No matter how horrible my dreams are - no matter how gory they get or how helpless I am made to be in them - it’s rare that I’ll wake up sobbing, let alone staying that way for fifteen minutes straight. Nevertheless, that’s how I started my Saturday. The funny thing is that while horrific, violent things have happened in my dreams for the past ten years, this one was, by comparison, fairly tame. It still managed to rock me to the core.

We were having a party, mostly my friends, but my mother had invited some people too. We were in the old house, the tiny one, so that even though the group wasn’t enormous, we were practically standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

I was having a good time. My mother had invited my grandparents. Somehow, above the din, I heard my grandmother tell someone, “well, [my sister’s name] is [my father’s name]’s kid, but we don’t know about Arielle.” In other words, insinuating that the man I’d thought of as my father for my whole life was not, in fact, my father.

Enraged, I made everyone leave. It was no small feat funnelling dozens of partygoers through our tiny front door, but I was furious enough to be persuasive.

I was left with my mother and father sitting in two chairs in our living room, while I stood before them, seething. “Is it true?” I asked.

Their slightly sad half-smiles were maddening - they were calm, as though to condescendingly hint that I was probably overreacting. But they didn’t understand - it wasn’t so much the blow of my genetic history itself, because no matter what, the man who raised me was still irrevocably my father. It was the lying. The twenty-four years of lying.

I slowly learned through their patronizing expressions that, no, this man was not my biological father. Yes, they had decided to let me think otherwise. No, they didn’t think this was such a big deal.

I asked who it was. My mother said that she had had a one-night stand when she was young with someone who had picked her up at a bus stop, and never saw him again.

I started to cry, searing, angry tears. Everything I was was a lie. Years of doctors’ visits based on inaccurate family medical histories. I wasn’t actually French. My sister was only my half-sister. My father wasn’t really my father. All the traits of mine that I’d ascribed to his side of the family - my looks, my dark features, my intellectual ambition and compulsive tendencies, my moodiness - were now inexplicable, coming from a seeming vacuum. All the feelings I’d had in my youth of feeling different, of being an outsider in my own family, came screechingly back into the light, redeemed, validated, confirmed.

I hurled insults at them, I tried to scream, tried to smack them, tried to get it into their heads that keeping me in the dark for all these years was so disturbed and twisted, so alarmingly not OK, that I would never be able to trust them. My screams and swings were useless; they stayed serene as Brahma bulls.

I woke up upon turning from them in anger and not knowing where to go, and an involuntary choking sob exploded out from the bottom of my lungs.

I told myself over and over - it was just a dream, it was just a dream. Your family is still your family. You’re still you. Everything you are, still is, and is here.

It didn’t change the fact that those dreams are designed to get at you, to show you what you’re afraid of. It turns out I’m disturbed by gore and violence, yes, and that I’m rocked by the existence of predatory beings as yet nameless to me. But what seriously frightens me is betrayal; is the people who are supposed to be there for me choosing not to be; and is the sense that I might not know, in any sense, with any kind of certainty, what my place is in the world.

—thewordunheard, 9/26/09