It's an essay Mike wrote back in 2000 for a presentation he and his birth mother put on, addressing ideas for how best to reestablish contact with birth parents. Here is some of Mike's early work to do so:
When I was 19, I took some bold first steps by (a) getting “non-identifying birth information” from my adoption agency, and (b) writing a 100-page paper on how to find your birthparents.Mike goes on to talk about how he prepared himself emotionally for the actual search, how his reconnecting with his bio-parents ultimately went well, the potential pitfalls of these searches, his thoughts on nature/nurture, and more. It's worth reading, so here is the link again.
The non-identifying info was, of course, wildly unsatisfying and slightly maddening. That single-sheet, double-sided form with its sketchy, vague facts was the post-adoptee equivalent of being given a nibble of a chocolate bar and then told you can’t have any more — even as the remainder is dangled in front of you. Shelley was described in it as “a little girl with a bright pixie expression,” and that’s just about it. This half-assed “revelation” left me thinking of Audrey Hepburn with pointy ears cavorting about in a Peter Pan outfit.
