Sometimes the author I need to read is me

I said it during the Q&A section of the evening after I’d talked my heart out about the magic of fiction. I know that sometimes there is fretting over getting enough people in a virtual room to make the speaker feel welcome and wanted, and that’s totally valid—we all want to feel like we have something important to say—but at the same time, I loved the small group. It felt like meeting friendly people at the bar, sitting all alone in Chili’s the way I did one fall evening off Park and Preston, a short walk home after I’d gotten an apartment near the rehab center. The intimacy was comfortable. I mean, it’s been almost five years since the pandemic, and people’s social needs got weird. Or I mean to say, mine did. There’s some strange new mappings and the metaphors get a little odd. But you know what I mean. 

Anyway, what I said was: “Sometimes the author I need to read is me.” And the poet in the room agreed. And I was welcomed as wholly myself so I let that Shannon free, let her talk with no restraints. They asked interesting questions of me. The conversation flowed naturally; I didn’t have to confine myself to a strict question and answer protocol, silences naturally bubbling between the shyness of the crowd and air in my cheeks that I couldn’t quite let out all the way. They heard me. 

Sometimes the author I need to read is me. I can’t remember everything, but I can document. It’s important that I keep a record. I’ll never forget the way the emptiness crept in after that final Moving Day drive up to Plano when I dumped a whole tub of my diaries and notebooks into a dumpster somewhere near a barbeque joint. The SeaWorld diary, gone. Dr. Pepper, gone. High school Mead notebooks, gone. Travel logs, notes, nicely written down quotes. The songs of my heart, my badly drawn art, the drama, the details, the stories and retells. Gone. Gone. Gone. 

It happened again after that. Just about two years to the day (by rough estimates and a blurring of fact). I sat down in my closet in the yellow house. Well, first I sat down in the Ohio apartment closet. Two closets, the first to mourn what was lost, what should have filled up a closet of skeletons, the second to pluck out the treasures that were left of my shoebox. 

That Sunday, we had the Divorce talk and the next weekend, we hosted a Halloween party. Maybe it was during the party. Maybe after. It doesn’t really matter what day or even what time it was. The warm ceiling light glowed dimly as I made a trash pile of printed out msn conversations, jewelry from when I was young, notes, letters, pictures. I didn’t need any of it, it was all memory and no value, but how would you feel if your heart was a bird you were angrily plucking the feathers from? 

And so, these gaps in written experience and lost memories have shaped me, shaped my writing, but in ways that are outside the record. And I want there to be a record. Due to the circumstances, we’re already a little bit behind schedule. But the dream continues, despite obstacles. Someday, somewhere, somebody will find these words and they will need them, too. It’s a kind thing to do, for me and for them.

It doesn’t always have to be facts and footnotes and emotional excavation, though, mimetic as memoir can get. The most important thing is that it resonates and I can feel it, the other Shannon peeking out at me with a mirror in her hand. “Look,” she says. “Look how beautiful and magical, how dark and wondrous. Roar, little dragon!” 

You read enough books and catch enough looks that one day it occurs to you that you’re never in the story quite right. I mean, you’re there, but not the Main Character Energy you really are under that mask. That’s why I wrote Rose’s Locket for myself. And for my daughter. So I could feel seen in a book and she would learn to understand, if obliquely, my experiences and perspectives. Same with the poetry book, Mirrors Made of Ink. That's the one I want to read. So I compiled it. 

My writing belongs in a cozy closet packed with artifacts, the growing inventory for the eventual slide into museum that my house will morph into over the  years, budget willing. It’s something that belongs to me, a snapshot taken from a different angle every time. And some of the pictures are good, so I’m willing to share. But most importantly, I don’t want to lose any more, and the best way to get writing to outlast you is to write a lot of it and publish as much as you can. That, and sometimes I need to remember myself, to see the versions of her dance throughout the years. Sometimes I need her. More than anyone else’s words, my own are the perfect salve to every wound. 

Sometimes the author I need to read is me. 

Case Study #3 Reflection

As with the second case study of my thesis, this one comes belatedly as well. I would offer my apologies, but, again, combining the academic with the emotional is a feat that I’m proud to have conquered and also, one that I needed to rest from. But I’m back, baby, and pleased to announce that the third case study is now posted. 

Case study #3 focuses on Matthew Salesses’ novel, The Hundred-Year Flood. Published in 2015, the book follows Tee, the protagonist, as he recovers from adventures in Prague and deals with family trauma, including his adoption. Unlike the other two case studies, I didn’t personally meet or speak with Salesses (until later!). Instead I came across his work through a deep comb of AdopteeReading (which I can’t recommend highly enough). It was with an educated guess and some luck that I found I could impose a reading of Lifton’s theory of Ghost Kingdoms on this book. 

The other differentiating factor of this book is that, unlike the two previous case studies that specifically aimed to create a work based on Lifton’s theory, Salesses was not previously aware of the Ghost Kingdom theory which made playing with this work all the more fun. I was able to argue that “the textual evidence of coping mechanisms adoptees employ to process the trauma of missing information about themselves often reflect Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory, regardless of any explicit influence.” That’s a fancy way of saying, there’s Ghost Kingdom stuff here, but not on purpose! 

I’m also pleased to announce that the featured adoptee art on the page of this chapter is a song called “Constellations” by Jenni Alpert (aka Cami), who I met at the 2023 Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference. The song is a beautiful tribute to the experience of adoptee-kind and I’m honored that she allowed me to share this with you. Please go poke around on her website, there’s lots to discover about her many works. 

I remember as I was writing this chapter that I thought that it was too bad I had such a demanding deadline because I really could have gone on and on about Matthew Salesses’ novel. It’s a fascinating read, and my copy of the book will forever bear the scars of my reading notes as I read and reread it. What I wish I had expanded on in more length is the aspect of memory as it’s portrayed here; the beginning of my chapter alludes to this, but due to time constraints and my focus on Ghost Kingdom narrative functions, I couldn’t focus solely on the disordered memory as it’s presented in the book. Another paper for another day, perhaps. 

The full chapter as it’s now posted on my website, explains the concept of Tee’s container (an internal place where he hides and represses his emotions), the unnatural narrative of the ghost that literally haunts him the entire novel, and, my personal favorite, the activation of a possible world when Tee composes an alternate birth story on his typewriter. There’s a lot of gems packed into this book, is what I’m saying, and if I’d had all the time in the world, I could have written entire essays on each of these three aspects, too. 

I originally came to this work because of the ghosts mentioned in the summary, but I ended up being more fascinated with Tee’s container and his typewritten story. This case study pushed me to be creative in my interpretations. Ghost Kingdom narratives in the wild were (and are still) not easy to locate because they aren’t usually named as such and I got very lucky with my first two case studies, but The Hundred-Year Flood helped me expand the definition of Ghost Kingdom beyond what Lifton had described it as and examine further the parts that made it work. Sure, Lifton says a Ghost Kingdom is a kind of psychic reality where we daydream about the biological relatives we’ve lost, but what does that look like? Wouldn’t cognition and its expression vary person to person? What if the daydream isn’t at the conscious level and is repressed? The cognition as it’s manifested in this novel is brilliant (IMHO) and led me towards a theory that was not adoption-centered, but instead an example of the workings of a fictional mind. And fiction is a function of a real mind, too, wouldn’t you say? 

When I took a version of this chapter focusing only on the typewriter story to the 2023 Narrative conference, I was also happy to receive some feedback about including some discussion on embodiment (would you rather read a story saying the character was sad he didn’t have a birth story or experience his grief by watching him type up an alternate birth story for himself?) and temporality (how narrative memory moves the reader back and forth between time and space). 

All of these happy discoveries have lent themselves to the growing definition of phantom worlds (sorry I keep hinting at this, you’ll hear someday, I promise!) and how such narratives function. In the case of The Hundred-Year Flood, I think you’ll be happy to find that Tee’s cognition as it’s expressed with his container and his typewritten story is beautifully expressed. And bonus, there's a real ghost. As with the other two case studies, I am quite proud of this one and hope you enjoy it, too. 

