S1E9 Unraveling Lorenzo

S1E9 Unraveling Lorenzo: Lorenzo’s story highlights how DNA discoveries are rarely a single moment—they unfold over time, intersecting with grief, loss, and major life transitions. His experience speaks to the complexity of identity when ethnicity, culture, genetics, and family narrative collide. Lorenzo’s journey began with concern for his father’s rapidly declining health. Dementia, neurological disease, and cancer were tearing through his paternal family, and he wanted answers about what might be hidden in his genes. What he didn’t expect was that a simple DNA test would dismantle his entire understanding of his identity.

Instead of confirming family history, Lorenzo learned he was Ashkenazi Jewish—something completely absent from the story he’d been told about himself. Raised as a Black man, his results set off months of disbelief, denial, testing, and a painful confirmation.

SHOW NOTES

In this episode, Kara and Lorenzo talk about:

• Taking a DNA test for health reasons—and getting answers he never asked for
• Discovering Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry that didn’t fit his lived identity
• Navigating disbelief, anger, and the instinct to prove the results wrong
• Losing his father while still searching for the truth
• What it means when family folklore and genetics don’t align
• How a DNA test fractures your sense of identity when your ethnicity shifts
• Grief, secrecy, and the psychological toll of prolonged uncertainty
• Finding support and connection in NPE spaces

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

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