Who Am I?

 

Who Am I?

I am an enigma tangled up in a mystery.

I am the lost puzzle piece swept under the rug.

I am a missing link in a chain of life.

I am a tumbleweed blown in the wind calling home wherever the breeze takes me.

I have no roots.

I am a chameleon changing colors to blend into my surroundings.

Who am I?

I am an adoptee.

As a child I was loud, hyperactive, talkative, emotional, demonstrative, and extroverted (I still am).  I was adopted into a family the exact opposite.  I spent decades trying to fit into a mold that I was not made to fit.  I was chastised, criticized, ridiculed, judged, and labeled because I was so very different.  Instead of celebrating and honing the gifts of heredity and biological I had inherited, I grew up hating myself and who I was. 

Something had to be wrong if a family gave me away, and I didn't fit into the "new" one where I was placed.  I learned very young to pretend to be someone else, I was good at it to.  Mostly because I didn't know "who" I really was.  I spent years and decades not believing in myself and searching for my biological parents and my true identity.  I lived, lost.

Even for adoptees who have access to knowledge about their biological families are still separated from them on a daily basis.  This can cause gaps and holes in the fabric of our young souls that leave us feeling not good enough or incomplete for the rest of our lives.  Much of the time our questions or fears go unanswered, ignored, or overlooked as just simple curiousity.  It is far from just that. 

So many people in life are running away from themselves.  Adoptees are doing their best to run towards themselves and whatever tidbits of truth they can get about who they are.  But, there are many who think we don't deserve the same rights as others, or that we should just be thankful...period.  We run into brick walls, into unknowns, as there is no map or compass to find these pieces from another time.  We lose time, we lose money, and we lose what other non-adopted persons take for granted everyday.  It can be very lonely and confusing being an adoptee.

I will always wonder who or what I could have become had I have grown up knowing that my genes and nature were not wrong, they were just different.  How terribly sad and preventable.  Lies and secrecy are not the way to raise children or create families.  So, I'll continue to work, as many of us will, for the rights of adoptees to know these valuable and life altering truths about themselves.

It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken.  It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966