“You’ll face this in your life someday,” Jacqueline Woodson writes in Brown Girl Dreaming. “A moment when you walk into a room and / no one there is like you.”

She doesn’t know this is your reality in every room: for school, for play, even when you sleep. 

“It’ll be scary sometimes,” she continues. And for you, it is. But you live there, so you don’t recognize the low-level thrum of adrenaline in your veins as fear. 

But there is good news. 

You’ll face this in your life someday, too. A moment when you walk into a room and everyone there is like you. And after almost 40 years, it will finally feel like coming home. 

You haven’t yet begun to wonder, to question the hegemony of your adoptive parents as saviors or consider what you need and need not be grateful for. 

Many moons, years, and even decades will pass, but rest assured that one day you will find places and spaces, cities, whole countries, and continents where you belong. 

Just rest. 

Where and when you can, although the suppressed memories of what happened to you in that house and before you got there keep you in a constant state of fight-flight-freeze.

Rest. Safety. Protection. Nurturance. All of these are your birthright. 

Existence—however unlikely—is your birthright, too. 

—————–

It will take a lot of letting go to get there. 

Rolf Gates, also a transracial adoptee, whose Korean sister did not survive the vagaries of a life that began like ours, writes in Meditations from the Mat: “To begin, we let go. We let go of our thoughts, our old scripts, our expectations, our darkness. The solution is not to fight but to let go.” 

In time you will try. 

But first you will have to fight. For your life. For survival. 

Be tough and willful, planful and precise. 

Because on your hero’s journey, the path through the wilderness—out of your childhood home, away from your small town, to a place where you control your own destiny—stands very narrow indeed. 

But one misty morning, eyes flooded with emotion and to your own disbelief, you will make it home. 

Touch down in the country that birthed you. Stand before the place—number, neighborhood, street—where you were born, slid into the world, flesh from flesh, and say to yourself for the first time: 

“I am a person. I was born.” 

Or perhaps it’s just the first time you’ll believe it. 

———–

You will find sisters and brothers of your heart who have been walking parallel paths unknown to you.

You will find cousins—second, third, and even first who will help you understand the inherited bonds of blood, family, kinship, and love.

I know right now you feel like Jenny Heijun Wells writes in Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related: “I sleep like that so I’m anchored down, tethered, so I don’t float away in the night.” 

But one day not so long from now, you will have roots so deep and wide they wrap around the center of the earth and intertwine with people and places all over the world. Like some colossal pando, where you exchange all the things you need: love, support, pictures, Grubhub gift cards, and other nutrients to keep growing. 

Your sphere of influence and connection will reach far beyond your perch in the backyard tree, your hiding place behind the tool shed, in your bedroom with the door that does not lock. 

One day, when you feel the pain of separation from those you love—known and unknown—you will find just-right ways to hold yourself, with bolsters, blocks, and blankets, aware that you were not held enough. 

Your adoptive mom trained you, as a doubly displaced infant of 6 months old, to “console” yourself using a “lovey” blanket. “Satin binding is a must!” she wrote to the adoption agency.

But you will learn you don’t always have to self-soothe. When your sobs wake neighbors or you cry crumpled on the kitchen floor, you will be cradled, comforted, met with softness, allowed to grieve. You will find those who want to lay down on cold tile next to you. 

Who nurture you, care for you, hold you, hug you, pat your back, listen to you, or loan you their favorite stuffy for the night, saying, “I think you need this more than I do, Mom.”

Who make you miyeok guk—birthday soup—just because you say you’ve never tried it. 

Who laugh with you, cry with you, believe in you. 

See you so clearly you will one day begin to see yourself.

No longer be surprised, confused, dismayed, or dissociated by what you see in the mirror, but instead recognize yourself. Smiling. Proud. 

Eyes open, you’ll begin to see the hundred parallel lives you might have lived if one thing had been different. And find that through events both in and out of your control you have already chosen one. 

Be brave, precious heart. 

For even as you mourn for everything adoption took from you, you’ll know by then that you can only live your life going forward. That trying to change the past has never worked. 

Except in the magical alchemy that is remembering, recollecting, writing.

So you will.

Remember. Recollect. Write.   

Use words and phrases, punctuation and imagination, forgiveness, hope, and grace to craft infinite possibilities out of exactly what is.