Case Study #2 Reflection

This chapter and reflection is embarrassingly late and for that, I want to apologize. But I’m not going to because my entire thesis project felt like the peak of my abilities both academically and emotionally, and, to be honest, it was something I needed to do, but it was not easy. It drained me and I needed a major break from that heavy lift. I needed a rest. I needed to remodel my bathroom and marvel at my daughter’s art and try out new recipes and get back in sync with the moon. I needed to go to bed early and organize my digital files and watch an entire sentimental tv show on Netflix and work in a lot of breath work and yoga. 

So I did all those things. Self-care is not easy to prioritize, but I did my best.

And now I’m back. Because if I am anything, I am a summer writer, and it’s more than time for me to return to my craft. So without further ado, I’d like to present my second case study from my master’s thesis, and goodness gracious, this one dazzles, my friends.

The second case study focuses on Maggie Gallant’s virtual play, Betwixt & Between, which debuted at the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates’ annual conference in 2021. Once again, the stars aligned so that I was in attendance for the debut and got to meet Maggie at that critical time of the beginning of my project when I was choosing case studies. She was the first one who saw the finished chapter and I’m so very honored to have had the pleasure of working with her and her work. Much like the preceding case study which looks at Brian Stanton’s film @ghostkingdom, this one also directly engages with Lifton’s work and her theory of Ghost Kingdoms.

Additionally, I’m very pleased to share with you a gorgeous song called “To Say Goodbye” by a fellow adoptee, Ferera Swan which I think pairs with this chapter quite nicely. I’ve embedded the song on my chapter page and I hope you take the time to enjoy some of her other excellent pieces, too. 

This chapter was the most heavily edited of the three case studies I produced during my thesis because 1) the narrative structure turned out to be a dream and 2) my advisor was obsessed with the implications of what I’d found here because it helped her (and me!) realize that my thesis could turn into a theory. This was also the chapter I borrowed from to present at my first ever Narrative conference (which, fittingly, was in England). You could say that it’s probably the most coherent chapter and, personally, it brought an element of whimsy to the otherwise deep and traumatic emotional work I was doing with my thesis project as a whole (because I am a nerd and portal fiction is FUN!). 

The most important thing that came out of this chapter (which, of course, I somehow mentioned zero times in the chapter itself) is the way that the main character’s cognition is laid bare for the viewers to immerse themselves in. This is precisely the bridge I needed to help me cross over (hahaha get it?) from Lifton’s psychological theory of the Ghost Kingdom towards a place where I could analyze the narrative strategies that make a Ghost Kingdom. In other words, saying that adoptees have a unique situation that prompts them to fantasize as a coping method is one thing. Constructing such fantasies in a fictional form opens up a whole new conversation about the interplay of fiction and reality as cognitive functions that help us interpret the world and our place in it.

Our brains are devastatingly driven towards the narrative form for all kinds of reasons (memory, sense-making, imparting social mores, purpose, etc.), but what’s interesting about the Ghost Kingdom is that, especially here in Maggie Gallant’s piece, we can see how, with the absence of factual information, the brain proceeds to fill in all the holes with possibilities. These possibilities manifested as counterfactuals, once Lucy’s considered them, allow her to exercise more control in her waking life. So even if those counterfactual characters and scenarios aren’t part of her “textual actual” world, they are still real and serve an important purpose: giving her narrative structure where there would otherwise be empty chaos.

And all of this talk about Lucy’s portal into her imagination versus the actual world her story begins in? That narrative structure exists in all kinds of other stories you’ll recognize. Like so many. The Ghost Kingdom is what we have to describe the fantasies of those in the adoption constellation, but this story structure is bigger than that. It speaks to the way our brains are structured to lead us down the rabbit holes of what-if queries and come out the other side of the thought experiment changed. 

You’ll eventually hear more about this structure once we get to talking about my narrative theory, Phantom Worlds, but for now (until I can get something published with my name on it), just enjoy stepping through the portal into Lucy’s daydream and seeing for yourself the ways in which our imaginations can help us heal. 

I’m A Writer And So Are You

It took me years and years to finally start regularly calling myself a writer.

I placed in a writing contest out of Amarillo (the big city) in 5th grade and won my family tickets to some sports game I barely remember. But I wasn’t a writer, then.

I once filled up an entire single subject notebook with a story that was eerily similar to the Cats and Dogs movie I’d recently watched.

Nobody had called me a writer yet.

I started writing in a diary and slapping angry rhymes together in junior high when everything fell apart. But I wasn’t a writer, then. Was I?

Some of my peers (and the teachers who stumbled upon my … art …) began to notice.

I moved on to expanded prose in both non-fiction and, more notably, fiction. My freshman English teacher was so delighted with the drama on the pages, she showed off my writing to other teachers.

And then I wrote my first full-length short story, jumping off a prompt one of my friends had asked me to expand on. A friend I’d made who knew how important my writing was to me. I was writing and people knew it, but still, I wasn’t a writer.

The story in question included murder and curse words. My mother was appalled. To my mother, my words were all curses, fiction or not, daggers straight to her heart.

In high school and my first round of college, I came to the page with desperation, but found that without an audience, my pain made no difference at all because, back then, I wasn’t a writer. I was just a fuck up.

I came out of rehab with a poetry book that about 10 people bought and a 300 page printed book (that wasn’t for sale) of the gems I’d curated from my diaries before leaving those notebooks, notebooks spanning nearly a decade, in a dumpster somewhere between Austin and Plano. But I wasn’t a writer, then.

I went an entire marriage, pregnancy, and divorce with minimal writing. Any words I wrote were school essays and the unfiltered grief that came towards the end of the saga. Nobody was supposed to see any of it, and you won’t for a long time because the writing of that era is from when I wasn’t a writer. Not yet.

I graduated with an English degree and a full portfolio of articles I’d written for the school newspaper, blogs published on the Dallas ZooHoo! blog, and even a second place prize for a prose piece in a Sigma Tau Delta journal. But I wasn’t a writer, even then.

I got my first job and in under a year, moved departments and got a role with “writer” in the title. The work, though, was less writing and more editing. You could officially call me a writer, but I didn’t feel like one.

When did I accept the title?

It wasn’t until halfway through my Master’s degree after I’d already published my first novel. A student in one of my former professor’s classes interviewed me about my book and its journey. I texted my professor afterwards that I felt like her student had treated me like a real author. I promised myself then and there that I would always do my best to remember to stretch out my hands and help those I could.

There were so many stops along the way that I could have accepted the identity, even as the people around me watched my writing bring me to life, but it was that little moment, thirty minutes or so on Zoom with somebody who saw what I had done and wanted my advice on how to do the same that hit me in the chest.

I’m a writer.

I’ve been writing for over twenty years now. I’m not the best one out there, but I’m also not nobody. I can write, and I get better and better at it, year after year.

I just wanted to let you know, writer to writer, that whether your writing is plastered all over the internet or lives somewhere more secret, whether you have an audience or just the pretend people cheering in your head, you are a writer if you’re writing, and that’s it.

Share your words. We need them.

Love,

Your writer friend

The Voicemails I Can’t Listen To Yet

I canceled the PO Box I only ever got one letter from just before the renewal, but I wiggle the mouse on my Google Voice number when I get the routine email warning me that they’ll shut down my account after too much inactivity. 

The phone calls were the hardest. At first, she didn’t call at all. Finally, when she did, I missed the two calls that came one after the other because I was eating dinner and couldn’t get out the door fast enough to answer outside of my daughter’s hearing range. That was November of 2022, a few months after I’d taken my daughter to visit my aunt for the first time. I still have that first voicemail from my mother on my Google Voice account, her voice garbled and breath unsteady. The next call was the first of a batch of phone calls and wasn’t until after we met in July 2023. That’s the whole flurry of them, all the phone call times and voice messages recorded for me on that Google Voice account. And then the record ends. 

But I can’t listen to the voicemails. 

I can’t. 

Not yet.

Instead, I put together all of my poetry into one Google doc and started ordering the story. Instead, I made a title page and a copyright page and a dedication page to preface the collection. Instead, I let the words fall straight from my heart and onto the paper. Instead, I began asking my friends if they could help me honor my mother the only way I know how, by helping me publish something. I began asking them to witness my pain again, pain that ebbs and flows, but never goes. 

