DNA, Disappearance, and the Stories We Inherit
Content Notes / Trigger Warnings:
This post discusses family estrangement, parental uncertainty, death of a parent, adoption, colonial violence, genocide, political unrest, state violence, and brief references to sexual violence. Please take care of yourself while reading.
Welcome to The Crippled Cryptid.
Disability, chronic illness, service dogs, and survival without the performance.
If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Medically complex enough to make my chart a jump scare.
I cope with sarcasm, snacks, and a lot of coffee.
Most days are lived in a haunted meat suit with a questionable warranty and a long-standing feud with my nervous system. I spend a lot of time in Bed Jail™, but I’m rarely alone thanks to Luna, my medical alert service dog.
Guardian. Enforcer. OSHA violation prevention officer.
There’s also M&M.
My Player 2. My soft place to land. The one who shows up when I can’t. She makes soup. She gives headpats. She watches shows with me. She keeps me sane. Or at least, as sane as you get when it comes to me.
This space is for chronic illness without inspiration porn.
Disability without apologies.
Love without pretending it’s always neat or easy.
(But it always comes with a little dog hair.)
If you’ve been here before, welcome back.
If you’re new, you’ll find your footing.
Welcome to the Lunatic Café.
On today’s menu: Ancestry DNA Kits.
Here it is. A post I know some of you have been waiting for.
I know I waited quite a while for the kit itself to arrive.
At the time of writing this, I’m still waiting for my results. Just so you don’t think I’m over here holding out on you. I’m not. I promise.
I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but recently I went ahead and ordered an Ancestry DNA kit during one of their Black Friday, end-of-year sales. It’s something I’ve always been curious about, mostly because I’ve heard conflicting stories about my genetic background for as long as I can remember.
Here’s what I do know.
What follows is what I’ve been told, what I can prove, and where those two things don’t line up.
My mom had blonde hair and blue eyes. According to my baby photos, I did too. Somewhere along the way, my eyes shifted to hazel and my hair turned a reddish auburn that doesn’t neatly match either side of the genetics I was told about. It’s a small thing, but it’s always lingered in the back of my mind.
Before she died, when the cancer was already close to taking her, my mom told me something complicated. She said that when she was younger, she slept around. Her words, not mine. She said she didn’t actually know who my biological father was.
I don’t know how much of that was true. End-of-life confessions live in a strange place between honesty, fear, regret, and the need to be unburdened.
The man she told me was my father lived across the country. We never had much of a relationship. His choice, not mine. After my mom died, I reached out to him to talk about my health.
EDS. PKD. POTS. Fibromyalgia. CRPS. MCAS… and more.
Several of these conditions can be genetic.
Especially now that I’m having seizures that can’t be explained, finding out my family history and medical background is more important than ever. If this is something genetic, I want to know about it. That way we know how to help my doctors help me.
According to him, none of it runs on his side of the family.
So, either I’m a medical anomaly…
Or he may not actually be my father.
There was another possibility. Door #2.
The other man my mom mentioned.
She never gave me his last name. She said he died before I was born. Supposedly, he was friends with the man she named as my father. Supposedly, he drowned while they were doing something dumb and illegal.
For the sake of this post, I’m not naming him. I’m not naming what they were doing. I’m not here to speak ill of the dead, especially when I don’t even know who he really was. Or if he actually exists.
I don’t know if either of them was my father.
What I do know is this.
My grandmother, my mom’s mother, was born in Germany. So were both of her parents. I have the birth certificates. That part of my family history is solid, traceable, and documented. Ancestry has helped me follow that line back far enough to make my head spin.
My grandfather, my mom’s dad, is where things get complicated.
His background includes French, German, French-Canadian… and Indigenous ancestry. Growing up, I was told Cherokee, Blackfoot Cree, and Lakota. But the records I’ve been able to trace point to the Leech Lake Reservation in Cass County, Minnesota. Which likely means Ojibwe.
That matters.
Names matter. Nations matter. Accuracy matters.
To be clear, I am not claiming Indigenous identity, enrollment, or lived experience. I’m talking about ancestry, records, and questions I’m still learning how to ask responsibly.
It matters because in American history, Indigenous people were systematically displaced, erased, and brutalized. That’s not a secret. That’s not a debate. It’s a fact. And if I’m going to talk about where my family comes from, I want to do it correctly.
Especially since my grandparents legally adopted me when I was little. Long story. I’ll tell it someday.
But it means this history matters to me. I want to know more about his family’s history and where they come from. I want to understand the parts of the story that were lost, hidden, or deliberately erased.
I’m the kind of person who likes showing up with facts. I like having receipts. I always have.
I’ve also traced parts of that family line back to England, including one ancestor who was tried for witchcraft. That’s wild. In a way, I even find it a little cool.
I don’t mean “cool” as an aesthetic or a costume.
I mean cool in the sense that I have purple hair, gravitate toward the strange and the haunted, and apparently come from a long line of women who made men uncomfortable simply by existing too loudly.
