Once published, Facebook, SubStack, Reddit, a memoir even; be prepared to discover that what you thought was testimony, has been issued without your knowledge as a map. People will arrive carrying your words folded in their pockets and expect them to contain roads you never travelled. Some will insist the hill wasn’t as steep as you described it. Others will have found no hill there at all. One will accuse you of leaving out the bridge. Another of inventing the ravine. Someone who came by an entirely different route will announce, with considerable confidence, that your compass is broken.

You may point out that you never claimed to be drawing the whole country. I’ve found this will not always help. There’s a peculiar expectation placed upon anyone who describes difficult terrain from the inside. Accuracy about one place is easily mistaken for a claim upon every place. A sentence beginning I found is too easily answered with I didn’t, as though failing to encounter the same mountain meant it wasn’t there. A scar becomes an atlas. A memory acquires borders. Before long you may find yourself being held responsible for the geography of strangers.

Resist the promotion.

Write down where you lost the path. Write down what the weather did when you were there. Say where the ground held and where it gave way beneath you. Record what frightened you, what fooled you, what you mistook for shelter and what, unexpectedly, became it. Put a cairn where you needed one and found none. But leave the edges unfinished. Because there will also be people who know the country before you’ve finished describing it. They’ll recognise a bend you believed belonged only to you. They will know the particular silence of a place you thought had no name. A sentence will catch against something buried in them and, for a moment, they may experience the extraordinary relief of discovering that their private geography is not entirely private.

They may say, Yes.

There.

I’ve been there too.

This doesn’t make you their cartographer, nor does it mean your journeys were the same. It means only that human beings sometimes reach the same clearing by different paths. One person describing what they can see allows another, standing a long way off, to recognise the trees. That’s enough.

There will be those for whom your map is useless. Let it be useless. There will be those who turn it upside down, those who object to the scale, those who prefer the official version with its clean roads and reassuring legend. Let them have that map. Your obligation is smaller and harder.

Don’t move the mountain because somebody else didn’t encounter it or erase the river because someone crossed in summer, and don’t build a bridge because some would prefer there to have been one.

Also, and this is important, don’t mistake the number of people who recognise your country for evidence that you have become responsible for theirs. Write what happened and what it meant, then and now, then put down your pencil.

A witness may leave markers, but the walking remains our own.

Jonathan

The Narrative Witness — somewhere to write, someone to hear, something to hold.
We the Unkept — my first book, available to pre-order.

My essay inspiration…

“…to write a guidebook is to poke out a neck as scapegoat...On your head will fall the imprecations of parties who wander in circles because they did not find the entrance of the track you so concisely described. Your directions were dehydrated, as it were, and those who came after did not reconstitute your stew with care. So be willing to take blame and to lose tail feathers. It will be natural for any unfortunates coming down the wrong bank of a river or the difficult side of an icefall to curse the absent chronicler. Do they lose an hour in the scrub or skin on the ridge, find impasse on the glacier or defeat on the skyline, mislay a hut in the dark or a toothbrush in the mist, it will be on your careless summary so fluently compiled.”

John Pascoe in the 1956 edition of his guidebook The Southern Alps: from the Kaikouras to the Rangitata

Maybe that sounds absurd, even offensive, to anyone who has spent years in AA, NA, rehab or therapy working to separate the drinking or the using from the origin story. It’s easy to draw a straight line between relinquishment and relapse, to package pain into a neat causal chain: separated, therefore broken, therefore addict.

I recently stumbled across a Facebook reel titled The Nature of Addiction, credited to Alan Watts, though the framing sounded closer to Gabor Maté than to anything I recognised of Watts, and I’ve since learned to treat attribution on that platform as decorative. Whoever said it first, the idea stayed with me:

It made me think about the relationship between adoption and addiction. Many adoptees are familiar with the regularity with which substance misuse coexists with adoption, in academic journals and, in some cases, in our lived experience. Not always as addiction, but as behaviour nonetheless. Five years ago I watched Paul Sunderland’s lecture Adoption & Addiction, and it was the first time in my life I felt seen, the first time I could name as trauma something that had never had a name. It wasn’t the addiction part that made room for my sense of self. It was that trauma became a plausible explanation for my why.

I’ve touched on this before, but usually no more than a cursory mention, as opposed to a “hold my coat, I’m going in”. I don’t want to write “adoption causes addiction,” and I don’t think addiction explains the adoptee experience. I want to take the movement of that quote and turn the lens slightly, asking what the same behaviour might look like from inside an adoptee, where the first experience of relationship involved relinquishment, separation, displacement, or at the very least an unresolved question of belonging.

What if, for some adoptees, we stopped asking why they are disproportionately drawn towards substances, compulsions or oblivion, and asked what unbearable thing those behaviours are attempting to regulate, silence, replace, recover, or briefly resolve?

