I'm Adopted Every Day but I Just Want to Exist

 I didn't grow up in one of those adoptive families that treated my adoption as a shameful secret. I'm glad that it was just a fact of me and not something to be ashamed of or hide. But I think they went too far in the other direction and shared it so openly that I never learned that I don't have to share my identity as an adoptee or that I could set a boundary and not share my adoption story. 

I'm open with my adoption story and my identity, often, I think, because I never leaned that my story is my own and that I can keep it private if I want. 

So it's something I've never had boundaries with and has often landed me in uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing conversations, because I've never known how to set a boundary around that. 

Someone finds out that I'm adopted and they then immediately waterboard me with questions and opinions and thoughts and assumptions and I find myself letting it happen with zero fight (never fight) as I drown in my anxiety and trauma over and over again. They drink me dry of my story and then leave happily, feeling as if they just listened to a true crime podcast called "My Adoption" and leave me withered and hollow. 

But as much as I'm tired of being an adoptee, of living this reality every single damn day of my life, a big part of that is the expectation that I share myself with the world, that I flay myself alive for the entertainment or education of others who will never ever be able to understand what it's like to be adopted. Sometimes I'd just like to exist. 

It's partly why I stepped a bit back from the adoptee community in the last year or so, because while these are people who I respect and love and appreciate so much, there's also an expectation that we use our trauma to educate and inform and fight and save future children and preserve families, which are all things I do want and do engage with, but also? Also it's exhausting and hard and I started to feel resentful that I be required to resurrect my pain every day to teach others, that I unearth my outrage every 15 minutes. It's not sustainable and it's painful. And sometimes I'd just like to exist. 

It's too hard to walk through this world wound-first. 

Recently, I started working with some clients that are actively adopting a baby. And I felt a lot of anxiety about that intersection or potential conflict of interest, because I don't want to always be an adoptee. Sometimes I just want to be a small business owner working with clients and paying my bills. 

I talked about it with my therapist today and I told her what I'm going to tell you (and she supports me in this): I don't want to shy away from this situation. I want to be able to work with clients whose lives may conflict with my trauma, because that's what living is like. I can't always be insulated from triggers! And also, I don't want them to know I'm adopted. I don't want to feel expected to share my story and my perspective and my feelings and then inevitably feel on the defensive when my experiences don't match up with their hopes and expectations. I don't want to engage with any of that. I just want to exist and do my job and be professional. 

They're paying me to do a certain job for them, not paying for my labor of excising my trauma for their interest or education. Their lives and this baby aren't my personal responsibility and I shouldn't have to feel obligated to get involved on that level. I just want to exist.

I'll never not be adopted. It's embedded in my identity. It's my lived experience every single day of my life. Every day I see or hear something that is colored by my experience of being adopted. I can never escape that, but healing means learning to live with it, learning to put up boundaries where I need them, learning to cope with the triggers so that I can exist in the world and do the things I want to do and live the life I want to live. I'll never stop fighting the adoption industry and the systemic injustices perpetrated against me and countless other adoptees, but also? Also sometimes I just want to exist.