National Adoption Awareness Month 2020- An Introduction

I challenged myself to post on Instagram every single day of November 2020. There aren’t a lot of adoptee voices in adoption spaces and communities. I wanted to change that- at least in my own community.

So National Adoption Month. And my birth month. And my mental health diagnosis anniversary. So I’m attempting something I haven’t done before: I’m going to post every single day of the month. Each week reflected on a separate aspect of my adoption. Just me talking about adoption from my own perspective. I am not claiming that my experience and my thoughts are universal or representative. This is the condensed version in long form.

For Starters

I hate saying that adoption is my primary identity. I’m not going to lie though, it’s the most formative and influential event in my life. I would be nowhere close to who I am today if not for this singular event.

I was born in the city of Ma’anshan, Anhui China in November 1994. The reports estimated that I was a day old when I was found on the side of the road. The next seven months of my life were a mystery. The only clues I have are the reports I can’t read, the building of the former Maanshan Social Welfare Institute, the photos I took in front of the building in 2014 when I visited, and the undeniable, unrelenting blank space that I carry with me.

Some might think that the blank space equates to a hole. Like something is missing. Many children hear stories of their birth from their families, their first solid foods, their first giggles. Things I often think about but are just a bunch of blank spaces for me. It’s taken me a while to become familiar and comfortable with these blanks. Even now, at 25, there are times when I feel exhausted having to explain their existence. Almost like justifying my existence. It’s not the “default” experience and it only enforces the otherness I feel.

Obviously, this is the most obvious aspect of my adoption. What is adoption without loss? I don’t often question the motivations that ultimately resulted in my abandonment. When I do, I wonder if it was a willing choice or if there were larger factors influencing the decision to leave me on that road. The rare times I reflect on those first 5110 hours of my life will never result in answers but I reflect on them all the same. 5110 seems so small when you compare it to all the other hours I’ve lived but that time period shaped how the rest of my life would follow.

I recall my adoption story as a constant theme of my childhood. I saw my story through the eyes of my parents, my family, my community. I accepted it as it was. We celebrated my adoption day. We watched the video, we had a party, we shared these memories with a reverence for the event as if it was its own holiday.

I remember attending a few events with other adoptees. At one point, we were in a 4th of July parade, all dressed in American flag t-shirts– you know, the old navy ones?– waving flags on the back of someone’s trailer. I thought it was just cool that we were in a parade. I attended ballet class with two other Chinese adoptees. One of them was also named Hannah. I remember deciding to count how many Chinese adopted Hannahs I would meet from then on out. So far the count is four.

These are the only instances I can specifically recall from my childhood where I was surrounded by other children who looked like me. I don’t remember having real adult role models. I remember having Mulan, but she was practically Santa Clause. I remember the first time I thought I saw myself on the tv was when I saw Brenda Song on the Suite Life of Zach and Cody.

I’ll never forget this one event from 4th grade. That was an especially rough year for me. A kid who told me I’d never be president because I wasn’t born in the country. He was right, of course, but it still stung.

In middle and high school, I remember October 16th was celebrated as Hug an Asian Day. It was a dumb thing that started on Facebook. You know, back when we were all poking each other, playing Farmville, and customizing those “pins” on digital corkboards. I was later invited to a group named “All Asians are Not the Same.” I transferred into the local public school in my 7th-grade year, and this was my first interaction with other Asians my age.

I recall feeling more comfortable around my White classmates than the Asian ones. I remember one of the girls in my class selling frozen egg rolls for a fundraiser. I bought some, but I was too embarrassed to ask my mom to cook them, so they sat forgotten in the back of our freezer for who knows how long. They might even still be there.

I could count the Asians in my graduating class on two hands. I don’t remember when I found out they all had different cultures and heritages. I was truly too afraid to ask them. We were friendly with each other, but they all knew my story. I felt self-conscious and thought that any attempt to learn more about anything regarding Asian culture would be seen as fraudulent. I don’t know what I was thinking and I regret not taking the chance to try to connect with my own foreign culture.

The beginning of my college career was marked by the relentless attempts of the campus group, Asians for Christ, to recruit me. This went on throughout the week before classes, known as Welcome Week. My friends would attend Intervarsity Bible Studies but I had absolutely zero interest in joining any Asian activity or group on campus. In fact, I was terrified of being revealed as an “imposter.” I feared their reactions when they discovered my ignorance or my adoption by my white parents. I still felt uncomfortable in Asian spaces.

I did meet other Chinese Adoptees in college. Some were brief acquaintances, while others became deep and long-lasting friendships that sustain me to this day.