It makes more sense in ink, if you ask me. That’s all I ever knew of her until 2023, the letters and cards she would send me in the mail. But the pictures I took and the narrative I wrote of our two visits plus the Google Voice record of our phone calls and all the voicemails she left when I couldn’t pick up the phone, all of that is too real. I have the documentation, I have the record, but I can’t stand to look at it. A person I’d only ever known by the mark of her black pen became a person in a body, a body I needed to say goodbye to. 

So I’ll keep wiggling the mouse and making sure to keep the number active. I’ll be ready eventually, to finish the story as it really happened, but for now, I’ll take it one step at a time. That’s what healing is, sometimes, taking it one step at a time and reaching out to others when you need help finding your balance. 

Mirrors Made of Ink will be published March 25, 2024 in honor of my mother and in hopes that someone out there needs these words to see themselves reflected on the page the way I needed to see myself reflected in the ink.

Life goes on …

“Long after the thrill of living is gone…”

I woke up this morning to a cheerful little girl jumping in my bed. “I win!” she sang, happily hugging me awake. We have an ongoing contest for who wakes up first. The winner wakes up the other. As I groggily came to, the song on my clock radio came into focus after she’d scampered off to get ready for school. John Mellencamp.

I feel like I’m just now waking up from another six-month nightmare into these lyrics. Life does, in fact, go on, long after the thrill of living is gone.

Last July, my aunt called me to tell me some important news about my mother. My aunt and I had connected via Facebook in the summer of 2021 and were soon spending long hours on the phone with each other, and sending pictures. Eventually, in the fall of 2022, my daughter and I drove up to visit her in person for the first time. Up until last July, she would give me regular updates about my mother during our chats. She’d tell me about her health, what care facility she’d been transferred to (and she transferred so often, we could barely keep up), and whether she’d responded to conversation about me. While my aunt and I were becoming family, my mother sent me a letter once in response to mine, and later left me a single voicemail. Neither of us was sure about the other. When my aunt called me last July, she said, “She’s in hospice. I thought you’d want to know. In case you change your mind about visiting her.”

She was right. I did change my mind.

Hospice was a blessing and a curse. It meant that the end was near, but it also meant that my mother would most likely stay in one place long enough for me to plan a visit and make it there. I hastily planned a visit to the middle of Texas.

There are 10,000 or so words (so far) that I have written elsewhere that detail my visit; they were written both for my own catharsis and for the historical documentation of my daughter’s biological history, something I wish had been done for me. There’s no way for me to summarize in any colloquial way the absolute joy and utter despair that I felt upon meeting my mother for that very first time, spending just short of a week visiting her in the nursing home where she would live out her final days.

She was a shell of what she had once been, and I only know this from the pictures and stories I have from my aunt. But still, enough of her was there for me to connect with. It was the third time in my life that I immediately and without reservation, loved unconditionally.

It was not an easy love to manage. She was stubborn and self-centered, proud and determined, forceful and single-minded. She was just like me. I brought her vapes to smoke and clothes to wear, silly little things from the dollar store that she asked for. I argued with her when she didn’t want to eat and sat with her in silence after I’d asked too many questions of her. I cheered her on when she walked with the help of her physical therapist and marveled at the strength of her hugs despite her small, withering frame.

After I’d returned home to a life that was already filled with other hard things like single momhood, running a nonprofit conference, and full time work that was beginning to bleed over into after hours, I fell into a dark hole. There were only a few people in my circle I felt comfortable venting to. I had to hold my head high and process all of this joy and heartache on my own, separate from parenthood, separate from community work, separate from my job.

The people I needed to understand the most didn’t. The comfort I wanted was out of reach. I was not alone, by any means, but I needed time to stop, and it didn’t. I kept on keeping on, trying my best not to drop any of the balls I was juggling. More news from a different side of the family surfaced in the fall, and, predictably, I began to waiver under all the weight. Soon after that news, I spent a weekend I should have spent working visiting my mother one last time in September on her father’s birthday.

I came home and tried to focus on the tasks set before me. My daughter came first, then the conference, and finally, just before Thanksgiving, I snapped.

I have snapped before. Someday, when you’re older, maybe I’ll walk you through the times that I have toyed with insanity.

This time was different from all the rest. I gently held the branches in my hand and said out loud, “I must break this, I am sorry.” I put in my two weeks notice on a Friday and felt a rush of relief from the lifted weight. There was nothing else that I could put down.

The next Tuesday, I got the call that my mother had died. And slowly, as I worked my final two weeks and planned for Christmas and cleaned the house, I fell into myself with grief.

Life goes on.

And to make sure that our lives do go on, I compiled a poetry book that roughly follows the storyline of my life as it’s been impacted by my adoption. If I know anything about carrying on, it is how to document these moments and frame them for the walls of our hearts. For me, for my family, and for anyone else who might see their grief reflected in these pages.

Putting this poetry collection together, ordering it in a way that reflects some of the moments I’ve lived, even if those moments were hard, was pure instinct, the same as deciding in an instant that I had to meet my mother before she died.

The first paragraph of the foreword reads:

There is no coherent beginning or ending to my story. This particular tale spans several lifetimes and it won’t end with me, but still, it’s time to document some things. At the very least, there can be a beginning and ending to this chapter.

There are only a few more things to do before I can close this chapter and start a new one. On a full moon in 2024, I will send this poetry collection out into the world.

I hope you’ll be there.

A Send Off

It’s been exactly a week since the day he went missing. A Thursday, a year and a day after he’d arrived in our home, he wasn’t anywhere to be found. The morning was rainy so I assumed he was hiding away from the water, but as the sun came out in the afternoon, I still didn’t see him, and when I looked in all of his usual hiding spots, he was nowhere to be found. 

Unlike other pet bunnies, this one was wild at heart just like me. He had been found on the side of the road by a friend of a friend, dumped with all his belongings. And so we agreed to take him in. But he disliked the inside crate and he disliked the outside run. Sometimes he would climb inside the hutch we built him, but mostly he liked to roam the yard. His favorite hiding place was a hole, a deep one, that he’d dug directly under his hutch. Despite worries that he might get picked up by a hawk or an owl, that something from the forest right behind our house might come creeping in the yard to get him, I decided to let him roam free. He distrusted humans, though he learned to begrudgingly allow me to pet him every once in a while, and though he thoroughly hated being carried, he was relieved when we brought him inside to shelter him from strong weather. Otherwise, he was happiest when he was free in the yard. I supplemented his diet with rabbit food, timothy hay, and treats, but his favorite food was dandelions. He was a happy and stubborn little thing. 

And so when he disappeared, like every parent I’ve ever met, I kept the secret, hoping against hope that my worst fears wouldn’t be confirmed. Or worse, that his disappearance would never turn up anything and we’d be left with a mysterious hole. Either way, I held it close to my heart and smiled through my worry for my daughter. But it had to come out eventually. That evening, we found out. 

My neighbor helped us dig the hole, and we laid him to rest right next to the toilet garden, his second favorite hang-out spot. Though we aren’t sure what exactly happened, I was thankful for the opportunity to say goodbye. 

I don’t regret letting him roam free, though I do wish we would have had him around for longer. But life is like that, or rather, death is always around the corner and so we must live our lives in a way that makes us smile through our tears when we do meet that finality. 

This stubborn little rabbit reminded me of myself; a cute little thing who had trouble trusting after a broken heart, a soul determined to live life on his own terms, an independent babe who would occasionally accept help, but not too often. He reminded me that some scars don’t heal, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make the best out of what you’ve got. I learned to be patient with him the way I wish somebody had been patient with me, back in those days when I learned firsthand that even adults can’t always be trusted. And for my efforts, he began to relax around me. Not all the way. But enough. 

He rests in the yard under what will soon be his favorite flowers now, but we’ll keep him in our hearts. He will remind us to keep fighting for our freedoms, to move slowly with those we don’t trust, to enjoy the wild sides of ourselves, to appreciate the dandelions. 

Love you, Bull Bunny. 

