“Why am I here?” 

“Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden assiduously avoided, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here.”

Thus begins an exchange between Neo, the main character of the movie, Matrix Reloaded, sequel to The Matrix, and The Architect, a character who is a program within the larger computer simulation called the Matrix. The Architect is responsible for the design of everything the human minds within the simulation believe to be the real world. Only not everyone believes, and Neo is one of those rare few who follow the hints that not all is as it seems, wake up to the reality of their actual circumstances, and escape the simulated world of the Matrix.

In the previous movie, The Matrix, Neo discovered that what he thought of as his real life—every event, relationship, memory, sense perception—was merely a programmed illusion. In truth, he had been encased in a pod alongside millions of others, kept alive for the electromagnetic energy his body produced to run the machines that had taken over the world. “Why do my eyes hurt?” he asks when he wakes up in his actual physical body on an examination table, one of his first conscious experiences outside the Matrix. “You’ve never used them before,” answers Morpheus, who orchestrated his rescue.

Now, confronting The Architect, Neo seeks further understanding of the Matrix and his own identity and mission. But I prefer to reframe their exchange and its context metaphorically in terms of adoption. As an adoptee, if I could escape the enveloping matrix of dominant narratives and traumatic impacts of relinquishment and adoption, journey to the very source of the contemporary adoption system, and speak to a personification of its logic—its precise mathematical design, so to speak—I imagine I might receive a very similar response to the question, why am I here?: “Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation….an anomaly…a burden…not beyond a measure of control…” 

Not all is mere cold calculation, however. Even The Architect—who is personified as utterly emotionless, masculine, ruled by pure logic—had to develop a counterpart program, The Oracle—who, in contrast, is personified as intuitive, feminine, and empathetic—in order to more fully understand the human experience and thus design a more authentic, plausible simulation. But the end is the same in any case: maintain control even over foreseeable anomalies, those whose awakening consciousness threatens the harmonious functioning of the system. In my reframing, I imagine adoption professionals and advocates, those on the frontlines of the industry, playing a similar role as The Oracle—putting a warm, benevolent face on what remains a means of controlling human destinies, the trafficking of human beings based on manipulating the forces of supply and demand, capitalizing on the human cost of social and economic imbalances.

The experience of being adopted can have a similar dichotomous quality. On the surface, we may absorb the cultural messages that we were chosen, given a better life, that love alone has enabled us to graft ourselves seamlessly onto a foreign family tree, while inwardly, we know ourselves to have suffered a grave injustice—the loss of our families through a binding legal and financial exchange that determined the course of our lives, in which we had no voice or agency. We may even share a genuinely warm, loving bond with our adoptive families, yet know in our bones that not all is as it seems.

A baby is born with an implicit sense of self, inseparably connected to its mother and biological lineage. When that connection is broken, the baby registers this rupture on a deep instinctual level. When the baby is then compelled to adapt to strangers as if they are family, the result is an injury to this implicit sense of self, a loss of self. When an older child is adopted, an additional layer of psychological dislocation and disorientation further compounds the impact of this developmental rift. As a result, the traumatic outcomes of relinquishment and adoption become our Matrix: At a fundamental level, life can feel unreal, like an arbitrary simulation to which we adapt, rather than a world in which we belong. We can suppress this feeling, but even then, many of us can still relate to Neo before he escaped the Matrix, haunted by the suspicion that our real lives, real selves, real relationships, must be somewhere else. Hence, such basic questions as “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” can fester in us like wounds that will not heal until long into our adult lives. We search and we search and we search but, to paraphrase another line from The Matrix, the simulated reality of adoption cannot tell us who we are.

Journal Entry 
5/22/2024

Woke up early this morning throbbing with anxiety, real panic, with an ache deep inside my belly, as if the very core of me longed to be met, ached for company—a whole-bodied heartache, soul-ache!—with the devastating perception/conviction that the world cannot meet me in my depths, cannot truly know me, see me, mirror me. My thoughts raced to and fro for something to grab hold of, something dependable, but everything—my life circumstances, relationships, beliefs, everything—just felt unbearably “WRONG!” and “NOT ENOUGH!” A nauseating whirlwind of distress, no escape. 

When I finally got out of bed, I used a meditation I learned from spiritual teacher Miranda MacPherson to find some calm in the storm:

“Be nothing.
Do nothing.
Get nothing.
Become nothing.
Seek for nothing.
Relinquish nothing.
Be as you are.
Rest in God.” *

These words are medicine to my adoptee soul, unhooking me from all the ways I learned to externalize my identity to be somebody for someone else (the adopted child of [fill in the blank])—to do something, achieve something, forget something (especially that!) in order to become the person other people needed me to be, to fulfill the projections of others that I choicelessly absorbed in the absence of true mirroring. And then all the fruitless searching for meaning, purpose, and identity within that matrix. Let it all go. Rest in trust in the expansive aliveness of simply being what I am, effortlessly held in an unbroken wholeness.

As the dust of anxious thoughts settled and I came back to myself, I was better able to differentiate between past and present in my feelings and perceptions, disentangle myself from the younger parts of me, child-parts and younger, who were in such intense distress, and give these parts the attention they needed:

“Of course you feel this way. Your feelings are normal and natural and deserve compassionate attention. Of course things felt wrong without your family, with people who could not mirror you or acknowledge and carry your losses with you. Of course it wasn’t enough to live with a family who couldn’t meet you in the deep places where you ached to be met, with no one to notice and validate your needs. I am here now. You are safe. I see you. I feel you. I will keep you company.”

***[SYSTEM FAILURE]***

Why am I here?

There is no why. Life is its own affirmation, felt in the wonder of seeing with these eyes, hearing with these ears, in the vitality pulsing through this body, in the dance of bright green leaves fluttering outside the window, in the contented joy of the child who knows that she is known and loved.

Now let me tell you a story.

* Miranda Macpherson, The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation (Boulder, Colorado: Sounds True, 2018), 2.