identity came with a huge cost.  Besides, life in Sweden kept me quite busy,trying to survive as an artist and musician. And with all that trauma on top of everything that kept me awake at night and weak during the days. Trying t

I grew up in a German middle class family in an area that’s called Martinez, San Isidro, Buenos Aires. Those who are from Buenos Aires know exactly what that means, but for those who are not from Buenos Aires here is a summary. San Isidro, located in the northern part of Buenos Aires, is known for being an area of ​​rich people, with European-English, German and French surnames, and for being very right-wing. This is not unusual, as right-wing politics upholds the system that privileges the rich and promotes their social and economical status.Of course, this is a very big generalization, but to summarize something that’s very complicated, let's just say that’s how it is.I then grew up surrounded by right-wing people. And to make matters a little more extreme, I grew up in the Menem era. For those who don't know what this means, here comes an explanation:  Argentina had a president from 1989 to 1999 who not only privatized the entire country, but also pardoned many of the people who had been convicted by the previous government. People who were members of the former military dictatorship, commanders convicted in the Junta Trial from 1985. Menem was the president of oblivion, and the society I grew up in was very keen to forget, thanks to an economy that somehow made a dollar worth as much as an Argentine peso, which of course was completely absurd and later led to an economic collapse for the entire country.The little that was said at family gatherings about the disappeared always landed in the conclusion that "They must have done something. If you weren't involved in it, they didn’t come after you".The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were greatly feared. They were seen as vengeful goblins who only wanted more blood to flow, and Hebe de Bonafini was highlighted as the representative of the entire organization. She was one of the founders of the Grandmother of Plaza de Mayo and it was said that in her activism she advocated for armed confrontation with the government. This howeverWhich did not give a true picture of the important work that the organization did.There was no understanding, no compassion, no empathy for those searching for their missing children. They were portrayed as mad women looking for their terrorist sons and daughters who had been imprisoned as a solution to the disaster they had caused. The missing grandchildren were never even mentioned. Again, the argument that "they must have done something" was what justified everything.  According to the message I got at home, one should not have anything to do with the Grandmothers. They just wanted to fight and they were never looking for justice. They just wanted blood and revenge and the best thing to do was to keep your head down and pass unnoticed. Maybe that's why, when I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me that "if they ask you at school which of your parents you look most like, say you look like your mother who is Argentinian". The thing was that my mother was the daughter of Austrians and, in turn, resembled one of the Von Trapp children from the movie "The Sound of Music". So, she did not look Argentinian at all.So I grew up like those privileged middle-class girls from the northern part of Buenos Aires and didn't really care about any of this.It was something that was far away from my reality. I remember my friend from school, who was also adopted, used to read books about the dictatorship, and even identify strongly with it. Without saying it, but probably thinking that she was one of the missing children. The whole thing was very boring to me, and deep down I felt she wanted to be special, and that's why she wanted to think that she was one of those girls. Because as I said before, in the society I grew up in, there was an underlying message that these babies were special, not like the rest who were just children of the poor. It seemed ridiculous to me to talk about something we knew nothing about, and as it was said around me, it is better to look ahead.And that was my attitude, until the day when everything changed and I understood that the only thing left was to go to Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.It wasn't easy-who would I meet at the there? Were they the vengeful goblins that everyone around me was talking about or were they heroines who like Don Quixote fought the windmills of a society that ridiculed them and wanted to forget them? As I already told you, Argentina is a country with so many gray areas that it is almost impossible to trust anyone. It is hard to go against a system that forces people to think only of their own survival. When the reality of a country is so dysfunctional, it forces its inhabitants to be in a constant state of vigilance and fear. Of course, within that system there are people who are trying to change the state of reality that surrounds them, and here and now I want to send my warmest greetings and say that I see you and salute you. The admiration I have for you is endless. So, why I decided to go to the grandmothers has not only to do with the rape I survived on August 7, 2001, but also with the Swedish man I met on the adventure tourism trip