Well Known or Known Well

This thought has been drifting through my mind since Christmas Eve when my sister’s apartment flooded and we stayed up til 3:00 am on my couch drinking bottles of champagne because that’s what you do when shitty things happen. You stay up and talk about it, you fill up your cup until there’s nothing left to fill it with, and as you pour in the drinks, you pour out your heart. That’s how we do it, anyway. 

The thought is this: I’m not half as interested in being well known as I am in being known well. It’s one of those thoughts that comes when you can see the love clearly on the other side of the couch in the form of a person you know will be there all the way up until the funeral. For me, a person with all kinds of attachment trepidations, having a sister like this means more than I can adequately express. Usually, I let the champagne talk when it’s time to remind her of this. 

Being known well is the gift of a lifetime. Somebody who knows you well can anticipate the movies you’ll shed a tear over, they know what kind of whiskey to serve at your funeral, they know your struggles and sit with you through them, and even if they don’t understand your ghost project, they do their best to listen and ask questions when they get lost in your stream-of-consciousness explanations (that one is me, but you get what I’m saying). Being known well is the freedom to be yourself in all your forms all at once. 

Being well known is something completely different. It has never really been my aim. It may well happen as I continue writing, but it’s not some master plot of mine. Sure, I want my novel to be in the hands of those who need it, who will resonate with it, and of course I want to make contributions to both the scholarly and adoption communities as I work my way through this head of mine with my writing. But those gifts don’t require sharing ALL of myself. Or they shouldn’t. 

One of the main reasons I think this thought really stuck around with me after that night we stayed up having cosmic discussions was because of my relationship with social media. I’d already let people know in November that I’d be making an exit from Facebook and Twitter. The people who were interested in my work would find me, I reasoned, and the rest would filter out. 

Facebook has always felt like a zoo enclosure to me, but not one of those nice ones with the good diets and enrichment. More like one of those cages with a chain link fence, concrete floors, and no escape from the people gawking. Speaking about adoption’s impact on my life has been difficult, and there are times when perhaps I’ve said too much, aired out a rug in public that I should have just beat in the backyard. It’s not that I regret anything that’s out there in the world, it’s just that now is the time for me to have a little peace. That’s what is supposed to come after the storm, right?

And Twitter is just a mess. I enjoyed my time there, but it was just another thing to invade my brain. If the true gift that I give is writing, I should arrange my brain in a way that leaves space for that. And again, I’m not really gone. 

It just takes a quick Google search to see what I’m up to. It’s not like I’m disappearing off the face of the earth. It’s just that I would rather be looked up for my ideas rather than watched like a reality tv show. It isn’t my quest to be famous, after all. I actually prefer that the people I interact with have a shared interest with me, that they make a smidge of the effort to figure out how to talk with me about these things. But, of course, having a sturdy pile of strong friendships and seeing one of them sitting on my couch on Christmas Eve helped solidify the other side of it for me. There’s being well known for the good ideas you toss out into the universe, but you don’t owe God and everybody the rest of yourself. There are things that are just for your close friends and family who get the privilege of knowing you well. 

I’ve gotten a little pushback from a few people who view me as aloof or perceive me to be intellectualizing my feelings instead of feeling them, especially as it pertains to my adoptee story, but there are some details that are just for me. That’s okay. There are some feelings that I feel all by myself, and that’s okay. What I give to the public is a gift. 

So maybe I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, but I’m still on Instagram and LinkedIn. And you can contact me through my website. I’m not so interested in being well known, but I know that if you’re here reading this right now, you’re on your way to knowing me well.

Fiction & Non-Fiction

My sister friend was looking at my Christmas list (which is just a huge list of books on Amazon) and she made the comment that I’ve switched from fiction to non-fiction. And she’s right. Something fundamental about my interests has changed. Dynamically. 

I sometimes say that if we’re talking about dissociative behavior, what’s more important to think about in terms of my own behavior are the times I am NOT dissociating: my “snap back to reality” moments. They’re not often, but they’re powerful, like little tsunamis of awareness flooding my central nervous system with a whole new level of panic and assessment. 

When I say that my auto-pilot function runs at peak capacity, I mean it. I am almost never operating in full hands-on pilot mode. Those moments when I am not on auto-pilot are like golden drops of rain in the desert, rare, but furious. 

But if you look at the reel of my reading and daydreaming behavior backwards and see the snapshots of me getting younger and more naive, the amount of fiction I poured myself into (or did it pour into me?) increases exponentially. As a young person, it seemed to me like there was nowhere else to go except for inwards. 

Fiction, for me, has always been an escape method. It was the first drug I had access to, and I gorged myself on it. The question of my existence was too much to handle so early and I never found myself in a place where I felt safe enough to explore the aspects of my existence in full. So I didn’t. I read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I won reading contests in school without even trying. It wasn’t about achievement back then, though the adults around me acted like it was; it was about being allowed to close my bedroom door and ignore everything for as long as I could, to tune everything out as best as I could. Fiction is like a dreaming state. 

But now, as I begin to acknowledge my reality in what I’ll call here the waking world one little step at a time, I am reading less fiction and much more non-fiction. The more educated I am, the more I want to know, it seems. Fiction has fallen from the top slot and now I read all kinds of things. The news, biographies, stand-up comedy (it counts, damnit!), books on theory, history books, books with citations of books with more citations, journal articles, the opinion section of the newspaper. 

What I love about this transition is that I’ve resorted to non-fiction in order to more fully grasp the concept of fiction and it’s relationship to how we conceptualize our lives.  I haven’t left, in other words. I’ve leveled up. And for me, that means disassociating less, engaging with reality more, something that is a very positive sign of progress when it comes to my narrative intake and it’s relationship to my behavior, I think. 

If life is about anything, perhaps it’s how long and how intensely you can stay awake, stay engaged, stay alive, continue moving forward. And for me, that has always been a struggle. It hurts to stay awake too long. When I am awake, I am bright, but I am vulnerable. I can see things as they could play out, like in a story, and I enjoy problem-solving, but the problem is that I have not been safe and secure when I’ve existed in this state and so, I can only handle it for so long before I resume auto-pilot. That’s how I have functioned for the majority of my life. 

But lately, as the dust has begun to settle from so much awake time and furious bouts of deep thought on the intersection of fiction and reality, I can see more clearly the function of fiction and the ways in which I abused it as an escape rather than a study on how to go about my life. And also, as I grow older and slowly inch towards some of my goals in stability like owning a house, paying down my debt, being able to comfortably afford the necessities, and other, quite frankly, boring milestones, I am better able to relax and assess more, often, through my newfound intake of non-fiction. That doesn’t mean it happens more often, necessarily, that I wake up on full power, but it does mean that I am getting better at strategically planning for such moments to make the most of them. 

I have learned that sometimes it’s all I can do to operate on low power mode, greet 3:00 am like an old friend and drink in the silence when I can because I will need this emotional energy for those moments which come more often and more determined now, in which I decide to do whatever it takes to do what I love, to operate at full capacity and gain a better understanding of myself and how fiction is, for better or worse, a part of me. Until then, don’t mind me. I’ll be reading non-fiction.

I am a Transracial Adoptee (I think)

“I don’t think of you as white,” she told me the other day, and I’d never felt so warmed by a truthful voice of a friend. 

And before that, a little interjection on my behalf in a meeting: “Shannon is a transracial adoptee, too” followed by my awkward explanation that “I’ve grown out of the term Heinz 57, but haven’t confirmed with DNA the exact label yet. To be determined.” And my nervous laughter. 

I have successfully put off sending in my DNA to both major companies, Ancestry and 23&Me, for a whole year because I am scared. There is no denying, especially after learning more about my maternal genetics, that I am half brown. Or as my paperwork puts it: “Mexican?” 

But if I get up the guts and send off my spit in a bottle and the results come back and I have the words for what I am, then I’ll have to admit the insidious racism that colored my upbringing, the gaslighting that convinced me that I was a white girl with “dark brown hair” and freckles who “tanned very well” and had “hair other women might be jealous of, maybe you should think of that.” I’ll have to grapple with all those weird moments at the grocery store when sweet old ladies would speak to me in Spanish, then make weird faces when I spoke back to them in English, all the fajita meat I missed out on because the closest I ever got was frozen chicken meat with “fajita” seasoning from Schwann’s. I’ll have to ask why they kept it from me, why they are uncomfortable with any terms, Mexican, Hispanic, Latino. I’ll have to cry over the culture that I lost, the music, the dancing, the queso, the language, the stories, the hair, all of it. I’ll have to look at myself in the mirror, try to convince myself that it’s true, I do stick out in pictures, and how dare my mother beam in public when people told her I looked like her. 