College is also when I began to really lay the foundation for my social work career. I started with a summer internship at an American-run Chinese foster home. I counted how many times people tried to speak to me in the first week, assuming I understood Mandarin. The final count was 116 times. Each time they realized I couldn’t speak the language, I was filled with embarrassment and shame that I couldn’t even utter a simple phrase.

I worked with children waiting to be adopted by families. I watched a child meet their adoptive parents for the first time. I remember feeling a sad sort of emptiness for the other children who would have to wait longer. I contemplated if I truly was fortunate to have no memory of my time in China. One could argue that the only memories I would have formed would be of an institution with a 30:1 child to caretaker ratio. But I think about that in relation to the impact of my relative racial and cultural isolation in my early childhood. These experiences, and my future similar internships, developed my beliefs surrounding family preservation, foster systems and such institutions as a whole.

I went on to serve another summer at a home in Uganda. Then a gap year at a home in Chile. The difference is that these children had families. They were not planning on being adopted. They were in what we could consider traditional foster care. These experiences surely molded my thoughts surrounding family preservation, foster systems, and such institutions as a whole. More on that later.

I decided to continue my social work education by pursuing a master’s degree. I did not stay in Texas. Rather, I relocated to NYC in order to attend Columbia. This was arguably my first big risk to take on my own. I recall my parents leaving me in my Washington Heights apartment. I would work with children both separated from their families at the border and children who had crossed the border alone. My thoughts around family preservation were present during that goodbye and that goodbye is present when I work with my clients now.

I strongly remember the final seminar of my International Social Work class when the professor asked us about our ultimate career goals. One student stated proudly that they would like to “open an orphanage somewhere in Asia.” Our professor immediately let out an exasperated sigh and asked if they learned ANYTHING in the class. I was actually one of two adoptees in that class of 30. I was stunned that a classmate, getting the same exact degree as me, would be so ignorant about wanting to continue a practice buying into a system that was unsustainable and steeped in white supremacy.

This brings us to my career in social work. I currently work in child welfare in New York City. New York City is arguably the birthplace of social work in the United States. Domestic adoption has an extremely flawed history and international adoption is no better. This is clear when you become aware of the way both serve to promote a sense of saviorism and the inherently imbalanced power dynamics between the adoptees that are seen as the victims. Narratives permanently portray us as children. Never as the adults we grow into with agency, autonomy, ability.

Adoption and My Family…

I work with families every single day. I work with them through various life stages. I can tell you that it’s given me a widened perspective of the assumptions I’ve made. Assumptions of my birth parents, family preservation, what even constitutes as family, loss, and adoption as an institution overall.

When people describe adoption in the abstract, conceptual, philosophical and theological sense, they see redemption. They see someone grant a chance at a life the adoptee might not have experienced otherwise. So much of the adoption experience is so focused on the adoptive parents- or prospective adoptive parents. Never the adoptees.

Adoption and my family. It’s just the three of us, but we’re just as much of a family as anyone else. I would get so angry as a child when someone would not recognize my mother or father as mine. I remember a homemade handwritten book that was given to my parents about two brown bears adopting a panda bear. I also remember the bat, Stellaluna, adopted by birds. I remember I love you like Crazy Cakes- the book I would always beg my mom to read me at bedtime. These three bedtime stories were all I had. I would go play at a friend’s house and I would see their home filled with photos of the family that looked as if they shared DNA, to realize that it was because they did. It’s the norm and my family didn’t fit into that stereotype.

I didn’t know other mixed racial families growing up- not in my immediate circles at least. I didn’t know other transracial adoptees. We would occasionally run into them, but they were never a part of my daily life. My daily life was filled with the stereotypical families of Texas suburbia.

There’s no smooth and easy transition so I will go ahead and say this here: My parents and I need family therapy. That is absolutely not an attack on my parents. I just want to make that clear. We would have benefitted from it years ago, particularly bonding therapy. Therapy is not indicative of failure. Therapy is a way to help explore relationships, both introspective and interpersonal. The reason we’re not actively in therapy now is that finding a family therapist that can work with all three of us, in different time zones, differing schedules, and different state licensing requirements, as well as insurance, is a huge barrier.

Mom- my beautiful, resourceful, resilient mother. There are so many things that my mind flashes to when I think about how my adoption has affected this primary relationship. My real first caregiver. When I say she gave me everything, I mean literally everything. As I’ve come into my twenties and see my friends branching off into different stages, like motherhood, it makes me reflect on that time when it was just me and my mom for days at a time. I will be the first to admit, my mother and I are night and day when it comes to personalities. I feel for her and wish I could apologize every single day because I was a high-energy nightmare child. I’m still high energy but more of a nightmare high energy adult that has agency and autonomy that still struggles with restraint.