Either witchcraft runs in the family…
or history is full of powerful women being punished for it.
Possibly both.
Why This Matters Now
I know someone out there is wondering why I care.
Why does Sky, in 2026, care about centuries-old history?
Why not just be “proud to be an American” and move on?
Because if you look around right now, there is very little to be proud of.
People are being taken from their homes. Disappearing. Detained. Some are being killed. Some are being assaulted. Some are simply gone, and we don’t know where they are.
When people in Germany are saying that what’s happening here mirrors what they lived through under Hitler, that isn’t hyperbole. It’s a warning siren.
I’ve never been someone who enjoys getting political here.
But this is the moment where silence becomes complicity.
This isn’t about whether someone was born here. It’s about whether people are allowed to live here safely. Work. Exist. Care for their families. Leave their homes without fear.
When people are forced to pay hundreds of dollars just to prove they’ll leave on time. When citizens don’t feel safe in their own country. When bombs are being dropped, borders threatened, and power consolidated by people who should never have been allowed near it… something has gone terribly wrong.
While building out the family tree, I found something else.
One of my ancestors on my grandfather’s side fought in the Revolutionary War.
Not as a symbol. Not as a flex. Just a fact. A name in a record. A person who decided that tyranny was worth resisting, even when the cost was high and the outcome uncertain.
I don’t know what he believed beyond that. I don’t know if he would recognize this country now. But I do know this: if rebellion is baked into the bones of this place, then questioning power isn’t unpatriotic.
It’s inherited.
This country was founded on rebellion against tyranny. And we need to ask ourselves what the people who fought for that would say now.
If that got a little too heavy, or made you uncomfortable…
I’m sorry.
But also, maybe you should be.
The Actual DNA Kit Experience
Let’s shift gears before I disappear up my own ass entirely.
The kit itself was straightforward. I ordered it on December 29th. It arrived January 10th. We did the test on the 11th.
When I say we, I mean M&M helped. MCAS means adhesives and I are enemies, and also this was genuinely exciting.
The hardest part was not the setup.
It was the spit.
They want so much spit.
If you are not a llama with an endless internal reservoir, you may struggle. I struggled. We laughed. Chronic dry mouth did not help. M&M had to promise me soup dumplings and rice as a reward while I fought my way to the fill line.
She did, in fact, deliver.
Once you get there, you remove the funnel, screw on the cap with stabilizer fluid, shake it for five seconds, seal it in the biohazard bag, and mail it off in the prepaid box.
For something involving bodily fluids and warning labels, it was surprisingly accessible.
Now it’s on its way to Tennessee to be processed, and I’m waiting.
At the time I’m writing this, they’ve received my sample. Which feels like a small win.
What This Could Mean for My Health
There’s another reason this matters, and it’s less poetic.
Depending on what comes back, I may be able to send my results to my medical team or use them alongside genetic counseling to get clearer answers about what’s happening inside my body.
I live with EDS, POTS, PKD, fibromyalgia, CRPS, MCAS, and now seizures with no clear cause. Some of these conditions can be inherited. Some cluster. Some travel in packs.
Knowing where my genes come from won’t magically fix any of that. But it can help rule things in or out. It can give my doctors more context. It can mean fewer dead ends, fewer shrugs, fewer “that’s weird” notes in my chart.
When your body is already hostile territory, information becomes a kind of armor.
This isn’t about chasing diagnoses for fun.
It’s about survival.
About quality of life.
About giving future me a fighting chance.
What I’m Hoping to Learn
Truthfully? Everything.
But since that’s a little broad, I’ll narrow it down.
I want to know more about my family’s Indigenous ancestry, especially those connected to Leech Lake, if that’s where the records lead.
I also want to know where the red hair came from. Even though the purple is non-negotiable.
Where the green and gray in my hazel eyes came from.
Where the freckles came from.
Where the fragile collagen and rebellious nervous system came from.
If there are stories to learn. If there’s history I’ve been disconnected from.
If there are other people in the family like me. Authors. Bookworms. The ones who live half in their heads and half in the margins.
I know a DNA test can’t tell me everything. But even knowing who walked this road before me matters.
I grew up going to Indian Summerfest in Milwaukee every year with my grandmother. She didn’t have Indigenous ancestry herself, but the respect and curiosity stuck with me.
Mostly, I want to know where I come from.
Maybe that’s the real inheritance: bodies that don’t comply quietly, and a refusal to accept answers that don’t hold up.
Would you want to know?
Would you want to know if your father wasn’t your father?
Would you want to know at 30?
This will have a follow-up.
And when it does, I’ll bring you with me.
Love you. Now say it back.
If something here hit close to home, you’re not alone.
If you stayed anyway, thank you.
You don’t have to earn your place here.
-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability. Honesty. A little chaos.
(Okay. Maybe a lot of dog fur.)
🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
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