And do I really want to dissect my life all over again after I just got done excavating the complex narratives I’ve been spinning in order to reconcile with the lost stories of what I could have been? Well, yes. But I’m going to need some rest before I do. I’ve earned that. 

Until then, hey. Is it okay if I start using the #transracialadoptee hashtag? I’ve got a closet full of trauma that needs unpacking. 

Case Study #1 Reflection

I should have known that it would always turn out this way, that I would complete the writing project and then hide myself away from it. The wonderful and terrifying thing about the thesis topic I chose for myself is that, in all senses, I chose to study myself. This is especially true for my first case study, the one that I cleaned up and finished last because it hurt so much to engage with. But growth is sometimes painful, and friends, I did grow. 

Like the main character of Brian Stanton’s film, @ghostkingdom, I too have been told that my father might have been a rapist. I have not found him yet, but as Brayden explains in the film, I’m inclined to believe that if my mother said it, it’s probably true. I’m a woman and I know how hard it is to get those truthful words over my lips. That’s why analyzing this film was a difficult task for me. It required an academic perspective, but also emotional vulnerability. I had to look myself in the mirror and say out loud, “my pain is portrayed here.” For me to write about this film, I had to pair my work with rigorous therapeutic study on myself, as well. I’m glad I did. 

As I began looking for my three case study pieces, Stanton’s film was the first thing I found. I had recently read Betty Jean Lifton’s Journey to the Adopted Self and had this idea that maybe I could take her psychological theory of Ghost Kingdoms and analyze it as a narrative. But first, I had to find some narratives to use as case studies. 

So, as I was preparing my own presentation material for my very first Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference (my first adoption conference!), I saw the social media marketing for the screening of his film that would be available to watch before the Q&A at the conference. I signed up, watched it twice, and knew immediately that it would be perfect. I mean, it was titled @ghostkingdom. It was on the nose! 

I was in character as nerd girl the entire Q&A, taking copious notes and asking premeditated questions. I was over the moon to find that Brian was so approachable and helpful. We stayed in contact during the entire project. He was the first one to see his chapter when it was done. I felt then as I feel now that in addition to gaining excellent material for my thesis project, I also gained important insight to myself through his film. I only hope that I have done it justice with the things I’ve said about it. 

Autofiction is one of the things I struggled with. There are several conflicting definitions of autofiction out there in academia, but the kind of autofiction I mean to highlight is the kind that he’s accomplished: inspired by his own reunion journey, but distanced by fiction, his piece is simultaneously fictive and a study of the self as he’s struggled with it. This is no autobiographical piece, but it is not an extreme kind of fiction, either. I feel that the adoptee experience is often in gray murky waters, much like our working definitions of autofiction. Even the definitions are confusing; auto refers to the self, and fiction, obviously, refers to a departure from fact. But sometimes, especially for adoptees, fiction IS fact and the self is elusive. Explaining this proved to be a challenge. I’ll probably have to continue working on it as I clean up pieces for journal publication. That’s for future Shannon, though. 

As far as the possible worlds go, Brayden’s Ghost Kingdoms are many in this film, and I love the contrast between his childhood daydreams and the fantastical expectations he builds as an adult seeking out reunion. Wild fiction against counterfactuals that could turn out to be true. This contrast allows viewers to see how fluid our Ghost Kingdoms can be, changing with us to provide us with those safe places we need as we need them. 

As an added bonus and to further emphasize that my thesis is specifically aimed at the adoptee community, I’m also quite honored to share Greg Santos’ poem with you. You’ll find it tucked into the first case study’s chapter page. Much like Stanton’s film, Santos’ poem muses on the role of fathers and ghosts from an adoptee’s perspective. I think it fits perfectly here, and I hope you take the time to read some of his other excellent works. 

As I’ve written in my introductory chapter, narratives that include Ghost Kingdom elements use a unique mixture of narrative elements to achieve their purpose which is to highlight a significant gap present in the self, something adoptees know well. This case study perfectly demonstrates the foundation of my argument which is that Ghost Kingdoms can be possible worlds in narrative form and that these fantasies are built as coping mechanisms. I’m a big fan, hope you are, too. 

The Parable of the Lost and Found

Once upon a time, God answered three parents’ prayers by bringing them together, but just for a moment. The first mother relinquished her newborn straight from the hospital into the adoptive parents’ arms. And for all that those two new parents knew, they were well on their way to a happily ever after. But entire lifetimes shouldn’t start with endings.

Sixteen years later, that little girl would sneak away to the chapel she knew was always left unlocked and write out prayers asking for forgiveness from a silent God for the truthfulness with which she lived her life. Those truths were wrong, she thought, and she prayed and prayed to drive them away. Why couldn’t she be thankful? Why couldn’t she forgive what had happened? Why couldn’t she be who they wanted her to be? And so, she wrote letters upon letters to a God who wasn’t listening, letters that somebody in the church kept scooping up between the times she came to sit in that chapel all alone and lay on the floor, crying. She felt safe all alone in that chapel, safe enough, anyway. This was the church that raised her. She knew where the keys were hidden under the cup in the kitchen, she’d touched the bell in the bell tower, she’d climbed on the roof, slept overnight in the basement. Every Sunday, hot chocolate in the morning, mints from the choir room after mass. Every Wednesday, a van to the children’s programming after school, a frenzied dinner then choir and bell practice. She was adopted, baptized, and confirmed as a Methodist. But West Texas churches are a whole other breed of belief. 

Then, somebody wrote her back. A person who said they were God and called her “my child” in ugly cursive writing on the back of a letter she’d left on the altar. Disgusted, she stopped writing letters. She didn’t come back until she was 18 and halfway through her first semester of college. She came home because she was falling apart and wasn’t attending class, she didn’t know why she was in college, what she wanted to do with her life. Everything felt wrong so she drove home and sat in the chapel and cried. But afterwards, they sent her back to try again, to attend classes, to see a career counselor. 

It didn’t work, and in the following spring, she closed her eyes in her car and let Jesus take the wheel. He wouldn’t let her die, though, and she was so mad at him, she stopped praying. On the outside she said, “I survived for a reason. God has plans for me,” but on the inside, the rot of doubt kept growing in, tangled and thorned vines spread. There was no escape. So, she started closing her eyes more and more often which, of course, was easier to do with a drink, with smoke, with pills. 

The next time she wrote a letter to God, she was sitting in the common area of a rehab center where she’d been admitted and sorted into the Substance Abuse group. She wrote for help with figuring out how to make that fairytale come true, the one they’d always told her. Did God place her with her adoptive parents for a reason? Was their love the highest love she’d ever attain in the world and if so, why wasn’t it enough? And with no answers from a God who never wrote back, she quietly decided to be who they wanted her to be, kill off all the parts of her that were wrong, or at the very least, bury them deep. And when she got out, she attended church and swallowed her uneasy feelings about people who only love you when you behave. She would behave. She would try. 

But after four years of trying to squeeze herself into a cookie-cutter life, everything fell apart again. After she stood alone in front of the judge with her signed and stamped divorce papers, she didn’t write a letter to God. Instead, she summoned her rage and determination to build a better life, and she did. Step by step. Brick by brick. 

She realized that all those letters she’d written weren’t to God, they were to the God of Shame that lived inside her, the one her family bred into her from both sides. She would no longer pray to shame. Instead, she would write to herself, for herself, no shame, all truth. 

And when her therapist begged her to find some way to relax on the weekends, she said, “I will schedule my relaxation in times and places where I feel safe, I will breathe easy in moderation,” and it was so. 

And when she spent a night in jail the first year after her divorce for public intoxication after an emotional night of art, she said, “I cannot drink when I’m emotional,” and it was so. 

And as she began to untangle the hurts from her past that she hadn’t previously understood, she said, “this healing is for me and I will not be deterred,” and it was so. 