My mother exhibits incredible restraint on a daily basis. She carries herself with a manner of grace that I will never achieve. She also has this insane humor that as her daughter, I’m obligated to roll my eyes at but she really is hilarious.

My mom faced many circumstances that she could not control that led to my adoption. She underwent many years working for a child. A lot of disappointment. A lot of heartbreak. Not knowing what would happen and then putting her trust in a million and one foreign entities in the hopes that the right combination of circumstances would bring a child.

She scheduled every single playdate. Every single activity, every enrichment, every class. She did it all to make me happy. Whatever insane interest I chose to pursue that week, she backed me 100% with the kind of support that I don’t think any relationships since have come close to.

My mother was my first example of how to love selflessly of anyone that was considered “others’’. She taught adult life skills and special needs throughout my childhood at different schools. She was the first example I had of true, uninhibited, unfettered compassion. She normalized differently-abled individuals and treated them with respect and dignity I never saw anyone else use. She’s one of the main reasons I’m in my current profession. That unrelenting support and compassion really did a number on me obviously.

These are things I never thought of deeply as an angsty teenager who was willing to bite anyone’s head off who came within three feet of me. That unfortunate soul was often my mother. We weren’t the Gilmore Girls best friends but our relationship is our own. It’s beautiful in that way because that is how we made it.

I am forever grateful for what my mother has sacrificed and given to me over the years. Especially now that we’re separated by 1500 miles.

Dad- where to even begin. My first concerts, my love for travel and reading, and my terrible, bone-dry, borderline nihilistic, sardonic sense of humor. All influenced, encouraged, and nurtured by my dad. As a child, there was rarely a time that my dad would be somewhere that I was not. The evidence is in the countless photos of him being my ultimate playmate. That or they’re photos of me playing while he watched the Dallas Cowboys lose. Not sorry.

At this point in our lives, my dad and I are on completely different ends of the political spectrum. We have countless debates and arguments over books, personal philosophy, and I’ve probably taken years off of his life with my antics. It just so happens that stubbornness, work ethic, and an all-or-nothing argument mindset are among the other things we share. We’ve come to verbal blows more times than I can count in recent years.

We’re still growing and our relationship is in this weird developing phase that I can only describe as “halfway between empty nester denial” on his side and “latent teenage rebellion” on mine. I’m sure he’s probably cringing with embarrassment as he reads this.

Despite everything, I still seek his counsel– to potentially immediately reject it– but I want it all the same. If there is one constant in my life, it’s that he never fails to respond to my texts or phone calls- regardless of the argument we had two hours before. It’s his consistency and unfailing trust that I’ll call back that brings me to call at all. It’s a kind of constant and abiding love that I will always rely upon. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still mad when I call back hours later. That doesn’t change the fact that when I need to scream, rant, and release my thoughts into the world, my dad– the one who helped form that passion in the first place– has my back.

My extended family has always been a short two-hour drive away. I’ve always considered myself close to my cousins, despite the significant age difference between us. Although, I do strongly recall myself being jealous of their deeper sibling bond. The secret code of siblings who grew up under the same roof, I guess. I spent many summers with them at our grandmother’s house or at their house, which I fondly refer to now as The Ranch. My aunt, uncle, and cousins are the counsel I seek when I’m too heated to even entertain the idea of talking to my parents. I was unaware that they even had other cousins for the longest time. If they were mine, how could they be a part of anyone else’s family?

I think that it is worth mentioning here that I am not the only adopted member of my family. I want to respect and honor the space and stories that my other adopted relatives have. I’m not telling their stories, I’m telling mine. There is another significant age difference between me and the other adopted members of my family. In fact, I am the oldest of my adopted family members. I suppose that when the family expanded, I could not help but feel like some sort of blueprint or guinea pig.

There is more than a bit of pressure to feel like some weird example of “adoptee success,” whatever that means. Logically, I know that each adoptee's story is different but there is some obsessive and inert anxiety within me that says I can’t step out of line. Subconsciously, I might believe that I still need to prove my worth. If I’m still constantly needing to prove that I deserve to take space, that explains why I hang the perception of my younger relatives on the basis of my objective successes. If I fail, what does it reflect upon them and their future?

Adoption as a global event has shifted since the time of my adoption, and it’s been interesting to see my family go through that familiar path but with different movements. I remember so many prospective adoptive parents seeking the counsel of my family. I loved attention in general but I hated that pressure. Perceived or otherwise.