I took to Mendoza with my cousin.I'm going to rewind here a bit, see if you guys can follow me in this story. August 7, 2001 was a sunny winter day in Buenos Aires. It was a beautiful dry day, which I could feel in my hair because it wasn't the typical disaster that Buenos Aires humidity does to my curls. As I mentioned earlier, I was on my way from my yoga instructor class. As I passed a house and was distracted by how beautifully the sun reflected on the red petals of the flowers in the garden, a young man approached me from behind. He threatened me that I had to do as he said or he would kill me. At first he wanted to rob me, but I had no money on me. Then he forced me to go with him. We walked and walked, I was so scared I didn't try to run away or scream. Eventually he found a secluded spot and I knew what was going to happen.The rape was quick, and like many survivors, I negotiated for him not to hit me, well aware of the frequency of femicide in Argentina. Nothing brings us closer to life than the presence of death. In that moment of total clarity, the two thoughts that would follow me throughout my life arose, the first of which I have already talked about: “Is this all? All my life I've been trying to do everything everyone wants me to do and now I'm going to die?" And the other, which unconsciously had something to do with the suspicions of being the daughter of the disappeared: "If I die now, they'll never know what happened, they'll never find me." But I survived and a couple of months later my psychologist told me that nature heals and that it was a very good idea to go on a trip to Mendoza with my cousin Lily. As life can be, fate struck again and I met a Swedish man at the hostel where we were staying. He seemed like a creature from another planet. Tall, with a cascade of long, straight, copper-colored hair.Like most Swedes, at least in words, very aware of human rights and the injustices of society. When I told him about my adoption, he told me: “Of course you have to search. We all have a right to our identity." I believed him. It was the first time I heard those words: "Identity is a right." I had never considered that concept before. My origins had always been a mist of speculation about where my genes came from.Speculations that assured me it was better not to know anything, that indicated that I should be happy with just being adopted by a family. That’s what I had gotten from life, and it was all there was to have. If there was something that I had permission to feel, something that I was reminded of from time to time, it was gratitude. There was always someone who said: "Look how lucky you were, who knows where you would be now if your mom and dad hadn't picked you up".The right to my biological identity had been revoked from the start and I had to settle for that and be happy. But my soul, which had just survived an episode where a person took the liberty of taking away my right to my physical integrity, reducing me to nothing, listened to the Swedish man's words, which he said with such wisdom and certainty, and reminded me, that this life is mine to live, that it can end at any moment, so it's time to live it.That clarity, that strength made me go against my whole family, the beliefs I grew up with and make the decision to approach the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Life derailed me completely from the path I had been on, and now that I had completely lost my way, why not face my deepest fears and emerge from the anonymity of my adoption and risk being seen?After all, victory always belongs to the brave.

The relationship with my family was, in general, difficult. The relationship with my family during my search was particularly difficult.At my age, I have understood that we all do the best we can with what was given to us in this life and that it is impossible to give what you never received. So it was impossible for my parents to give what they never receivedA couple of years ago I asked my dad if he remembered when it was that my mom started being that bitter and aggressive person I grew up with. The fights at home were always violent.My mother always started them and my father endured the aggression until he exploded. The fights then became a marathon of physical, mental and emotional aggression from both sides, which could last for several days. My brother and I grew up in the midst of that unstoppable whirlwind that was created by them.Violence and abusive behavior towards children was very common in those days and I would even say it was considered normal. Things that at the time were considered a daily part of raising children would today make the majority react. But it all really escalated when I was 11, after my grandmother died. And I never understood why my father would put up with a woman as aggressive and cruel as my mother. I always thought that something must have happened to her along the way that turned her into that monster. The only answer I got from my dad was that she really dreamed of having children and after trying for 10 years, that frustration and sadness changed her. Eventually they adopted us and thus the dream of the two children, the house, the car and the provider husband came true. But despite that, there was a pain in her soul that never left her alone. And my father, who only wanted to play tennis, have two children, a house, a car and a beautiful