That’s the juxtaposition. No credential is attached to any of this, and no clinical experience of any kind. It’s a point of view, and you should take it for what it is.

There is a familiar way of looking at the addicted adoptee through a very narrow lens. Attachment disorder. Developmental trauma. Poor bonding. Someone who couldn’t form secure connections because their first connection was severed. Someone who needs to be fixed, medicated, taught how to trust. The whole approach is terribly mechanical: you are a broken attachment system in need of repair.

I think that misses something. What we call addiction in the adoptee may not be simply the fallout of relinquishment. It might be closer to a spiritual crisis wearing the clothes of an origin story. Something in the person is in revolt against the terms of the separation, is reaching for a return to unity, for the dissolution of the idea that we could ever really be apart from where we came from. And when that unity can’t be found through conventional means, through the families that raised us, through the identities we were given, through the grateful narratives we were asked to perform, the seeking can become desperate, chaotic, self-destructive.

Perhaps some of us are attempting to reproduce the original union through chemistry. Searching for the first body in a bottle, in a pill, in a powder. Not because we’re damaged, but because somewhere deep inside, something in us remembers.

I’m not making a claim about foetal cognition, and I don’t know what memory is made of. But there was a time when we were not separate, when food and breath and warmth came from another body, when belonging wasn’t something to be earned or performed. I guess, what, if anything, survives that transition in us is the question.

And measured against it, ordinary consciousness, ordinary reality, ordinary life as we’ve constructed it, where children can be separated from their source and expected to be grateful, where love is conditional on adaptation, where an original face is replaced by a chosen story, is simply not enough.

The longing, I think, is sacred. It’s the method that fails. The substance is a false prophet. It promises the return. It offers a glimpse of that original unity, that oceanic dissolution of self into other, that absolute safety where the question of belonging doesn’t arise because there is no other to belong to. And then it takes it back, leaving you more isolated than before, with the particular grief of someone who has touched reunion and found it was only chemical.

That’s the whole con, and it’s worth being precise about it, because everything else I want to say depends on it. The glimpse is real. The reunion isn’t. Nothing in the bottle was ever going to deliver what the longing is actually asking for, and it never becomes truer with repetition. Every return costs more and gives back less.

There’s a hunger at the core of this that I think is often misread. It gets diagnosed as attachment trauma. It gets written up as fear of abandonment. It gets described as a craving for biological connection, which is part of the story but not, I suspect, the whole of it.

Some adoptees have been told they lack object constancy, that they’re stuck in the oral stage, that if they would only process the grief, only understand the trauma, they could stop. They could become one of those people who has a drink and walks away. Who can take it or leave it.

But the hunger may not be pathology at all. It may be something in you refusing to accept the terms of your separation. You’re not craving the substance. You’re craving the end of exile, the experience of coming home, not to the house you grew up in, but to the first body, the first heartbeat, the first voice.

Perhaps the addicted adoptee can sometimes look less like a failure than a mystic who’s forgotten which door they came in through. For a few hours, sometimes minutes, the walls come down. The adopted self goes quiet. You feel whole, as if the severance never happened. And then it ends, and you’re back in the ordinary arrangement, where you are someone’s child by choice rather than by blood, where you are loved but not from the beginning, where you fit but never quite fill the space. So you reach again. Not because you’re chasing pleasure, but because you’ve tasted something you can’t forget.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of what comes next that I don’t believe and won’t write.

It’s often said that the false self must die before the true self can emerge, and addiction does dismantle a person: the career, the relationships, the self-image, the pride, the certainty about who you are and what you’re capable of. For some adoptees it can feel like a second erasure. Something of the first continuity was lost already: a body, perhaps a name, certainly a possible life. We were emptied out and given a new story, a new set of expectations, and we built a self on top of that emptiness. A grateful self. An adapted self. One that didn’t ask too many questions and knew better than to reach for what was gone.

But I don’t think addiction is doing that work on our behalf. It isn’t a stripping away of the inessential, and it isn’t grace arriving in disguise. It takes the masks and it takes everything else too, and it has no interest in what’s underneath. People do sometimes come through it changed, and something real can be waiting on the other side, but they come through it despite the addiction, usually with a great deal of help, and many people don’t come through it at all. The destruction is not the mechanism of the return. It’s the thing the return has to be salvaged from.

What I do believe is that the longing survives it. That the part of you which refused the separation is the same part that eventually gets you to the room, the meeting, the phone call, the first honest sentence. It was never the enemy. It was only ever badly fed.

The first time you were emptied, someone else decided what would fill you. The second time, you get some say in it. Not through the using, but on the far side of it, in the slow and unglamorous business of finding out what remains when the adopted performance ends.

I also need to say, honestly, that my frame has a flaw, and it’s the same flaw I’ve accused the ‘damage narrative’ of having. It tries to explain too much. It accommodates the adoptee who never touched a drink, the addict who was never relinquished, the person who gets sober in exactly the rooms whose language I’ve been arguing past. Nothing contradicts it, which means it isn’t really an argument, as it’s non-falsifiable. It’s not a theory of addiction but a
phenomenology of longing.

