Who Am I? Growing Up in Care Without an Identity

No baby pictures. No dusty albums filled with memories, no grainy videos capturing my first steps. There’s no one to tell you if you were an easy baby or if you screamed through the night. No one remembers what your first word was or the way your nose scrunched up when you laughed as a toddler.

When you grow up in care, your past is scattered fragments of stories told by professionals, case notes scribbled in files, gaps where love and connection should be. Your  identity is a patchwork quilt of what others have told you, stitched together with missing pieces you can never replace.

You often wonder who you were before all of this? Before social workers, before bin bags filled with your belongings, before you was a name on a case file. Who held you when you cried? Did anyone stroke your hair and whisper, ‘It’s okay, I’ve got you’?

Growing up without a sense of self feels like floating in a space where nothing is anchored. People talk about their childhoods with certainty, with stories passed down through generations. They have parents who can settle arguments about what year they lost their first tooth or what toy they clung to at night. You have none of that. You have silence where answers should be.

You scroll through social media and see childhood photos shared with pride, messy faces covered in birthday cake, tiny hands holding onto parents who never let go. You feel the ache in your chest, a grief for something you have never had. Your childhood isn’t in photo albums or home videos, it exists only in the memories of people who didn’t stay.

The worst part isn’t just not knowing, it’s the confusion. It’s looking in the mirror and not seeing the resemblance to a mother or father. It’s filling in forms and hesitating at ‘family medical history’ because you don’t know if heart disease or cancer runs in your  blood. It’s being asked about your happiest childhood memory and feeling your throat close up because you don’t know if you have one.

And then, there’s the endless questioning, Who am I? Are you the person people said you were in your case files? Are you the behaviours you were labelled with? Are you the lost child, or are you something more? The uncertainty seeps into everything. It’s second-guessing every trait, every preference, every decision because there’s no foundation to build upon. It’s wondering if the way you smile, the way you walk, or the way you react to things are reflections of a family you have never known or just survival mechanisms you have  developed over time.

You want to exist in something permanent, something that isn’t a placement order or a report written about you. You want to belong to a past that is yours, not one decided for you. You want to hold a photograph of your younger self and say, ‘That’s me. That’s where I began.’

But you can’t. So instead, you try to create your own memories, build your own identity. You tell yourself that you  are more than the missing pieces. You  are more than the gaps in your history. You are here, now, and you matter.

Even if you don’t know where you came from, you can still decide where you are going.

The Impact of Not Knowing Who You Are in Adulthood

But the gaps don’t just disappear with age. They follow you into adulthood, shaping how you see yourself and how you move through the world. Not knowing who you are leaves a lingering sense of detachment, a feeling of being an outsider in your own life. It’s struggling with a name that never felt like yours, questioning if you even look like the people who brought you into the world, wondering if your mannerisms mirror someone you will never meet.

It affects relationships, too. How do you trust when your foundation was built on instability? How do you love when you were taught that people leave? There is a hesitancy, a need for reassurance that others don’t always understand. It’s hard to let people in when your past is something even you don’t fully understand.

It affects self-worth. When no one was there to celebrate your milestones, to hold your hand through the uncertainties of childhood, it’s easy to feel like you weren’t worth remembering. You become an expert at blending in, at adapting, at being whoever people need you to be, because you never had the chance to figure out who you truly are.

And then there are the practical struggles, the medical forms with unanswered questions, the job applications asking for an emergency contact when you don’t know who to list, the family tree projects your own children bring home from school, and the silence that follows when they ask, ‘Who were your parents?’

But in the absence of a past, there is also an opportunity, a chance to build a future on your own terms. To create traditions, to tell new stories, to become the person you needed when you were younger. The scars of not knowing never fully fade, but they don’t have to define everything.

We may never know where we started, but we can choose where we go from here.