The people who loved her stayed. And the people who didn’t love her left. She didn’t need to write letters to a hateful God anymore, she wasn’t depending on substances to deal with her disenfranchised grief anymore, she had built a tiny yet strong village of council members who hugged her when she was sad and cheered her on when she was on a mission. And in the silence when she was alone, she began to feel complete. 

Rehab didn’t fix her. Sure, she quit some behaviors, but she didn’t address any of the underlying trauma in that hospital. 

God didn’t fix her. If anything, that God of Shame that she prayed to held her back from achieving clarity and peace. 

And though her life began with loss under a god who veiled a corrupt system of selling infants, and her parents’ love wasn’t ever enough, this girl finally severed herself from that chapel, that god, that shame system, but this time, the separation was her choice.

The Censorship in My Adoption

I was somewhere around 9 or 10 years old when my parents read to me a letter from my birthmother. It wasn’t the first letter she had ever sent, but it was the first one that they read to me. I remember sitting up in my new twin bed in my brand new bedroom that they had added onto the house in order to accommodate their first and only biological offspring, my little brother, so that all three of us kids would have our own bedrooms. 

If you force me to, I can arrange the letters I now have from her (which I have, of course, compiled in a binder) and pinpoint the exact letter they sat me down to listen to, but because they didn’t allow me to hold it in my hands, the memory is less than what it could be. 

“Do you have any questions?” They asked me afterward. 

“Who is this from?” I asked. 

“Your birthmother.” 

“Oh.” 

“Do you have any questions?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“You know, she made the best choice she could for you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

And when they got up to leave the room, to turn out the lights and bid me goodnight, I held my hands out for the letter, but one of them said, “We’ll hold onto this for you.” And so I lay awake that night trying to understand both the entire loss of my birthmother and the loss of that letter, proof that she had taken the time to think about me and write to me. 

A few years later, after so much creeping around the house behind my parents’ back, I finally found a file folder marked “Shannon” in the filing cabinet in the garage where my mother kept all of her piano music. My mom was on her way home from I don’t know what, the grocery store or practicing the organ at church, and when she opened the garage door to pull the suburban in, she knew exactly what I’d found. Instinct kicked in, and I ran to my room with my stolen artifacts, she was close on my tail. Slammed my door. Screaming behind me, “Give it back! That’s not yours!” Body weight against the door, knob wiggling, thumps, crying. Shoving down as much paperwork as I could down my sports bra, getting as much important stuff as I could. Pictures and letters, first priority, couldn’t tell the difference between the rest of the paperwork. 

Of course, I was forced to relinquish (sound familiar?) the file folder back, but I’d stolen enough documents to have things to sift through after the house quieted that night, one of them another letter, a letter I hadn’t yet seen, and most importantly, one that was signed by my birthmother at the bottom and in the space where her last name would have been, a rectangular hole in the paper. 

The censorship I endured as a young adoptee was inflicted on me not only by my adoptive parents who kept my adoption paperwork, letters from my birthmother, and pictures of her away from me, but also by the adoption agency who monitored our correspondence and cut out identifying information before sending it on to me as if I were an inmate in prison. 

And to top it off, the details of my adoption weren’t the only things I was being sheltered from. I grew up in a conservative evangelical family; we were big supporters of James Dobson and Focus on the Family, we only watched PBS and Sunday night Disney movies on ABC, though we got the treat of watching the Discovery channel in hotels every summer on our way up to Montana to see family. I was forbidden from reading a whole litany of books: Harry Potter, The Secret Life of Bees, anything that disrupted the Christian teachings I could not escape. 

I was laying in bed last night, tossing and turning, when suddenly I thought of the two kinds of censorship I have endured. First, the cut out rectangle where a name should have been, complete absence of a thing that should have been there. And then, of course, the standard black bar of censorship blocking something from visibility, a thing I never actually saw until late junior high because of how successfully I was sheltered. In black and white, absence and restrictions. 

Censorship can wreak such havoc on young minds. It certainly did with me. And the trouble is, I began to understand what was being done to me the moment my parents walked out of my bedroom with that letter, the first time I asked for a book they said no to at Barnes & Noble. But as a minor, there was nothing I could do about it. 

In junior high, my friends burned me CDs to help, I began saving my allowance to buy things at the mall on school field trips, I quit going to church because that was the only time I could count on to root through the house and find the hidden pieces of my history. I did what I had to in order to fill in the gaps that I could see and depended on my friends who lived in the outside world to call out the gaps I couldn’t. 

You can’t ask me about my medical history or my Latina hair because I don’t know any more about it than you. The same goes for Nickelodeon shows or secular music in the 1990s. I was there for Bill Clinton’s presidency, but his entire tenure, I never heard his name spoken in my house once. And whatever happened at the hospital when I was born, stayed there. That vital piece of myself that entered the world, happy for just a moment before it all came crashing down, was kept away from me, hidden by my parents who knew my original surname for 30 years before giving me the paperwork, hidden by the government who wrote me a legal fiction in the form of a birth certificate. 

You can say that there are some things children aren’t ready to know, but I’ll disagree with you there. Children can feel those holes, can see your censorship bars, even if they lack the vocabulary to name them, and all that does is prove to them that you don’t think they’re worth telling anything. Or worse, that you don’t trust them to have their own opinions about things, especially if you fear the risk of those opinions running counter to your own. 

Robbed of What-If

It hit me on the way home, twenty minutes after we turned south on I-25, the gravity of my real life actual fucking situation. I just spent an excellent weekend with the only two blood relatives I have ever met, my daughter and my aunt. It was glorious and because it was glorious, I was tearing up in the car, planted firmly in a counterfactual Ghost Kingdom that suddenly felt undeniably real, just out of reach, but vivid and true. 

I’ve spent my whole life feeling like a spoiled brat when I talk about being adopted. I know, factually, that my biological mother was unprepared to care for me nor would she have been provided with the resources to do so. I feel guilty every time I pass a homeless person on a street corner or think about how I had the time and money to go to rehab and quit cocaine. I got a brand new car for my high school graduation and have no student loan debt to speak of. I am, in most manners of speaking, excessively privileged to lead the life that I do. 

Those things are all true, but so is the fact that my birth was a family secret, something only my grandfather and mother knew about until it was too late, until I was already gone. Had my grandmother known, had my aunt known, they would have stepped in. When they found out, they cried on the phone together. And from that moment, thirty years passed to this one. 

I reconnected with my aunt last year, and since then we’ve talked on the phone every other Saturday night like clockwork. She knows the whereabouts of my mother and tells me how she’s doing. She also tells me stories from the past. My grandmother passed away before I could meet her, but the stories I’ve been hearing for the past year are so colorful and mystical, they fill me with wonder and sadness that I missed out on knowing such a woman. This past weekend was the first time that my daughter and I visited with my aunt in person after so many phone calls and picture exchanges.

Oh, she is wonderful. She is my Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. That’s why this hurts so much. I missed out on thirty years with an aunt who loves me just for existing, who can tell me about myself, who sees my quirks and explains them, who matches my physical features with our family’s. I missed out on living with a blood relative who would have taken me in had she known. 

Could have, should have, would have, but I didn’t. I was a minor at the mercy of those good Christian folks at the Methodist Mission Home, then the Texas government, and finally my adoptive parents, all of them aided by the shame a father inflicted on his daughter for getting pregnant out of wedlock, and the cultural understanding that women who messed up could simply go away and have it taken care of, never mind how she might feel birthing a human into existence only to have it taken away, never mind the trauma that this human birthed into existence would carry for a lifetime. 

I’ve talked about it a great deal, that blur between reality and fiction, but after meeting my aunt in person and touching the paintings my grandmother painted, I felt it viscerally. I am fiction and I am real, I’m just a painting on the wall of a made-up landscape and yet, I still take up space. I’m a pile of what-ifs on the wrong side of a counterfactual coin toss. I am neither in this family nor that family, just somewhere in between, tethered down to reality only by the hope of the future that my daughter reminds me of, a story yet to be written. 

And so, after a joyful reunion, something not every adoptee gets, I cried in the car on the way home, heartbroken to know and witness and experience and feel, for the second time in my life, that adoption robbed me of so damn much.