I’m not saying: “This is why adoptees become addicted.” I’m saying: “For an adoptee who experiences addiction in this way, does this account reveal something the diagnostic account doesn’t?”

It’s a way of holding an experience. Because a story that can’t be wrong is its own kind of trap, and I’d rather call it out than pretend I’ve escaped it.

So take it as one lens among several. Keep the attachment research; it’s good, and it’s useful. Keep the meeting. Keep whatever is working.

But when the diagnostic account leaves you feeling like a fault to be corrected, it may be worth considering that the reaching itself was never the problem. That you were not cursed, and not wired wrong, but perhaps still carrying something nobody had helped you understand.

Maybe the reaching was never proof that something in us was broken. Perhaps, sometimes, it was evidence that something remained unresolved. We fed the reaching with whatever would make it quiet. Recovery may begin when we stop asking it to be quiet long enough to find out what it’s been trying to say.

I’ll end with the same reminder I began with: I’m no expert in these matters. I left school without qualifications and possess no certificate in any ology. My proposed “solution” may itself be an interpretive story rather than an objective truth.

I write what I think. I offer a perspective, not a universal claim, and certainly no certainty that outruns the insight. Just my voice, my words, and a willingness to let them land where they may.

Jonathan

The Narrative Witness

I’ve never written it all down.
I wouldn’t have the think.
I’ve thought about it all in fragments.
To not think about it whole.

It unravelled episodically, not cataclysmically.
Easier to hide and bury small dead things than the entire corpus.
The spade and the pen agreed: take it in pieces or not at all.
The words made easier to swallow, with tears falling inward, a chokeful at a time.

A thousand cuts, and not one of them the one that did it.
A death of who I once was, and who others saw me as.
Theirs a rejection, mine a withdrawal.
The result, though, just the same.
Parts of me were killed before I was ready to die.

Rebirth wasn’t a choice.
More an imperative of survival.
I don’t have to like this version of me.
I just have to live with it to live.
Sticks and stones may break my bones.
Words will actually kill me.

I have to believe there’s a purpose to this.
A responsibility, even.
I hope there is.
Or at least die trying to find one.

From dying without something to live for.
To living for something to die for.

From no hope.
To know hope.

Give purpose, purpose.
Be kind each day.


Jonathan

We, the undersigned, being surveyors without territories, navigators without seas, and scholars of coastlines that no tide has ever touched, do hereby constitute ourselves a learned Society, dedicated to the patient and rigorous mapping of places that do not exist. We hold that a map is not a record of the world but an argument about it; and that an argument, once drawn beautifully enough, deserves its own latitude.

Every member shall maintain at least one imaginary country in a state of good cartographic repair. Its rivers shall obey gravity, its mountain ranges shall respect the logic of colliding plates, and its place names shall be pronounceable by at least two other members after a single glass of madeira. Whimsy is welcome; sloppiness is not. We are dreamers, but we are dreamers with theodolites.

No member shall claim that their territory is real. The Society has lost too many good cartographers to the border between invention and delusion, a border which, unlike those we draw, is regrettably unmapped. Expeditions into one’s own atlas are encouraged; permanent residence is grounds for a stern letter.

All discoveries shall be lodged with the Archive: the first sighting of a coast, the naming of a strait, the sound a fictional wind makes through an invented pass. The Archive asks not whether a place is true, only whether it is convincing, whether a sailor, shown the chart by candlelight, would check the horizon twice.

Signed


We The Adoptees


Reader Notes

When we are forced to navigate the world without an inherited map of our origins, we inevitably have to become our own cartographers. I wrote this piece to capture what it feels like to construct a sense of home, identity, and lineage from scratch.

Here are a few notes on the core themes behind the Charter to keep in mind as you read:

The Metaphor of the Unmapped Coast: For many adoptees, the sense of origin is a place that exists only in the imagination. We naturally wonder about the alternate routes our lives could have taken, imagining a hypothetical birth family or an unlived heritage. Framing this longing as the work of a “learned Society” is a way to treat that internal search with dignity, structure, and purpose, rather than treating it as a deficit.

Dreamers with Theodolites: This is the heart of the argument. A theodolite is an instrument of precision, mathematics, and geometry. If we must build our own chosen identities and personal mythologies, we should do so with rigor, intellect, and self-respect. Exploring who we might have been is not just passive daydreaming; it is active, careful emotional labor. Whimsy has its place, but our internal worlds deserve structure and care.

The Danger of Permanent Residence: There is a crucial boundary explored in the third paragraph. While it is healthy and natural to take expeditions into our “imaginary countries” and explore the endless “what ifs,” becoming permanently trapped in a fantasy of what should have been can be destructive. We have to recognize these alternate maps as tools for healing, self-discovery, and art, while remembering to step back across the border to live in the real world.