housewife, had no peace either. His peace was always dependent on her peace. My brother, the first one to be adopted three years before me, was always the pride of the family, something that was obvious to everyone who knew us. Not only did he suffer the typical older sibling feeling of being displaced when I arrived, but he was also the one who suffered far more physical abuse than I did. Perhaps because he was the son, he learned to confront them and that's why he received much harsher punishment.I saw that, and I learned not to complain, or answer, or take space, or be sad. I learned to avoid the blow. My brother learned to take it. None of us had peace. He learned to confront, I learned to disappear, put on a poker face and pretend as if "nothing is happening here."A couple of years ago I realized that it is not normal for a 6 year old girl to pray to God at night to take her away because everything she does is wrong and she is just a mistake in this world.In my egocentrism as a child, when I thought I was the cause of all this, I thought it was my job to create that peace that didn't exist. That it was my job to save them, protect them, make them laugh, explain to them and show them how much I loved them, to beg them to stop fighting, to try to understand what hurt them so much and find a solution, a relief so that they would finally find peace within themselves and finally see me. So that there would be love in my family, the love that I had been waiting for for so many years. I did, as children do, everything I could to make them love me as I wanted to be loved, but I never succeeded. So asking about my adoption did not exist in my reality.The biggest threat, from what I understand, for adoptive parents, is that one day their adopted child will come to them and tell them “it's over”. That they don't love them anymore and that they are going to  look for their real family. The anxiety of losing their beloved children can make them quite crazy. And it´s understandable. It must be so scary. I felt that all the time. "Even a mare can give birth! A mother is the one who raises you", is what my mother used to say to make it clear to me that it was not worth looking for my biological mother.Children feel what their parents feel. Children understand beyond their words. So I never threatened to look for my biological mother. I had nowhere to go, there were no legal papers about who it was. The feeling that I had was that my biological mother didn't even bother to do things legally. She got rid of me "like a mare". At that time we began to hear about the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and their search for the children stolen by the dictatorship. But it never dawned on anyone in my family that I was one of them. As I mentioned earlier, according to the social norms of the time, I was the daughter of a slum person, a mare, also known as a poor person with no morals, who left me without looking back. But luckily, this family wanted to adopt me and give me the comfort of a middle-class life. As everyone had told me: "There´s no need to look back. The past must be forgotten." Now, before I continue, a trigger warning here, as this is about to get a little bit darker.The good thing or the bad thing, depending on how you look at it, is that life has its own plans.Now, before I continue, a trigger warning here, as this is about to get dark.My suspicions about being the daughter of The Disappeared began sometime in 2001, but it was thnaks thanks to the rape that I survived the 7th of August of that year that many things changed in my life. That day I left the yoga instructor class and instead of taking the busiest street to walk the 6 blocks home, I took the parallel street. There I was stopped by a guy who threatened to kill me. He kidnapped me and eventually raped me. That day I thought I was going to die. Abuses like the one I suffered are still common in Argentina. It is still easy to rape and then kill women, and in 2001 it was even easier. I thought my time was up, right after the rape I looked around to see if anyone would save me but there was no one. This was my destiny and I thought, "I always did everything everyone wanted me to do, I always behaved well, I always tried not to be a burden, not to rebel, waiting for permission to exist and now I will die. What a waste of a life! In the end, no matter how hard you try, it all happens anyway." At the end of that day, I managed to convince my captor to let me go, and that's how the rebuilding of my being began.With the strength of the pain and probably the adrenaline of having survived, a short time later I asked my father for my birth certificate to go to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and start the search. I don't remember exactly what happened that day and I wouldn't remember anything at all if it wasn't for my friend Adri, who was there with me. Apparently, he witnessed the scene where my father gave me the birth certificate yelling, "You're going to send us all to jail," and my mother screaming that if it hadn't been for them, I'd be dead. My family tried to convince me that the past meant nothing and that I was just looking for excuses to play the victim.Everyone in my family was against my search. And not only against it, they were violently against it. They were terrified of what they read in the newspapers about