[Disclaimer: once again, I’m not bashing my parents. I hate how I constantly have to censor myself to make sure my words or actions aren’t misinterpreted as an attack on my parents. One commonality I’ve found among adoptees is that we never want to appear as “ungrateful.” Instead, we overcompensate.]

Missing siblings. This portion can most definitely coincide with my “only childness”. I can’t tell you how often I longed for a companion to look like me when I was younger. Not just a classmate or a friend, but a co-conspirator. This isn’t just about me wishing I had siblings growing up– adopted or otherwise. It’s about the very real possibility that somewhere out there, there could be people walking around that have approximately 50% of my DNA. That very real possibility is terrifyingly mystifying. It’s not only the unknown, it’s the scary reality that there are cases where DNA kits and sibling searches have been successful.

I’ve met families who have adopted multiple children and others that adopted single adoptees like me. My personal take is that I’m way too extroverted and high energy to be left to my own devices for too long. This proved tiresome to my poor mother, which I’ve mentioned before, but the idea of another person mirroring and feeding off of my chaotic energy is daunting too.

One of the first things my family watched together when Netflix began its digital streaming service was a documentary about the Lost Daughters of China. Surprising, right? The documentary was called Somewhere Between, in case you were curious. It’s been a few years since I last saw but I believe one of the girls was in a reunion with her bio family.

Every adoptee is different and that entirely includes their perspectives on a reunion. Reunion isn’t something I’ve really thought about until recently. As a child, if I ever felt like searching for my birth parents was something I wanted to explore, I often felt too guilty to vocalize and express that desire. I was worried that people would unintentionally shame me and that expressing my interest would be misinterpreted as “I hate my life and my parents.” My parents are great, and as such, they’re held in such high regard by our community that saying anything other than praise about them is automatically taken as insulting them, if not outright attacking them. I let it go each time the thought crossed my mind.

The closest I’ve gotten was visiting the Maanshan social welfare institute. My dad arranged it through my adoption agency. The whole experience was… interesting. I felt like I was being handled with gloves the entire time there. I’ve had remarks regarding how “I would handle returning emotionally” and honestly when people ask that in a way that I interpret as condescending, I immediately shut down out of anger.

I’ve recently joined several adoptee groups on social media and have been in more contact with the greater adoptee community. Hearing others’ stories and their reasons for searching has been eye-opening, to say the least. I’m still open to searching, not because I feel something is missing, but out of morbid and genuine curiosity.

My definition of “family” has changed throughout the years. I feel ambivalence towards the concept of “found family.” I work in a field where family bonds are routinely made and broken, where there are differing definitions of “kinship,” and what constitutes a family in the first place?

I’ve witnessed friends grow up and become estranged from their families. I’ve heard adoption horror stories of families rejecting their adoptee later in life. The term “blood relative” is definitely a trigger for me. I’m not related to anyone who I consider family through blood. I think that “blood is thicker than water” is an excuse, at best. At worst, it can be used to cover for abusive behaviors in relationships.

I was introduced to the concept of “found family” in college. I liked the idea that a family is not necessarily restricted by who brought you into existence, or even who raised you. It consists of those who love and accept you for who you are and do so unconditionally. The people who show up for you, who you are able to be around without fear or anxiety, and you do the same for them. As I’ve grown older and moved away from home, I have been fortunate to find community and form familial bonds with people I’ve met along the way.

Adoption and my mental health- this is an overall trigger warning for the week. This post specifically mentions anxiety and depression, therapy, medication and thoughts of suicide. This entire week will focus on the aspects of my adoption that have affected my mental health.

Adoption and my Mental Health.

[Content warning This entire Section will focus on the aspects of my adoption that have affected my mental health. This specifically includes anxiety, depression, therapy, medication, and thoughts of suicide.]

There is something about adoption and mental health that I have learned over the years and want to address right from the beginning. This comes from personal experience, my MSW education, and other experts in the field.

No matter how adjusted and “successful” an adoptee appears, the fact of the matter is that the adoptee has survived an initial trauma. Coping with that separation trauma can manifest itself in various ways. Sadly, adoptee suicide attempts are more common than the general population due to this initial separation trauma. In many cases, unknown medical history and genetic predispositions are valuable but missing factors.

From here on out, I’m going to be talking about my own personal relationship with my mental health. Once again, I do not claim that my experiences, symptoms, and ways of coping are at all universal. If you are struggling with your own emotional and mental health, please know that you are not alone. You have divine and inherent value and the world is better with you in it. If you are in need of support, I encourage you to reach out to your doctor and a trusted loved one. Additionally, a great resource I’ve found around adoptee mental health is @iamadopted. Please feel free to check out their page!