My Adoptee Story (The Adult Remix)

As a child, I repeated my mother’s words: “My real mom is the one who raised me.” The first nine years of my life, my little body knew that submissiveness was key to my survival. So, I played along. But the series of events afterwards spiraled fast and, to be honest, I can never quite tell if I’m overly sensitive or if these events were actually as catastrophic as they felt. In therapy over the past five years, I’ve learned that feelings are valid so I’ll just say that everything hurt (and the pain escalated) from the time I was nine years old forward and, to me, it was excruciating. 

At the time of those events, however, I had no words and so, there grew a rift between the parts of myself, inside and outside, which even to this day, argue profusely with each other. But I realized a few years ago that I needed to name these opposing parts of myself in order to better understand them. Naming something, after all, gives you power over the thing. One part of myself, the outside, is called Mask. The other one, the inside, is called Truth. 

Truth is a nasty subject in terms of adoption rhetoric and language choices, right up there with “real family.” Tony Corsentino, in his piece, “Fourteen Propositions About Adoption,” has contended that adoptees alone have “the freedom, and the burden, of deciding whom to call family.” But I have never gotten the impression that anything related to my adoption or my idea of it was my choice. 

The opposite, actually. My parents told their side of the story, they chose what details to leave out, the language they would uphold, the language they would shame. They were the ones lying and keeping secrets. How can there be Truth in a family like that? 

I had their lies, I had stolen documents and sparse letters. But of the three parents I had, none of them helped me gain a new perspective about myself. That would be up to me alone. The truths I was handed down were full of shame, all sides, and none of them were whole truths. Of course, I didn’t understand any of this about myself or my family until about five years ago. 

It was when I got divorced that the ball of yarn began to unravel. Divorce was a visceral reminder of losing a family before that scared me awake. The difference between my adoption and my divorce is that when I got divorced, I was an adult who could consciously experience the pain and make choices around how I dealt with it (and they weren’t always the best choices, but you know, they were mine) whereas when I was a baby, I had no words and no way to consent to the decisions that played out around me. But both of them hurt. 

My therapist at the time helped me trail my life backwards from the divorce until all that was left was the event of my birth, staring me in the face. It wasn’t a sudden crash, though, more like a really uncomfortable reminder that adoption played a huge role in who I was because deep down, I knew. 

I knew my anger was justified, I knew I was lacking truth. The problem was getting to a point where I valued myself enough to realize that I deserved things. “We accept the love we think we deserve,” right? I deserve things that were taken or hidden from me, but I had to feel deserving of those things first. I went with a fake it til ya make it mindset because, as my therapist said, I deserve love. Because all humans deserve love. And so, the growth of my Truth began as I began interrogating and digging. As it did, my self-worth grew along with it. 

Here’s a bullet point list of events in the order that they happened after this realization because I don’t want to write a cohesive narrative series of paragraphs at the moment, but I do want to catch you up on the emotional roller coaster I’ve been on for the past five years: 

• May 2017 - I officially got divorced and presented a fiery divorce project in one of my undergraduate classes in which I compared mainstream rhetoric of divorce from the current day (with my own decree!) and the long eighteenth century, the days of our feminist mothers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton (one of my heroes!) 

• June 2017 - I composed a poetry project in which I got my creative writing voice back. Sad realization: I can write sad shit REALLY WELL. 

• Fall 2017 - I took a World Literature class where my professor encouraged me to be more creative & I met a creative writing buddy who took me to a writing group. This writing group saw the first very sci-fi version of Rose’s Locket and also suffered through a lot of very depressing stories I had to get out of my system. 

• Spring 2018 - As a journalist for the student newspaper, The Lasso, I was asked to cover and promote the library’s first hosting of the Human Library. In my excitement for the event, I volunteered as a Human Book to tell my story of adoption (mostly as a parlor trick, but it was a step in the right direction) 

• Fall 2018 - I was asked by the same professor who witnessed the divorce project to assist him with a project concerning Edna Gladney (who you’ll be familiar with as being the namesake for the Gladney Center for Adoption). I felt as though I’d been given permission to study myself (plus the legal and archival research was super fun because I am a giant nerd). 

• December 2018 - I graduated with a BA in English literature, minor in Global Studies

• Spring 2019 - I began my research assistantship on Gladney and began my MA degree. I took a narrative class where I focused on attempting to write coherently on my adoption experiences. It was the first time I actively attempted to write my own counter narrative to what I’d grown up hearing from my parents. Big moment for me, but a lot of sad and bad writing that my professor had to dig through. 

• Summer 2019 - Interned at a FinTech company, snagged a big-girl job with health insurance, WOW

• December 2019 - Eric Koester reached out to me on LinkedIn and successfully roped me into his Creator Institute program to write my book. Which book, you ask? Some idea I had written about 12,000 words so far about an adoptee girl like me, structurally based on Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated novel. Read it. 

• February 2020 - Bought a house, YEAH! 

• The pandemic? Yep, just went straight to work writing a novel and did my best to survive like everyone else. It was not pretty. 

• December 2020 - Published Rose’s Locket <3 

• April 2021 - Wrote an Op-Ed that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman about HB1386 and Texan adoptees’ rights to their original birth certificates which subsequently led me to meet all the right people including folks at Adoption Knowledge Affiliates 

• July 2021 - Legally changed my name to reclaim my birth name (Rose) and trade my married name back for my adoptive family’s surname (Quist) 

• Summer 2021 - Reunited with my biological aunt via Facebook, she’s now one of my absolute favorite humans. 

• Fall 2021 - Began writing my Master’s thesis. I also presented at my first adoption-related conference hosted by AKA and made some very important and lovely friends (I’ll introduce you very soon!) 

• May 2022 - Now-ish (though I’m posting this later). I have walked the stage and completed all tasks for my Master’s degree in English rhetoric & writing, the thesis track. 

To be honest, it takes a lot of emotional energy to write and so it happens that I fall mute after an exceptionally difficult project, like here lately. I hope you’ll excuse me for the above bulleted list. As you can see, I have been very busy. And as a result of all this labor—emotional, legal, creative, public, academic—I am more dedicated than ever to sharing my perspective in hopes that it helps move the conversation about adoption along. Most importantly, I have decided that I will no longer employ Mask which will leave me free to embrace Truth.

Bunnies & Abandonment

My neighbor texted me asking if my daughter and I would like a pet bunny. One of her coworkers had found a domestic bunny and all the supplies (including a crate, hay, and bedding) on the side of the road. Somebody abandoned this bunny and it needed a home. “Bring me this bunny,” I texted back. 

I went to work purchasing the necessary supplies: an outside hutch and bunny run, rabbit food, a toy. Then I cleared out a space in the house for the crate so it could sleep inside on nights when the weather’s bad. I found a veterinarian who sees bunnies. I sat down and reconciled with the part of myself that knew why I was making the choice to take in this rabbit; I am under a large amount of stress as I come up to the final stretch of my thesis and graduation looms. I know that it helps me take care of myself when I have a smaller being to take care of. This is not the best place to be in, emotionally, but for adopting a pet, it’s not the worst. And then, once I’d come to terms with the state of my mental health, I told my daughter that we’d soon have a fluffy little bunny to love and care for. 

But as I explained the story to my daughter, a ball of disgust formed in my throat as I put it together. How dreamy this story could be if I leaned into it, if I told it the way I was supposed to, right? Here was an abandoned baby who needed a home. We would be the heroes, save it, take it in. And, you know, for this little bunny, maybe it really is like that. Whoever decided to drop it on the side of the road really is the bad guy here and thank goodness for its foster family who scooped it up. But for millions of adopted human infants, this story doesn’t work. 

This is what happens when language isn’t precise. We use the same words with infant adoption and pet adoption which, as you can imagine, leads to confusion in the differences and pain in adoptees who don’t enjoy being compared to the shelter dog you brought home or the purebred you paid thousands for. It doesn’t sit well. Humans are not to be bought or owned, but since this language overlaps, so do our cultural ideas on adoption. 

