“Too emotional.”
“Too challenging.”
“Too much.”

These key descriptors missing from my adoptee bio would go on to shape my personality, completely catching my parents off guard as the orphanage had failed to disclose these traits.

As I settled into my new life, I sought hard to mirror my family’s innate emotional apathy, however I lacked their emotional baseline and every feeling seemed to toss me around like a perpetual bungee jump. I veered between failure to control my feelings and fleeting moments of success at merely being “just okay.”

But fear not! By the time I left home I had achieved my ultimate life goal: 

complete 
emotional 
suppression

I had rendered myself numb to both positive and negative emotions. It was everything my adoptee self had ever longed for.

However, this accomplishment brought me no satisfaction. Instead, I struggled to maintain the façade as I feared an inevitable eruption. My training towards apathy left me drained; I felt truly hollow, convinced that the years ahead would be a continuous descent into emptiness.

Slowly I have begun to loosen my iron grip on my emotions as I recognized all that has been lost to the deliberately dulled experiences and the self-imposed constraints. Shedding this armor, while high risk, was the key to stepping into my true self. 

The lingering remnants of self-imposed isolation and excessive resilience are still present within me but I have made it my new mission to reclaim my superpower of emotional authenticity.