the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, terrified that I would leave them, terrified that the story was true: that they had bought a baby that had been stolen by the military.That was the last time I talked to them about it. I went to the Grandmothers, did what I was supposed to, moved shortly after to Sweden and never ever mentioned the subject again. My mother tried to get information out of me from time to time and said she had gone to a witch. The witch had told her that I was still searching in silence but that I would wait for her, my mother, to die in order to search freely. The witch was right, but I denied everything. My mother could not handle the anxiety of my search, nor could my father. So why generate more anxiety that I then have to deal with myself? No, I'd rather search in silence.In January 2013, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung and liver cancer. I didn't get to see her while she was still conscious, but my aunt Mary told me that one of the things she had said in her last days was that she wanted me to would find my biological mother. My adoptive mom used to tell me that she watched that show on TV called “People looking for people” (Gente que busca gente) to see if any mother looking for a daughter who looked like me would show up. And when she would tell me this, I always answered : "I already have a mom." In my eyes, my mother was like a little girl with a great inability to regulate her emotions. All my life I protected her from me and my truth, and I wasn't going to stop until the day she left this dimension.Once she died it was time to gather my courage and talk to my dad. In 2015, when I went to Argentina, I asked him if we could have coffee. For 13 years I prepared what I was going to say: "Dad, the grandmothers are getting old now, I can't wait any longer." So that's exactly what I said to him that day in that cafe in the Plaza de Martinez and to my surprise, my dad agreed with me 100 percent. Of my parents, he was always the most reasonable. His response was positive, he also thought it was time and not only that, he ended the conversation by saying, "I don't agree with that ideology," referring to how the military junta decided to settle the question of what to do with the babies born to people they captured, tortured and killed.That was not the reaction I expected from my father. Apparently my mom and dad had time to think during the 13 years of silence. I can imagine that it was probably because the governments that have been in power since I moved to Sweden made the work of the grandmothers visible in a positive way and brought forward the atrocities of the military junta, which made my parents' conscience weigh heavily. So, with my father's permission, I contacted the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo the following year

I have always felt an immense loneliness.The feeling that my life is a mistake and that I should never have been born has haunted me from a young age. I remember that sometimes at night I prayed to God to take me away and at the same time not wanting my family to know this, cause I didn’t want to make them sad. I never questioned myself feeling this way until I was 17. That's when I asked my parents if I could go to a psychologist and basically I have been in some kind of therapy since then. Being a patient has been part of my identity, as one of my best friends would say. Yes it's true. What else would I be if I wasn't just that? Forever broken, forever to be mended. Forever wanting to be someone else. The problem has always the same: my self-esteem. But how did I get here? What happened to me that turned me into this? Or could it be that I chose this role, to be the eternal victim? I mean, sure, we're all a little damaged as a consequence of living on planet Earth, but what has always bothered me the most about my traumas, is having those inner voices that debilitate me every day and make me take decisions that continue to keep me  in a place where I am subjected to some sort of abuse. And of course at the same time knowing that it is up to me to remove myself from such a position but still somehow not being able to. Sure, at this point I feel much better than I did a few years ago, healing slowly but surely, one day at a time. But still, I can get so annoyed at myself from time to time and my self-hate sometimes gets a free pass when I can't see the good in me, and when I keep on getting into relationships and situations that confirm that I'm not worth anything. It is frustrating to say the least. All this came to a peak in 2008. I had fallen victim to an obsession with a person who realized how much I admired him and he took the opportunity to suck out all the self-love I had.I felt like he really saw me, and the part of me that had been hiding came finally out into the open to receive love. Of course, all this had to do with music, I finally felt seen. Music, that forbidden place in me that had been systematically criticized by my family, and that had saved my life so many times. Music, my salvation, the only place that for years had helped me escape my reality, until the day I could finally get away for real, when I left for Sweden to start a new life. But by 2008, and so many years of therapy behind me, plus reading the book "Women Who Love Too Much", I had come to the realization that I was powerless and didn't have the ability to get out of the situation