Emotions? What emotions?

For as long as I can remember, I knew I was adopted. It was never kept a secret from me at any point, which I feel was best thing for my parents to do. Naturally, there has always been a part of me that yearns to know my biological parents. I never thought I actually would…
My story is interesting, yet, unclear. At the time of my adoption, my adoptive father was only given a vague description of my background, and that’s all I know to this day. According to the story, my birth father is an American man living in Texas somewhere, and my birth mother is an Indian woman (from India) who was deported shortly after my birth. Funny thing is, I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted in New Jersey. For whatever reason, only the name of my birth mother, Troupe George is listed on my original birth certificate. Because of this, I had always thought that it would be more likely to find her, if any of my birth parents.
My adoptive father has always been very supportive of my desire to find my birth parents. I could never even imagine what I would do if I did happen to meet them. I really never wanted to have any sort of ongoing relationship with them, because that would just be weird. I feel that what I want most out of this endeavor is to see my face in theirs. It would be so satisfying for me to see the very two faces that created mine. I could finally pinpoint the cause of my stubby fingers. I would actually have the opportunity to hear the real story.
Basically, I went all of my life thinking that the only way this would really happen is if they come to me, or I went on the Montel show, and had him do the work for me. Both of those scenarios, I realized were, most likely, not ever going to happen. So, around the time of May of last year, I took the first steps.
I did some research and was able get in touch with a woman named Debra, at the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS), here in Trenton. This is the headquarters of the adoption agency that handled my adoption. Debra provided me with all the information I needed to begin this process. The first step was to get my name on the national adoption registry, which is list of birth parents looking for their children and vice-versa. As soon as both parties are on the list, DYFS can then contact each party and provide them with the information of the other.
Prior to being added to the adoption registry, the only information Debra was authorized to give me was that my birth mother had been on the registry since 1990. This was absolutely shocking to me, so I quickly completed the application and got myself on that registry. About a month went by and I received an e-mail from Debra containing the address of my birth mother in Rajkot, India.
While Debra was very excited for me to contact my mother, I suddenly became unsure of the situation. Sure, I had waited twenty-one years for this information, but I was afraid to pursue it on my own. Debra offered to attempt to contact her for me, and without any hesitation, I consented. She went ahead and sent a letter to India with my current contact information. Months went by with no response or any indication of receipt. Eventually I put it to the back of my mind while I began to prepare for the fall semester.
It was about the last day in August when I woke up to find several missed calls from an especially strange phone number. Oddly, the phone calls occurred in the early hours of the morning, between 1:30 am to 4:30 am. Surprisingly, they left a voicemail.
I never thought, in my wildest dreams that I would ever be so frightened as a result of listening to a voicemail. “Hello, this is Ms. George calling from India… please call at…” For the first time in my life, I was legitimately scared. This event certainly stopped me in my tracks and filled me with more emotion than I had ever felt before.
I’m not a very emotional person, and when I am, I just suppress it, or, if anything, I’ll use anger to express emotion. But, this time, it was a different kind of emotion. For some reason, this time, I couldn’t suppress it, nor could I get angry about it. Instead, I was filled with an unexplainable fear. I’m never afraid of anything, which causes an abundant amount of problems in my life, yet, this event was so powerful it scared me.
For a few days, I walked around in a daze of uncertainty. It was so simple for my family and friends to tell me to just call her back. Maybe I was just not as ready as I thought I was for this awkward situation. Mostly, I think the problem is that I never imagined meeting her on the phone. I always thought that I would just meet them in person, or even exchange letters and pictures through the mail which would then lead to the phone call. I still have not called her back.
This event in my life has showed me that, sometimes, what you think will make you happy, might just take you by surprise and scare the hell out of you. This was something that I felt I was emotionally ready for all my life, since, in my opinion, I lack an average amount of emotion. This led me to believe that when the time came, it would be easy for me to deal with. I was surely proved wrong when I was overwhelmed with an array of emotions that I had never felt before, most of which I was unprepared to handle.
So, I never actually met my birth parents, yet, but I am now closer than I ever had been before. The ball is in my court, and its time for me to make the next move. I have finally come to terms with the situation, as well as my emotions and decided that, instead of calling her back, I’m going to write her a letter.