The Value of Emotional Truth: The final mention of the Archive speaks to validation and empathy. A constructed identity, a chosen family, or a self-made sense of belonging might lack the literal, geographic truth of biological inheritance. However, if it carries profound emotional truth, and if it is built with enough love and care to make another person pause and “check the horizon twice,” then it is authentic. It is a reality worthy of being recorded, honored, and shared.

Jonathan

Adoption has rarely afforded me that certainty.

The same word can mean comfort to one adoptee and injury to another. Chosen. Mother. Family. Lucky. Reunion. Home. We use the same language and don’t always mean the same thing.

So this isn’t the Adoptee Dictionary. There could never be one. It’s an incomplete lexicon of words that become less ordinary when adoption enters them.

Definitions vary by speaker. They always have.

abandonment /əˈbændənmənt/

noun

The fear that a departure is permanent. The act of being left behind. A word frequently avoided in polite adoption discourse, often replaced with softer syllables.

See also: relinquishment, loss, unkept.

ache /eɪk/

noun; verb

A continuous dull pain. A longing without a clear object, present since before memory. Something the body feels for a person the mind cannot picture.

See also: yearning, grief, loss.

adaptive calibration /əˈdæptɪv ˌkælɪˈbreɪʃən/

noun

The biological and psychological process by which an organism adjusts its stress response system to its environment. For some adoptees: an early, invisible recalibration to threat or unpredictable care, operating long after the environment has changed.

See also: hypervigilance, trauma, survival.

adoptee /ˌadɒpˈtiː/

noun

A person who was adopted. In infant adoption, the one party who did not sign, speak, negotiate or choose; and the one who lives inside it longest.

See also: adoption, relinquishment, witness.

adoption /əˈdɒpʃən/

noun

The legal creation of one family relationship following the alteration or extinguishment of another. The making of a family. The unmaking of a family. Rescue. Loss. Neither. Both.

Usage: Definition varies by speaker.

See also: family, loss, love, relinquishment, choice, best.

amended /əˈmɛndɪd/

adjective

Modified for the sake of legality or convenience. In paperwork, the official erasure of one truth to accommodate another.

See also: certificate, record, history, truth.

ancestry /ˈansɛstri/

noun

One’s family or ethnic descent. A line of people reaching back through time, occasionally interrupted by a sealed door. Information now available for the price of a saliva sample and a willingness to be surprised.

See also: DNA, origin, roots, ghost.

attachment /əˈtætʃmənt/

noun

An emotional bond between people. A biological imperative sometimes interrupted by bureaucracy, circumstance, or tragedy. A metric by which adoptees are frequently measured by professionals.

See also: love, family, forever, normal.

belonging /bɪˈlɒŋɪŋ/

noun

The condition of being somewhere without having to explain why you are there. The feeling of being claimed without feeling owned. Recognition without introduction.

Synonyms: home, kinship, ease. Antonyms: exile, placement.

See also: family, home, recognition.

best /bɛst/

adjective

As in best interests. A judgment concerning the future of a child, generally made while the child is too young to contribute evidence.

See also: choice, protection, forever.

birth /bəːθ/

noun

A beginning. For some, the first separation.

Usage: May simultaneously denote arrival and departure.

See also: birthday, mother, origin.

birthday /ˈbəːθdeɪ/

noun

The annual commemoration of one’s arrival in the world. For some, also the anniversary of somebody leaving it with empty arms.

See also: birth, loss, mother, trigger.

blank /blæŋk/

adjective; noun

As an adjective: Empty; void of markings. As a noun: A state of being presumed by those who view a child as a fresh start.

Usage: A child is never actually blank; they simply carry text others cannot yet read.

See also: story, history, identity.

blood /blʌd/

noun

The fluid that circulates in the principal vascular system. A biological tie frequently declared to be thicker than water by those who have never had to choose between the two. A biological tie frequently declared irrelevant by those who already possess it.

See also: kin, family, resemblance.

certificate /səˈtɪfɪkət/

noun

An official document attesting to a fact. In adoption, a document that may attest to a legal reality by fictionalizing a biological one.

See also: amended, record, origin.

choice /tʃɔɪs/

noun

The freedom to select between possibilities. In adoption, a word requiring an immediate supplementary question: Whose?

See also: chosen, relinquishment, consent, poverty.

chosen /ˈtʃəʊzən/

adjective

Selected with particular care or affection. A description of adoption frequently offered to children as reassurance. A word whose comfort may depend upon not asking who made the choice.

Related forms: choice.

Usage note: Beloved by some adoptees; rejected by others.

See also: lucky, grateful, wanted.

closed /kləʊzd/

adjective

Not open. Of an adoption: sealed by design, records withheld, contact foreclosed. A door locked from the one side the child was not standing on.

