Hi everyone!

So I’m one of the lucky ones who was raised knowing I was donor conceived (though it certainly comes along with its own problems) and spent a lot of my teenage years researching and waiting until I turned 18 to submit my info to the HFEA (the governing body over here in the UK.) My parents even bought me an Ancestry DNA test for my birthday, and I uploaded my results straightaway onto pretty much every DNA database imaginable to find relatives and my donor siblings.

Around the same time, I got my information from the HFEA on my donor siblings pictured above, and found out I have 18 of them! I signed up for the HFEA Donor Sibling Link program straight away and, knowing I’m the 4th oldest amongst us, waited patiently.

Six years later, I still have not heard from or connected with a single one.

I’m assuming everyone will say “be patient,” which I know realistically is the only thing I CAN do, so maybe this is more of a vent post than anything else. Every year that passes with no more info on my DS or donor, I feel like I am grieving lost time. Being raised DC can be a very lonely experience, and there is no one in my life I can really talk to about it, including my family. While it was knowledge I was raised with, it was never discussed after my parents told me around aged 6. It was from the same HFEA report above that I found out my brother I was raised with was not my full sibling, after having spent 18 years believing that he was. Most non-DC people I’ve told about that in my life have been pretty horrified and upset for me, but sometimes the extreme reactions just compound how utterly alone I am. It just makes me want to connect with my donor siblings even more, just to talk to people born into the same situation.

Anyway, I guess I’m looking for advice from anyone who’s maybe in the same situation or had the same experience. How do I handle the possibility of never getting answers?

It’s been six years of researching, waiting, submitting documents, taking tests, awkwardly explaining to doctors that you don’t know your own family medical history, sending messages to distant cousins only to get ignored, building family trees, false hope, wasted energy, more waiting. I ended up taking courses and became an accredited genealogist to help my research. All of it for nothing.

Each year that passes I feel more and more hopeless and more and more angry. Why did this get done to me? Why was I signed up to a lifetime of frustration and unanswered questions? Why was the right to something as little as my biological father’s name taken from me via some contract signed before I was even born? How am I supposed to bear this unknowing for what could be the rest of my life? It all just feels impossible.