I’ve been called “high functioning” by social work friends. It’s true that I’m able to work a full-time job and still have the energy to invest in friendships, hobbies, and so on (I give a lot of credit to coffee). However, that doesn’t mean that I am not feeling the effects of my depression and anxiety. I recall my doctor once equating my level of hypervigilance to that of Secret Service members. I can typically hide or present my symptoms as hyperactivity. They also compared me to a swan: calm and serene on the surface but paddling frantically underneath.

For those who see me in my day-to-day routine, I appear quite hyper but positive overall. The not-so-fun part of these comorbid diagnoses is that many of the symptoms can be masked by other symptoms. I can’t really describe it, but the closest I can think of is that I’m feeling way too much way too often. Everything seems to be happening at once, demanding my attention and energy. I try to respond and react immediately, before the inevitable burnout that happens later that night behind closed doors.

In school, this manifested in the form of procrastination and caffeinated rampages, 72-hour writing marathons, and seeing how many all-nighters I could pull in a row before it wasn’t legally safe for me to be driving. I had a “hilarious” episode in college during midterms. I pumped over 7 shots of espresso into my body over an 8 hour period, and I was on the verge of hysteria at the end of it.

I’ve always experienced my episodes behind closed doors. There were very few times that I “slipped” and exposed what was really going on. Those few times where my symptoms got too extreme to hide anymore is when my friends and family became concerned.

In case you haven’t caught on yet, adoptees can often feel the need to overperform, be overtly grateful, overtly successful, overtly …. well, everything. If you want to talk about the impact of childhood trauma on adult lives, the evidence is clearly visible in the adoptee community. Abandonment, separation, and the knowledge that you weren’t enough (insert characteristic here) from the beginning will definitely embed itself in the back of your mind like a parasite.

My anxiety diagnosis came later in life, after the pressure of performing highly enough to reflect well upon others imploded. My core fear (that borderlines irrational, but since when is anxiety rational) stems from the fear of never being enough, taking up too much space, and being a burden. That obviously has nothing to do with my abandonment on the side of the road as an infant.

The anxiety manifests in a variety of visible and invisible ways. For instance, if anyone complains about anything, I’ll be the one to apologize– even to the point of annoyance. I can’t help myself. My 8th grade volleyball teammates once counted me apologizing 114 times in a single 2-hour practice.

My anxiety can appear somatically as an uncontrollable twitching in my hands, an inability to sit still, a constant need to be standing, squeezing a stress ball, anything to let out my frenetic energy.

My anxiety causes insomnia in extreme cases. Even small mistakes can lead to disastrous fallout. In my mind, I see a typo in a work email as the cause for someone’s punishment. I’m terrified that I will somehow ruin someone’s life.

None of this is rational. None of this is 100% controllable. I manage through working myself into exhaustion. I am not good at managing my anxiety symptoms. I attend therapy every week to try to curb it. My anxiety is an ongoing battle where my brain is attacking itself.

We all have different sources of trauma. None of them are trivial, all of them are valid. The adoptee community is not immune or healed from trauma just because they were adopted.

My depression is almost never surface level. I’ve had a handful of episodes where people became substantially concerned, but I hide it for the most part.

I’m not good at expressing sadness or despair. I don’t like to cry a lot. I especially hate crying in front of others. I would associate my more frequent symptom as a loss of energy, rather than sadness. It’s hard to put it into words what I feel during my depressive episodes.

My episodes manifest in loss of appetite, crashing on the weekends for 16 hours at a time, increasingly reckless behavior– such as leaving my apartment for hours and not telling anyone where I am. I told my roommate that these are my “dead days.”

I think it’s also important to note that today is my 26th birthday. The unfortunate milestone for this year is that I’m losing my mother’s health insurance coverage. My health insurance from my own job isn’t accepted by my therapist. I just started a side hustle that will be able to cover the out-of-pocket expenses of mental health every month. It’s unfortunate that what I need to perform at a functional level and help other families in turn, is at risk. However, that’s the reality we live in, and I am nothing if not one of the most bullheaded people I know. Let’s not read into the pros/cons and origin of that.

The idea that I wasn’t enough for someone from my very beginning is something I’ve been conscious of practically my whole life. The knowledge that the first hours of my existence were marred primarily by abandonment, being “unwanted”, or other circumstances beyond me/my birth family’s control, has implanted itself on my DNA. I’m not joking. Look it up: trauma rewires the brain, which in turn affects the rest of the body. No amount of “God had/has a plan for you” reassurances can change that reality.