See also: open, record, secret, privacy.

closure /ˈkləʊʒə/

noun

A sense of resolution following loss or uncertainty. Something frequently recommended by people whose own origins are not under investigation.

See also: search, reunion, healing.

coincidence /kəʊˈɪnsɪdəns/

noun

A remarkable concurrence of events without apparent causal connection. The official name assigned to a resemblance one is not permitted to investigate.

See also: resemblance, recognition, stranger.

complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) /ˈkɒmplɛks pəʊst trɔːˈmætɪk strɛs dɪsˈɔːdə/

noun

A condition arising from prolonged, repeated interpersonal trauma where escape is difficult or impossible. For some adoptees: the nervous system’s lingering memory of pre-verbal rupture, unpredictable safety, or enforced adaptation. Not an illness of weakness, but an ancient architecture of survival.

See also: trauma, hypervigilance, dissociation, healing.

consent /kənˈsɛnt/

noun; verb

Permission for something to happen. In relinquishment, a signature whose freeness becomes difficult to audit years later. Rarely sought from the smallest person present.

See also: choice, relinquishment, best.

contact /ˈkɒntakt/

noun

Communication or connection between people. In adoption, a privilege granted, measured, restricted or withdrawn - the terms set by adults.

See also: open, reunion, wait.

debt /dɛt/

noun

A sum of money that is owed or due. A feeling of obligation for having been saved, raised, or chosen. A ledger kept entirely in the mind, often impossible to balance.

See also: grateful, lucky, loyalty.

déjà vu /ˌdeɪʒɑː ˈvuː/

noun

The sensation of having previously experienced a present situation. The ordinary adoptee condition of recognising what one has never been shown.

See also: recognition, ghost, return.

dissociation /dɪˌsəʊʃɪˈeɪʃən/

noun

A mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity. An emergency exit built into the mind when physical escape from overwhelming loss or confusion is impossible.

Usage: Highly functional in childhood; exhausting in adulthood.

See also: fog, masking, trauma, whole.

DNA /ˌdiːɛnˈeɪ/

noun

The molecule carrying the instructions for a life. A modern oracle. The sealed record biology declined to seal. The reason strangers now arrive by post.

See also: ancestry, match, resemblance, search.

echo /ɛkəʊ/

noun

A sound reflected back toward its source. A gesture, feature or temper that returns unbidden from an ancestor one never met.

See also: resemblance, ghost, inheritance.

erasure /ɪˈreɪʒə/

noun

The removal of something written. The administrative process by which one history is unwritten so that another may be filed in its place.

See also: amended, paperwork, record, blank.

ethnicity /ɛθˈnɪsɪti/

noun

Belonging to a group with a shared cultural or national tradition. A heritage one may be raised outside of, then later asked to explain.

See also: heritage, transracial, roots, identity.

family /famɪli/

noun

The people from whom you come. The people to whom you go. The people who raise you. The people who resemble you. The people you choose. The people who choose you. These definitions may refer to the same people. They may not.

See also: kin, home, stranger, love.

father /ˈfɑːðə/

noun

A man whose relationship to a child may be biological, legal, social, remembered, unknown, absent, discovered or some combination thereof.

See also: mother, parent, stranger.

flinch /flɪntʃ/

noun; verb

A small, involuntary movement in response to fear or pain. The body’s honest answer to a raised voice, a slammed door, a sudden goodbye.

See also: hypervigilance, trigger, adaptive calibration.

fog /fɒɡ/

noun

A thick cloud of tiny water droplets restricting visibility. A period of time, sometimes lasting years or decades, during which the adopted person views their experience entirely through the lens provided by others. The state preceding clarity, often followed by grief.

See also: truth, story, dissociation.

forever /fəˈrɛvə/

adverb; adjective

For all future time. A common word in adoption language. Law, biology, memory and attachment maintain separate definitions.

See also: family, belonging, permanence.

foster care /ˈfɒstə kɛː/

noun

A system of temporary family care for a child. A waiting room furnished to resemble a home. Temporary, occasionally for the length of a childhood.

See also: placement, wait, forever, belonging.

found /faʊnd/

adjective

Located after having been lost or searched for. Not necessarily restored.

See also: search, reunion, recognition.

foundling /ˈfaʊndlɪŋ/

noun

An infant abandoned and later discovered by strangers. A word from an older, blunter vocabulary.

See also: found, orphan, origin, abandonment.

ghost /ɡəʊst/

noun

An apparition of a dead person. The version of oneself that would have existed had the trajectory not been altered. The shadowy presence of unknown ancestors, unlived lives, and missing relatives.

See also: identity, return, origin.

gotcha day /ˈɡɒtʃə deɪ/

noun

An annual celebration of the day a child arrived in their adoptive family. A festivity that records the moment from one direction only.

Usage: Cherished in some households; quietly endured by some of their children.