I was in. I was very clearly my own worst enemy and did not have any kind of power over my behavior. So that's when I, in August 2008 started attending 12-step meetings. Very… but very slowly, I began to dig into this entanglement of thoughts, feelings and guilt that I carried inside. Although I had already been in therapy many years before, I still hadn't processed so much. Slowly and carefully I broke the denial and saw what was really underneath. But very slowly. Because what lies behind addiction and codependency are monsters with big teeth and sharp claws, followed by the destructive voice of guilt. In Gabor Maté's words "don't ask yourself why the addiction, instead ask yourself why the pain". It's really annoying to see oneself reacting as a co-dependent. It's as if another being suddenly takes control over one's body and before one has time to stop it, it already says words one didn't want to say and moves ones body where one didn't want to move it. When I find myself in what is called "in the race" in the 12 step program, it is very difficult to get in touch with my truth, know what is happening inside me, make decisions, set boundaries or remove myself from abusive situations. The fear of losing the people around me makes me panic and transforms me into the perfect victim. "I just want them to love me and stay by my side", says my inner child, ready to pay any price. The worst part is that she, my inner child, always finds people who remind her of the family she grew up with to see if she now will  finally win that love she never got as a child. And always, but ALWAYS loses the game. Because the past has already passed. The only thing I can do is accept it. Accept the reality, the pain and allow myself to cry.This existential loneliness is not only found in us adoptees. Everyone carries it inside. We were born alone and we die alone. And we are the ones who have to see ourselves, feel compassion for our history, give ourselves time to process it, slow down every day for a little while and ask ourselves how we feel, to cure that loneliness. Meditation for example helps a lot.To participate in groups with people who have had or have the same life experiences as well. We have to break the silence. Break the shame of what we feel and think so it doesn't eat us from the inside. After all, we all want to be seen and loved for who we really are. That is universal.But how did it go for us adoptees? Since no one really knows what the human soul is made of, or what our inner core and identity actually consists of, that is, there are many theories but no absolute truth, it is difficult to say how a person is shaped by adoption and how such a process will land in us. Especially nobody knew when I was adopted. It was assumed that it was simply to receive a girl and raise her in a context and that she, like a blank slate (tabula rasa), would grow up to be identical with her adoptive family or at least to become a natural part of it. The first problem probably started already when they went  to collect me at the doctor who had me for sale Dr. Celestino Bartucca. According to what my mother told me, they had been promised a blonde girl, but when they came to pick up the baby, it was me instead, brown skinned and black haired. She always said it to me like it was a huge disappointment. How ugly I was. The racism was unbearable.Years later I found out that the day after they bought me, she took me to the neighbor and asked if she didn't think I was "too dark". The neighbor was horrified and told my other neighbor, who has been like an aunt to me, who then told me this story in 2010. And thank God for that, because sometimes I think I made this all up,this racism I was constantly exposed to. I was a blank slate, but with one small detail: my genes. Genes, as I was repeatedly told by my surroundings and family, originated in the slums. An assumption full of racismAnd it is clear, according to the society's values based on class and racism, that they are the worst genes in the gene pool. On top of that, of course it didn't help to have grown up in the German society that blossomed in Buenos Aires after World War II.But the past must be accepted. And I traveled to Buenos Aires in June 2022 to knock on doors, behind one of them could belong to my biological mother to do just that. To see if I could accept my reality. To see if I could stop blaming myself, to see if I could understand what was happening inside me and why I carry this endless loneliness that brings me to my knees before my co-dependency. I went to Buenos Aires to see if I could repair that part of me that I hadn't been able to embrace, because I always felt it was my fault that I had been given away to another family. That I was a mistake, unwanted. I should never have been born. I appeared in this world and since then I have tried to be someone worthy of being loved. I'm trying to prove to everyone and everything that I didn't come here to take someone else's place.That I am a good person, and above all loyal. I don't give up on anyone or anything. Never. I stay until the end even if it destroys me. The Titanic is sinking and I will be the one left in the band playing. And that's why it's worth staying by my side.Because…“Please stay by my side.Please don't let me go mom, this world scares me.Please mom, what lies ahead is going to be very difficult.I promise to be the best