My dog’s adoption is more like my own than this bunny’s. When I was twenty years old and in my first apartment, I wanted a puppy. Luckily for me, one of my friend’s dogs had an unexpected litter so once she was weaned, Penny came into my life. I knew that Penny would be my dog before she came home, the same way my parents knew that about me. Penny was wanted just like I was. Unfortunately, I think both of us were meant to fill some holes, and it shouldn’t be like that. 

This bunny, however, is the perfect model of what most conservatives want in an adoption. An abandoned bunny, clearly dumped and no longer wanted, the obvious solution is to take him in. Right? 

Last fall when Amy Coney Barrett, an adoptive mother herself, explained that safe haven laws solved the abortion / adoption problem once and for all, I spent a month or so afterwards coming out of the shock her comment put me in. Since when is abandonment the best way to start a life? Living as an adoptee has put me firmly in the pro-choice camp. If you can choose between non-existence and trauma, the choice seems obvious. Well, from the adoptive parent perspective, maybe it’s a cleaner slate if parents just abandon the baby at a firehouse. Ownership is a much cleaner bill if you can rid yourself of the fear that the creators won’t come back for what they’ve lost, right? 

It’s really unfortunate for all the adoptees how badly we’ve screwed this narrative up. Their own flesh and blood parents are vilified, their adoptive parents are elevated to hero status, and the adoptees themselves are left somewhere in the middle to sort it all out for themselves. 

It reminds me of my own family. My daughter’s father and I are divorced and there is one cardinal rule: don’t vilify the other parent. I firmly believe that my daughter is more than just my daughter; she is her father’s daughter, her grandparents’ granddaughter, her aunts’ and uncles’ niece, she is a friend, she is a student, she has many relationships of her own. She deserves to know all of her family, she deserves to build her own relationships with people. That openness is something I didn’t get in my adoption story. There were good guys and bad guys and then me, stuck in the middle between them. 

I know from experience how important openness is in a blended family, how the truth must shine or else it turns to shame. But I also know of the dark side, the trauma that rides along for your entire life, the nervousness that surfaces with each new relationship. And with our new family member, this little bunny, I promise that I will meet it where it is and take care of it the best I can, but I can never erase the pain of being left on the side of the road. 

Nobody Sees It But You

I’m a first-time homeowner, two years into owning the house I plan on dying in. Several well-meaning people have told me congratulations on my nice little starter-home, but for me, this place is a really big deal. 

I’ve lived in seventeen other places before, none of them ever felt remotely like “home.” During my teenage years when I was forced to see a Christian counselor, he got irritated with me when he tried to explain the difference between a house and a home. “A home is a place where you’re loved,” he said, but I adamantly referred to my living quarters as a house. Everything that came after was similar: I’d put my things in a dorm room, an apartment, my car, a rent-house, but never fully moved in. I used to poke fun at myself by saying that I was awful at home decor, but the truth is, I’m not. I just have my own offbeat taste and never had the freedom or courage before to unleash it. 

Probably more significant to this conversation is my adoptee status. I’ve finally learned that everything ties back to what my adoptive parents portray as an event, but my experience shows is a lifelong struggle. 

That’s why buying and owning a home has been a big deal for me. I am in control of my life, of this place. Other people made monstrously big decisions for me without my consent when I was an infant, but I’m an adult now who is in charge of establishing what I want my life to look like. 

So, for the past two years, I have been slowly working on my house as I’ve been able. When we first moved in, there were some pretty major changes I made immediately: we needed a new garage door, we needed a new dishwasher, I wanted to rip out the raised box gardens the previous owners had put in because they were crawling with termites. Then we painted my daughter’s bathroom, painted the hallway and established our art gallery. I’ve replaced the windows, the siding of the house, added gutters, installed solar panels. My dad built a swing set for my daughter in the backyard and my mom helped clean up the front garden. And thanks to the insurance money, after the water heater flooded, we gutted the kitchen and everything there is sparkling new. I still have plans, it will take me several more years to touch every inch of this home, but I’m not worried. My house is a constant project just like me. We are both in need of attention, love, and change. 

The latest project has been my bathroom. The toilet was leaking the other day and despite all my efforts at tightening the bolt that sat at the bottom of the tank, I ended up having to call a plumber. The more cost-effective plan, he told me, would be to replace the toilet altogether. “Can I keep the old one?” I asked. “Of course!” He told me that lots of his customers opted to keep old appliances to use in their garden which is exactly what I planned on doing. 

I called my parents with the news and wanted to get their opinion on some other things. The cabinet and sink needed to be replaced in that bathroom, too, did they think it was worth it to take out another loan and gut the bathroom? How much would that cost, generally speaking? 

“You should probably hold off on that,” they said, and at first, I agreed. For all the work I’ve already done in the house, I am pretty much at my limit for monthly loan payments. But they went on. “After all, ugly or not, it’s livable. And nobody sees it but you.” 

This comment changed the entire conversation. 

You have to understand that I’m the only one out of their three children who clearly remembers both houses. I was seven when we moved from Borger to Perryton. My little sister was 3. And ever since we moved in, my mom complained about the wallpaper. Or the kitchen. Or whatever else. Which, her complaining would have been fine if it had bothered her enough to do something about it. My dad made enough money to cover a weekend paint job. But years and childhoods passed by with very minor changes. Sure, they replaced the fridge when it died or took care of the damage when the water heater flooded. After much pleading, my sister got her room re-decorated with new paint and wallpaper. The middle bathroom got a minor update, the house trim got painted, but it wasn’t the things my mom complained about that changed. 

That little comment, “nobody sees it but you,” brought out a fierceness I didn’t know I was capable of. Am I not important? Will I allow complacency to mirror that thought train? 

No. Even if I am the only one who sees my bathroom, I am a person. And I deserve to exist in a space that feels comfortable and bright and welcoming. I own this space. It’s mine. And I am worth making happy, even if I have to do it myself. Even if nobody sees it but me. 

Secrets of the Ghost Kingdom

My daughter helped me realize that Ghost Kingdoms are not always accessible to us, even as they aid in our cognition. Though the term “Ghost Kingdom” was famously coined by adoptee author and psychiatrist Betty Jean Lifton as a psychic reality adoptees retreat to in order to play out what-if scenarios and create characters of lost biological relatives, I think the idea of an internal fantasy world applies to everybody as a basic function of the mind.

We were talking in the car on our way home from picking up dinner, and I genuinely don’t remember what I was telling her, but when I paused for her response, she said, “Wait, what? I wasn’t listening, I was in Emery Space.”

Immediately, my ears perked up because in my studies of adoptee Ghost Kingdoms, it’s become clear to me that we all have inner worlds where we sometimes retreat to. Fantasies and what-if scenarios are inherent to the structures of our minds, adoptees or not. What I used to call Mom Space when my mom would drift off at the dinner table is actually a secret internal place all of us have inside our minds. 

“Oh?” I asked. “What’s Emery Space?”

“Well, you know how sometimes you can leave your body and go into space and then you come back like, boom?” She explained. “That’s where I was, but I’m back.” 

“Yeah, I know what that’s like,” I said. “What is Emery Space like? What do you think about when you go there?” 

“I don’t know,” she said. “I know I go to Emery Space, but I don’t know how to explain it and I don’t know what I think about there because I’m back now.” 

And I really liked that answer. As I worked on my thesis project, it became clear early on in the writing process that it would be imperative for me to take time away from the academic writing to give myself time to reflect on my own Ghost Kingdom and how my mental processes over my lifetime have informed my worldview, especially regarding my adoption. 

My first exploration of my own experience reflected on how my birthmother has appeared to me in dreams over the years. As I explained in a guest blog, my dreams seem to be the clearest insight I have into my own Ghost Kingdom as it was when I was a teen and now as I’m currently in reunion with my biological aunt. 

Though the two dreams I discussed there were important for me to recognize as entryways into my personal fantasy world, I felt frustrated because I couldn’t recall any such dreams or thought behavior indicating a ghost kingdom from my childhood. They must be deeply repressed memories, I thought. 

But now, as I reflect on this conversation between my daughter and myself, I can’t help but think that whatever my Ghost Kingdom was as a child was helpful to my emotional growth as I navigated the world around me whether I remember that place I escaped to or not.