See also: birthday, chosen, grateful, loss.

grateful /ˈɡreɪtfəl/

adjective

Feeling or expressing appreciation. In some adoption narratives, an obligation confused with belonging. A perfectly ordinary emotion until prescribed.

Antonym: ungrateful, often incorrectly applied to anger, curiosity, or grief.

See also: lucky, chosen, love.

grief /ɡriːf/

noun

Keen mental suffering or distress over loss. In adoption, a sorrow that is uniquely complicated by the fact that the person being mourned is often still alive. An emotion frequently misdiagnosed as ingratitude.

See also: loss, relinquishment, birth, healing.

half-sibling /hɑːf ˈsɪblɪŋ/

noun

A brother or sister with whom one shares a single parent. A fraction invented by paperwork; rarely experienced as one.

See also: sibling, kept, blood, kin.

healing /ˈhiːlɪŋ/

noun

The process of becoming able to live with what happened. Not synonymous with forgetting. Not necessarily synonymous with forgiveness. Not evidence that the wound was imaginary.

See also: scar, grief, acceptance.

heritage /ˈhɛrɪtɪdʒ/

noun

Property, tradition or culture handed down through generations. An inheritance one may be told about rather than raised within.

See also: ethnicity, roots, inheritance, origin.

history /ˈhɪstəri/

noun

What happened. What was recorded as having happened. What one was told happened. These entries are not always identical.

See also: record, truth, story.

home /həʊm/

noun

The place where one lives. The place where one belongs. The place from which one came. A place one may spend a lifetime trying to distinguish from the other three.

See also: belonging, family, return.

hypervigilance /ˌhaɪpəˈvɪdʒɪləns/

noun

A state of heightened sensory sensitivity and continuous scanning of the environment for threat. The instinct to read a room before entering it, measuring micro-expressions for signs of imminent withdrawal. Exhausting work performed quietly by a child who learned early that peace is conditional.

See also: adaptive calibration, cptsd, belonging.

identity /aɪˈdɛntɪti/

noun

The answer to the question Who am I? Complicated when several people supplied answers before you were old enough to ask.

See also: name, origin, story, recognition.

inheritance /ɪnˈhɛrɪtəns/

noun

Property or characteristics received from those who came before. Everything passed down by people one may never be permitted to name: a jawline, a talent, a risk, a disease.

See also: DNA, medical history, resemblance, blood.

kept /kɛpt/

adjective

Retained. Continued to be held, raised, protected or cared for. An ordinary word until applied to siblings.

See also: unkept, sibling, why.

kin /kɪn/

noun

People related by blood, law, culture, affection, memory or recognition. The order of precedence remains disputed.

See also: family, belonging, resemblance.

limbo /limbo/

noun

An uncertain period of awaiting a decision. The condition of belonging fully to no file, no family, no country.

See also: wait, placement, belonging, home.

loss /lɒs/

noun

The fact or process of losing something or someone. In adoption, the foundational event upon which an entire new life is constructed. The missing floorboard beneath a carpet.

See also: birth, relinquishment, grief, unkept.

love /lʌv/

noun; verb

A profound attachment to another person. Capable of being entirely real while coexisting with grief, rupture, anger, contradiction and harm.

Usage: Evidence of love does not automatically disprove evidence of loss.

See also: family, grief, loyalty.

loyalty /ˈlɔɪəlti/

noun

A strong feeling of support or allegiance. A tug-of-war played on a field of affection. The quiet fear that loving one family requires betraying another.

See also: love, family, debt.

lucky /ˈlʌki/

adjective

Having benefited from favourable circumstances. A word frequently assigned to an adoptee before they have offered an assessment of the circumstances.

See also: grateful, chosen.

masking /ˈmɑːskɪŋ/

noun

The act of concealing one’s internal distress, trauma, or authentic self to conform to environmental expectations. The performance of the good child, crafted to ensure safety and prevent further rupture.

See also: grateful, chosen, identity, dissociation.

match /matʃ/

noun; verb

A person or thing that corresponds to another. In DNA testing, a stranger the database insists is family. A percentage attached to a name attached to a face.

See also: DNA, search, stranger, resemblance.

medical history /ˈmɛdɪkl ˈhɪstəri/

noun

A record of a person’s past health, consulted to predict their future. A form handed to someone who cannot complete it. The question at the appointment that ends the appointment.

See also: record, inheritance, blank, origin.

mirror /ˈmɪrə/

noun

A reflective surface. An object that shows an adoptee their own face without explaining where it came from. A tool completely useless for answering the question: Who do I look like?

See also: resemblance, recognition, identity.

mother /ˈmʌðə/

noun

A woman in relation to her child. A woman who gives birth to a child. A woman who raises a child. A stranger, for all intents and purposes. Definitions may describe one woman, several women, or no woman the speaker knows.

Usage note: In some editions, mother occurs only as a noun. The verb is absent.