While we’re on this: please do not say this to an adoptee, or anyone for that matter, who chooses to express their trauma to you. It minimizes our pain and, despite your best intentions, comes across as dismissive and unfeeling. If you want to truly be allies, listen to how we want to be responded to, rather than responding in a way that makes you comfortable. Adoptees carry this intrinsic trauma throughout our lives. It truly is an indescribable internal grief that everyone handles in their own way and comes to terms with at their own pace.

Psychologically speaking, we still don’t know everything about the way the human brain processes complex trauma and grief, so I can only speak about my own experience. The reality of my separation, or abandonment, or trauma, or whatever you prefer to call it, is not always “in your face apparent.” For me, it’s noticeable through spurts of dark humor, run-ins with racists, and other everyday instances. Yes, the racial component exists because facing racism, microaggressions, and white supremacy IS trauma.

Since my anxiety-affected brain has a tendency to compulsively overthink and ruminate over even the smallest details of my day, any reminder of this deep loss can and will throw my whole week out of balance. Grief is something that I navigate regularly and there are times that I might steer into a storm instead of a port. I don’t mean to insult naivety or unintentional ignorance, but where many might see adoption as a one-time event, adoptees know that this is our life you’re talking about. You could have the best intentions in these conversations but we’re the ones who have to live with it. We’re the ones who know our trauma and want to have our narrative told by us– the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I felt extremely lonely as a teenager. Lonely from being an only child but also from not knowing other adopted kids. Feeling like I didn’t fit in anywhere. Feeling like nobody understood my problems. You know, the typical teenage angst. This was before social media became the juggernaut it is now, and was still a largely new medium. Back when we were posting dumb photos of our meals and oversaturated sunsets. Back when we were unaware of the impact on mental health and the value of it as a tool.

When I was diagnosed with depression, I remember how loneliness and shame spiked. I didn’t know anyone else who struggled with their mental health, especially not with the formal diagnosis I now had.

Loneliness looks different to me now; literally, the only reason I didn’t do at-home workouts when COVID shut my cycling studio down was because I only enjoy working out with others. Now, loneliness is the physical separation from what I’ve relied upon for as long as I can remember, in addition to my already lovely brain.

Most of my friends have a tendency to be more introverted. We run the gamut of dynamics, but as someone who internalizes and overanalyzes everything, I get concerned over radio silence. If plans get rain-checked, despite logically knowing the validity of doing so, I start spiraling. It’s funny thinking about my introverted friends in comparison to myself since I want the constant comfort of someone else, virtual or otherwise. This lockdown did not help me at all in that area. We’ve all become more aware of our innate desire for company in the past few months but personally? I’ve had to increase my daily dosage of antidepressants three times since March, due to a multitude of factors, not least of which is this loneliness.

I still have no clue how to manage my loneliness. My poor friends will typically see multiple texts from me within the hour, regardless of response. In those moments, I wonder how much of this can be attributed to the primal trauma of not having more than my basic survival needs met during those first seven months. I was told the ratio of children to a caretaker in some orphanages can be 30:1. I know how important it is for infants to be held frequently and their need for human interaction. If they don’t receive these base comforts, they often fall behind developmentally.

I wonder about myself and whether or not these same factors affected me to the extent that my loneliness and extended episodes of isolation can cause the panic attacks I also experience. Nobody can discount the impact and longevity that early childhood trauma has on a person. At the same time, nobody can measure in exact units how it affects us. It’s a loneliness that comes from not knowing those aspects of myself and knowing nobody can give me the answers from that blank period.

As you have read, being adopted has had deep consequences for my sense of self, identity, self-esteem, and self-worth. It’s taken a long time for me to learn to navigate, and I still often consider myself in the Adoption Fog. This is an adoptee term I literally learned this month; it basically means an adoptee is redefining their outlook on adoption.

It’s hard to put into words exactly how I’ve struggled with self-esteem, but thinking about it through my lens of mental illness gives some clarity. My self-esteem has been firmly rooted in my interactions with others- no matter how many times someone has told me that I am enough as I am for myself, my brain irrationally and instinctively makes the jump to assuming I’m a burden. This has resulted in overcompensating by projecting a facade where I have everything together. I have to appear as independent as possible. You can ask my dad– the amount of times I’ve attempted to travel out of the country alone has probably increased his prayer life 10 fold.

Since I try to present as hyper-independent, I find it almost impossible and against my very being to voice my loneliness. I have a handful of people I call when I reach my breaking point of isolation and anxiety. Unfortunately, they are also busy with their lives and can be unable to provide the emotional labor — seriously, respect people’s emotional capacity and boundaries — which can result in a spiral, despite knowing the facts. That’s how anxiety and depression work.