daughter if you let me stay by your side."And here I could end this chapter of codependency.But on second thought, I'll give it a few more minutes. Not long ago, I read an article about the relationship between adoptees and substance abuse, depression, suicide or attempted suicide, divorce, the inability to maintain functional emotional relationships, and the onset of certain diseases.Our self-destructive tendencies are obvious. There is a noise within us that we cannot calm or silence. As if we had a cry inside that is inconsolable. But because it's so hard to identify it, accept it, talk about it, the noise becomes a heavy and static void.Of course, we are not all the same. Not all of us feel or experience the same thing. Much depends on the family that adopts us. But the statistics speak for themselves.Pain is inevitable. In this life we ​​will all feel pain at some point. But suffering is not necessary. I found relief in the Codependent Anonymous twelve-step program. And even though my codependency still dominates my days, I try to find love for myself and understanding for that little girl who longs to be loved and will do anything to get people to stay by her side.One day I might be free.In the meantime, I pray the serenity prayer God grant me the serenity  to accept the things I cannot change,  courage to change the things I can,  and the wisdom to know the difference Thank you

In order to find something, you must first understand what you are looking for. And I don't think I understood what I was looking  for until I actually began knocking on doors. Doors behind which might reveal my biological mother.Our identity is not something permanent. There are components of our identity that are constantly changing. And there are also other components that don't change that much. Our biological identity, for example, is one of the parts that doesn't change that much. That is, unless there are significant treatments or interventions done on the body, it is most likely that we will somehow resemble our biological relatives. And that we inherit our genetics from our ancestors. If we simplify the question: Did you find your biological origin? Then the answer is also simple. It's either a yes or a no. But every time I get this question, the answer is not at all simple, because I hear a whole different  question in my head. What I hear is: “Now that you better understand who you are and what happened the moment you were born, do you understand why you were abandoned? That is why it is difficult to find a quick answer to this question, because both the question and the answer are really complex. Now, if I would find someone who is biologically related to me, well, that would be wonderful. Because it's something I've never had and really wish I could find. But with that said, that is a much simpler answer. As for the search for my biological identity, it was not clear to me what I was really looking for. I mean, I had a feeling, but I didn't really understand. Thanks to the conversations with a person named Mercedes Yañez, I was able to connect a little bit with what was happening inside me. Understanding the big question was the real journey. What am I looking to heal? What part of me am I missing? And why is it so important?If we assume that my search began the day I suspected that I was the daughter of the disappeared during the dictatorship, then I can say that what I was looking for all along was to accept what happened. And how it happened. And It’s it’s hard to reconstruct the truth when you don't have it. The expectations, the dreams and fantasies that this emptiness feeds from are very powerful. As if my feet can never touch the ground, because there is a bit of truth that I don’t understand. It wasn't so much figuring out who I am, because at my age I already am who I am, instead it was about figuring out why I am.So knocking at the doors of women where one of them could actually be my biological mother gave a  face to a fantasy. Although none of them turned out to be my biological mother, they were all my mothers in a way. And in their stories I could see and understand something that without their bravery I would have never understood or found: context. These mothers had never forgotten their daughters. Whatever the reason for the pregnancy, the girl that was born was not just a mistake that had to be corrected by handing it over to other people. That girl always remained in the memory of these mothers. It never left them. The answer I was looking for was largely answered. "How could you let me go? How could you hand me over to strangers who God knows what they would do to me? Was I worth so little? Was it all worth so little to you?But it wasn't like that at all, she didn't just let me go. There were no other options. And The the family that adopted me was not chosen. They were just there, at the right place and the right time. Nothing more. It wasn't personal. I didn't cause it, nor controlled it. Everything just happened that way. Life is a lottery and you get what you get. It's not fair, there are no rules. Or if there are, they are very difficult to understand and it is beyond me to do so. So my answer is, yes, I found a lot. And I understood at least through my journey and experience that mothers do not forget their children. Never. (Ever)And none of this was personal. It has nothing to do with me.But yes, it did happen to me.

