Austin Kleon — I was adopted as an infant and so I had this one...

I was adopted as an infant and so I had this one family that I was growing up with that I was aware was sort of this construct. Like, I knew that I could have happened to be in any family. Then when I was in my twenties, I got married and had kids, and so I had this new experience of having a family that I’d created, as opposed to having a family that I had been sort of airlifted into. And that was really the first time that I’d seen a biological relative of mine: when I saw my kids. And that was a really transformative experience for me. Then, when I was in my thirties, I met a bunch of my biological relatives, and that was another kind of family experience that had lots of weirdness. It had a lot of good aspects to it, too. And, you know, over the last few years, I’ve had the experience of kind of losing this family unit, or having it transformed — you know, with the death of my wife and then my kids going off to college. So I’m back at this stage where I am a single person again, and very disconnected, in some ways, from all of that family life…