I am still learning how to deal with loneliness and my self-worth. I’ve tried reading, mediation, and podcasts. Community and a sense of belonging are such important needs for adoptees. I didn’t realize how deeply I needed my loneliness to be understood from the adoptee context until I met other adoptees.

Adoption and my Communities.

The way that I’ve found that adoption has affected my various communities over the years has changed with every community I’ve lived in. NYC is, by far, the most diverse community I’ve ever lived in. I did not realize the true value of a diverse community until I lived here. When I graduated into the “real world,” I really struggled to figure out how I was going to build community from scratch now that it wasn’t an automatic bond formed by a common experience.

I quickly realized life was not like Friends or other New York-based sitcoms. Yes, that was a hope of mine that was quickly dashed. As the extroverted and coffee-addicted human that I am, finding people who were able to be around constantly was hard– if not nearly impossible.

I’ve recently discovered the Adoptee community here, almost by accident, via Instagram of all things. The connections I’ve been able to make with other adoptees has been one of the only redeeming aspects of this Quarantine Season. Finding others online is scary, but being able to connect over such a deep and formative event with others, despite the challenges of today, has been amazing.

Being an adoptee has probably been the number one driving force of my career, whether I knew from the beginning or not. My social work career has certainly shifted as I learned, and continue to learn, about diverse populations, perspectives, and communities.

I probably only met a handful of adoptees through my entire social work education. I would wonder why, but considering my particular job, I can see why there aren’t a ton of us in this field. After all, social workers are humans first. It can feel like I’m voluntarily exposing myself to heartbreak every day, but the truth is that it’s an honor to work in a field where you see the most of human resilience and perseverance. Finding community with my coworkers, and especially other adopted social workers, has been so inspiring.

Earlier in the pandemic, I hosted an event for NYC adoptee social workers to virtually gather, network, and build community. Once again, I was blown away. The social work community is amazing as a whole, but for the Adoptees who choose this life, there’s a different context that inspires credulity. I think what makes adoptees such dedicated social workers is that added level of experiential empathy.

Growing up, my community/church (they were basically interchangeable) was not the most diverse group. It was pretty much racially, ethnically, and even economically similar. That’s not to say that there was no diversity at all, but if you weren’t a part of the average, you were an outlier. We all went to most of the same schools and the same after-school activities. Point of fact: church WAS our after-school activity.

We learned about the overall global Church family, but I was rarely able to experience that global aspect in a direct way until I spent significant time in another church community- namely the church I attended when I was in South America the year before grad school.

Since that time, I’ve learned that other transracial adoptees like myself, as well as BIPOC populations, can often feel uncomfortable in White Majority spaces- church is no exception. I remember the first time I attended church in NYC, I accidentally walked into a Korean service. I just sat in the back, too embarrassed to leave until it was over. I haven’t gone back.

Earlier last year, @nowhitesaviors provided insight as to how Christianity specifically plays a large role in international adoptions. It’s a complicated topic to be sure- as most Protestant denominations do not have a centralized theology. Churches can share common practices but there has to be an allowance for regional differences and culture.

I don’t intend to criticize Christianity, but I would be remiss to neglect the role that Christianity has in international adoptions, seeing as I am a direct example of that. I would be out of my depth to navigate that conversation, but it is a conversation that needs to happen and should discuss the good and problematic aspects.

A church community is something I’m still navigating because I haven’t lost hope in finding the community that I hope for. It’s just that COVID19 has definitely made connecting to others, and finding that spot, that much harder.

My parents told me that the only time they voted for a Democrat was when one sponsored and helped file my adoption/immigration paperwork. President Clinton also signed the Adoptee Citizenship Act while he was in office.

Two Democrats played key roles that made my adoption and citizenship, as well as other adoptees’, possible.

@adoptees4justice is bringing to light the issues adoptees without citizenship face. In grad school, I worked with undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees for my MSW field internship. Yes, those are all different kinds of immigrants. Since I was adopted prior to the passing of the Adoptee Citizenship Act by the Clinton administration, my parents had to work to get my citizenship on their own. I was granted it in 1997.

It wasn’t until after grad school that I learned that not all international adoptees were naturalized citizens. Some fell through the policy loopholes. I heard horror stories of adoptive parents rejecting their adoptees and even calling immigration authorities on them. There’s a darker, political side of adoption that not everyone sees, or even considers when it comes to the industry that facilitates them.

I am extremely grateful to be living and working in NYC and being able to build a new community here. However, many of my closest friends are still in Texas. I really do feel like I have two separate parts of my life like my community is divided between here and Texas. My dad’s been trying to convince me to move back to Texas since I started working, if not sooner. The pull of NYC is just too strong though.