In order to answer that, it is necessary to start by explaining what happened in 2015. After getting the call from the Argentine Embassy that the Argentine Foreign Ministry was looking for me, I panicked. Panic to the point that I did something I had never done before in my life. I called my boyfriend and told him crying: "They found me, they found me. Please come home." I'm not that kind of person. I'm not usually the one to call people and ask them to come and save me, but that day I had such a severe panic attack that I actually asked for help.This reaction actually had to do with something that happened a few months before, when almost at the end of my annual trip to Buenos Aires, I decided to go to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo to ask the last questions about what would happen if I left my DNA and they found my biological family.I understand how such questions may seem irrelevant to people in general.I mean, if you compare it to the solving of crimes against humanity and the restoration of my biological identity, everything else should reasonably be irrelevant.But for people like me, who are on this side of history, it is not. So in my opinion, anyone who has something to say about it, if they are not in the same position as we are in, who have to face such decision, please remain silent and try to understand instead.At least for me, it was something I had been thinking about for 13 years, before I could take the big step. And I had actually had already decided that I would do it. On that same trip to Buenos Aires, I sat down with my adoptive father for the first time and told him that it was time. That the grandmothers still searching for the stolen children and grandchildren had grown old and could not wait any longer.He replied that "I also think it is good that you do it" and that "if I had ever suspected that you came from one of these families, I would have never accepted it". My father gave me permission. All this was also happening because of what my mother said two years earlier on her deathbed. Before she fell into a morphine-induced coma, when the cancer was already beyond recovery and there was no turning back, she admitted to my aunt that "I hope Natalie finds her biological mother."We all suspected that I was a stolen child, the daughter of "desaparecidos" or disappeared. By the way, when you talk about the "desaparecidos" or disappeared in Latin America, you mean people who were murdered by the military and police during the dictatorship, whose bodies were never found.So, as I had understood it, there were two things that would happen if my DNA sample matched with any DNA in the stolen children´s gene bank:By law, my last name would be changed to the last name of my biological family A legal process and a police investigation would begin to determine if my father had anything to do with the military dictatorship's systematic theft of babies, which could lead to him having to deal with brutal scrutiny and even receiving a prison sentence.This for me meant mainly two things: 1. My German passport would be invalid (which is very problematic for someone like me who has lived in a European country for 13 years, because as we all know, getting a visa for staying in Europe is not easy as an Argentine)-and secondly and more importantly, perhaps most importantly, my father would have a very tough time.It wasn't an easy decision, but I had already taken it. So I went to The Grandmother of Plaza de Mayo in March 2015 to ask the last questions before returning to Sweden and leaving the DNA at the Argentine embassy there.With such bad luck that I was met by the person in charge of my case who tried to convince me to leave the DNA then and there for an hour and then, when he finally realized that I would not give in to it, he threatened me that they would force me to leave it anyway.A psychopath in the place where they were supposed to be working to repair the damage caused by the psychopaths of the military junta in 1976. If these are the good guys and they treat me like this, I can only imagine how the bad guys would treat me. "Argentina is truly the upside down kingdom" I thought and swore to never come near the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo ever again.The worst part, as always, was that no one believed me. How could there be such a psychopath working there? Could it have had something to do with my attitude? Hadn't I just imagined what happened? Me being so sensitive... And after all, if I was still thinking about leaving the DNA anyway, why did it matter to leave it there or in Sweden?It mattered a lot. Leaving the DNA because it is my own decision, within a context where I am leaving it because I am part of an historical event, where I had no power at all and I was a victim along with my mother of the decision of a group of people, and then ended up in a family that had nothing to do with me, mattered a whole lot. I was giving up the identity that I had built for 38 years and my dad's love in exchange for the truth. If that was the price to pay, then at least may it be my own decision.I went back to Sweden and closed that door. But they found me. So I went to the embassy and spoke to the judge who was in charge of my case. Basically he told me that they wanted my DNA, that the case had been opened and that if I didn't leave my DNA  willingly, they would have to send the Swedish police to search my house and obtain the samples.I told him to give me a month to think about it.I needed a month, because I was traveling to Argentina for my dad's 75th birthday. I needed to get in and out of the country without being hassled. He said yes.But a week later they called me from the embassy saying that they already had the papers and that I should come by to leave the DNA.They told me that the judge had told them that I agreed.That's when I had enough and understood that if I didn’t document everything, no one would ever believe what happened. Also, that in these times where everything is on social media, people tend to behave when they are in front of a camera.So that's why I contacted Simon, a friend of my boyfriend. Simón was studying script writing at that time, and already filming documentaries. He found my story very interesting so he asked me if he could make a documentary of my search. I told him yes. As long as he filmed all these procedures so I could protect myself at least a little bit from all the abuse.If that was the case, I agreed to be a part of his documentary and Simon and I started filming. Because if there’s one thing we both had learned was without witnesses, there is no truth.