See also: birth, stranger, search, recognition.

name /neɪm/

noun

A word by which a person is known. May be given, removed, replaced, inherited, recovered, rejected, reclaimed or carried simultaneously with another.

See also: identity, record, origin.

namesake /ˈneɪmseɪk/

noun

A person named after another. A quiet question for one named after nobody they were permitted to know.

See also: name, identity, origin.

nature /ˈneɪtʃə/

noun

The innate character a person is born with. One half of a debate frequently conducted over an adoptee’s head.

See also: nurture, inheritance, identity.

non-identifying information /nɒn aɪˈdɛntɪfaɪɪŋ ˌɪnfəˈmeɪʃən/

noun

Details about one’s origins released with every identity removed. A biography with all the names cut out. A mother reduced to a height, an age, and the weather on a particular Tuesday.

See also: record, privacy, secret, origin.

normal /ˈnɔːməl/

adjective

Conforming to a standard or expected pattern. See manufacturer’s instructions.

See also: family.

nurture /ˈnəːtʃə/

noun; verb

The care and encouragement given during growth. The other half of the debate; the half more easily photographed.

See also: nature, parent, love.

open /ˈəʊpən/

adjective

Not closed. Of an adoption: permitting some continued contact or knowledge between families. A door left ajar, its width negotiated by adults.

See also: closed, contact, record.

origin /ˈɒrɪdʒɪn/

noun

The point at which something begins. In a person, apparently simple information until access to it becomes conditional.

See also: birth, identity, record, privacy.

orphan /ˈɔːfən/

noun

A child whose parents are dead. A legal status sometimes applied to a child whose parents are living. A word with a distinct literary romance, rarely matching the administrative reality.

See also: relinquishment, truth, record.

paperwork /ˈpeɪpəwəːk/

noun

Routine clerical or administrative work. The alchemy by which biology is erased and law is written. A pile of forms that can hold a person’s entire past hostage.

See also: record, privacy, amended.

parent /ˈpɛərənt/

noun; verb

As a noun: A person legally, biologically or socially related to a child in a parental capacity. As a verb: To nurture, protect, guide and raise. The noun and verb do not always arrive together.

See also: mother, father, love.

placement /ˈpleɪsmənt/

noun

The act of finding a home or position for someone. A word for a child’s arrival that sounds like a word for furniture.

See also: belonging, foster care, home, best.

primal wound /ˈpraɪml wuːnd/

noun

A theory that separation from the birth mother inflicts a lasting, pre-verbal injury. A phrase that hands some adoptees language for the first time. A phrase other adoptees set down again.

Usage: As ever, definition varies by speaker.

See also: trauma, birth, adaptive calibration, relinquishment.

privacy /ˈprɪvəsi/

noun

The right to keep personal information from others. In adoption, a right whose ownership can become unexpectedly difficult to determine.

See also: record, origin, truth.

question /ˈkwɛstʃən/

noun; verb

A sentence framed to obtain information. The one an adoptee learns not to ask at the dinner table.

See also: why, secret, story.

recognition /ˌrɛkəɡˈnɪʃən/

noun

The act of knowing someone or something because one has encountered it before. Also: The extraordinary experience of recognising something one has never previously seen. A nose. A laugh. The way someone holds a cup.

See also: resemblance, reunion, stranger.

record /ˈrɛkɔːd/

noun

An official account of facts, events or proceedings. May contain information about a person that the person themselves is not permitted to know.

See also: history, certificate, privacy, truth.

rejection /rɪˈdʒɛkʃən/

noun

The refusing or dismissing of something offered. An outcome braced for so far in advance that it is sometimes delivered, pre-emptively, by the adoptee.

See also: abandonment, reunion, hypervigilance.

relinquishment /rɪˈlɪŋkwɪʃmənt/

noun

The act of giving up possession, claim or custody. May contain love, coercion, poverty, pressure, shame, necessity, choice, absence of choice, or several of these at once.

Usage: Do not infer motive from outcome.

See also: choice, mother, loss.

resemblance /rɪˈzɛmbləns/

noun

Similarity in appearance, behaviour or manner. A trivial observation until you have lived without it.

See also: recognition, kin, identity.

return /rɪˈtəːn/

verb

To go back to a place one has previously been. In adoptee usage: To go back to somewhere you have never been.

See also: home, origin, search.

reunion /riːˈjuːnjən/

noun

The act of bringing together again those who have been separated. In adoption, occasionally the first meeting between the people being reunited.

See also: search, stranger, recognition, grief.

roots /ruːts/

noun

The part of a plant which attaches it to the ground and conveys nourishment. Family origins. Something one is often told they can grow anywhere, usually by people who have never been transplanted.

See also: origin, family, home.

scar /skɑː/

noun

A mark that remains after a wound has closed. Evidence, simultaneously, of the injury and of the survival.