If I could move everyone I loved up here with me, life would be just about perfect. That’s not reality though. The reality is that being in community with others, and who those others are, looks so different this year than anyone could have predicted but I’m grateful nonetheless.

I found out last night that my hometown opened its first East Asian Grocery Store. It’s weird how random things like that can elicit such strong emotions in me. After living in NYC for so long, I thought moving would lessen the impact of seemingly minor hometown news.

After I found out, I started thinking of my experiences back home. I had very little interaction with the Asian community, even though it’s large enough to support several businesses.

There was a lady who worked at Target: Ms. Ha. My mother would always make sure we visited her on our trips to the store. She’d ask me to blow kisses to Ms. Ha each time we left. Ms. Ha was always so joyful and seemed to actually remember the random little Chinese girl in the White mother’s cart.

I don’t recall seeing many Asians in my daily life until I started public school at 13. By then, the casual recognition/misidentification of myself as being “essentially White” had already set in.

It’s nearly impossible to consider myself a part of the Asian American community– even in a place as expansive as NYC. I worked on a research project in grad school that focused on Asian American Immigrant experiences, specifically regarding social integration and self-confidence in their communities. I was at a loss.

So much of this intersects and is influenced by the community in which I was raised, the emergence of online communities, and my own navigation of my identity in my new community. My roommate here is also Asian. I often find myself feeling very self-conscious when I ask her about the food she’s making or when I hear her in the kitchen and she’s speaking her first language. I think about how it would sound from my own mouth. I feel disappointed when I get the tones wrong when I try.

Today’s post is dedicated to my amazing Adoptee Community. We are so diverse, passionate, and resilient. Honestly, finding them was one of the best parts of this year, if not the best part. The connections I’ve made through the efforts and advocacy of the Adoptee Community have been incredible. They are dedicated to their work and I’m in awe of their creativity, especially in the midst of this adversity.

And the most amazing part is that I literally found them almost by accident. I messaged one person on Instagram one day and it snowballed into such an amazing thing.I have lived most of my life where my limited interactions with adoptees came from mutual friends, my own adoption group, or friends of the family.

This new community is incredibly diverse and I’ve met these people both in person and virtually. You can never discount genuine support systems even if they’re mostly digital. Especially in a pandemic. I’m going to utilize this post to promote some of the amazing adoptees and highlight their work that I’ve come to know in the past few months!

We’re rounding on the final days of National Adoptee Awareness Month. My last two posts for this month are focused on what this entire month is about in the first place: Adoptee Voices. The Adoptee Narrative. I can’t tell you how many family YouTubers and mommy bloggers I’ve seen out there talking about their experiences. Not to discount their perspectives and changes they make, but the adoptees themselves face the largest changes and are the voices lost in the noise. The adoption narrative has changed from being about the creation of familial bonds to focusing on how the adoptive parents feel. This erases our primary attachments, no matter how long or short they may have been. This control of the narrative forces a new primary identity upon us. Our primary identity is changed from children to adopted children. We became adoptees before we became ourselves. None of us chose this.

The hard truth is that if my parents didn’t adopt me, they would have adopted someone else. I can’t say that I would be the same social worker in NYC that I am now if that had not happened. Nobody can know how life works. I might have been adopted by another family. I might not have been. My odds for adoption were high since I was young, but age is not a guarantee.

I’ve learned, and hopefully, you have too, that adoption isn’t a fairytale. There aren’t always happy endings. The larger narrative really tries to push that on us. It sees adoptees as victims. It paints adoptive parents as saviors. It portrays adoption as a singular “one size fixes all” event. Adoption is not a sustainable solution. Adoption is not the thing that should be normalized.

That might sound incredibly harsh, especially coming from someone who has had relative societal success and lives a very #blessed life. That doesn’t mean that the adoption industry, particularly the transnational one, can escape criticism. It is exactly because of the high impact that it needs to be examined closely and without prejudice. Just because something is legal does not make it right or ethical. Something is not good because of the intent behind it.

And Finally…

I want to thank all of the adoptee community for who you are. For being here. In the space, we carved out for ourselves. You are not alone. We are stronger together.

For those of you who have been following my journey this month, thank you for allowing me to hold this space. Thank you for sharing the space. I wish you all the safe space to grieve, to feel, and to be yourself. I hope that I can help provide and help widen that space here. We are grieving as a community for the continuous loss that we collectively endure but we are here for each other.

Our stories do not end when NAAM ends. We will continue to show up. We will continue to show resilience. We will continue to hold the narrative to a higher standard and change the narrative to reflect our reality.