See also: healing, whole, trauma.

sealed /siːld/

adjective

Closed securely, so as to prevent access. Of a record: legally shut, sometimes against the wishes of the very person it describes.

See also: record, vault, closed, privacy.

search /səːtʃ/

verb; noun

To attempt to find someone or something. Common objects include: a mother, a father, a sibling, a medical history, a name, a face, oneself.

See also: found, reunion, identity.

secret /ˈsiːkrɪt/

noun

Something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown. Information treated as dangerous. Information belonging to a child, held by an adult for the child’s “protection.”

See also: privacy, truth, best.

self-medication /sɛlf ˌmɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/

noun

The use of substances, behaviours, or distractions to soothe unaddressed distress or physical/emotional pain. An attempt to quiet an ancient, unnamed alarm system when language fails to describe the wound.

Usage: Frequently miscategorized as a moral failing rather than understood as an unassisted coping mechanism.

See also: substance abuse, trauma, grief, cptsd.

sibling /ˈsɪblɪŋ/

noun

A brother or sister. A person with whom one may share parents, genes, childhood, memories, resemblance, none of the above, or some arrangement not adequately covered by the available boxes.

See also: family, kept, stranger.

silence /ˈsaɪləns/

noun

The absence of sound. A method of parenting favoured in certain decades. Whatever fills the space where a story should be.

See also: secret, fog, story, truth.

story /ˈstɔːri/

noun

An account of events. In childhood, often the first explanation offered for why things are as they are. May later require revision when the protagonist gains access to the source material.

See also: history, truth, record, identity.

stranger /ˈstreɪndʒə/

noun

A person one does not know. May have your eyes.

See also: mother, father, sibling, recognition.

substance abuse /ˈsʌbstəns əˈbjuːs/

noun

The harmful or hazardous use of psychoactive substances. For some adoptees, a desperate attempt to regulate a nervous system wired for hyperarousal, abandonment, or unexpressed grief. A search for quiet inside a memory that cannot speak.

See also: self-medication, trauma, cptsd, fog.

surrender /səˈrɛndə/
noun; verb

To stop resisting because resistance can no longer be sustained.

In adoption, sometimes mistaken for relinquishment.

For some first mothers, not the act of giving away a wanted child, but the point at which coercion, pressure, shame, exhaustion or lack of power finally overcame resistance.

For some adoptees, the later act of laying down what can no longer be carried: the unanswered question, the hoped-for reunion, the demand that two incompatible truths become one.

Usage note: Surrender does not necessarily imply consent.

See also: consent, choice, relinquishment, coercion, loss, grief, acceptance.

time /taɪm/

noun

The indefinite continued progress of existence. A measure of absence. Something irrevocably lost between separation and reunion, unable to be fully recovered by apologies, paperwork, or eventual meetings.

See also: forever, history, reunion.

transracial /transˈreɪʃl/

adjective

Spanning or crossing different racial groups. Of an adoptee: raised inside a family whose mirror returns no match.

See also: mirror, resemblance, ethnicity, belonging.

trauma /ˈtrɔːmə/

noun

A deeply distressing or disturbing experience. For some adoptees: a developmental rupture occurring before language is available to name it, stored not as an explicit narrative, but as a bodily state.

See also: complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), healing, birth, adaptive calibration.

trigger /ˈtrɪɡə/

noun

A stimulus such as a smell, sound, date, or event that recalls a past trauma. A birthday, a suitcase, a filled-out medical form, an offhand remark about non-resemblance. An invisible tripwire connecting the present directly to the past.

See also: birthday, cptsd, history.

truth /truːθ/

noun

That which is in accordance with fact or reality. What remains after paperwork, memory, mythology, loyalty, silence and competing versions of love have finished negotiating.

See also: history, record, story.

unkept /ʌnˈkɛpt/

adjective

Not retained within one’s family of origin. Not synonymous with: unwanted. unloved. unworthy.

See also: kept, relinquishment, belonging.

vault /vɔːlt/

noun

A secure room for the keeping of valuables. Where a state stores a person’s beginnings; entry by permission only.

See also: record, paperwork, privacy, sealed.

wait /weɪt/

verb; noun

As a verb: To stay where one is or delay action until a particular time or event. As a noun: A state of anticipation lasting anywhere from hours to decades. Waiting for a file to open. Waiting for a letter to arrive. Waiting for a stranger to reply.

See also: search, time, closure.

wanted /ˈwɒntɪd/

adjective

Desired. Not an antonym of relinquished. Not a synonym of kept.

See also: love, chosen, unkept.

whole /həʊl/

adjective

Complete. Not synonymous with unwounded.

why /waɪ/

adverb; noun

For what reason. The question underneath all the other questions. Sometimes answered. Rarely answered enough.

witness /ˈwɪtnəs/

noun; verb

As a noun: One who sees, hears or knows by personal presence or experience. As a verb: To remain present while another person tells the truth of what happened to them without correcting the story into something easier to hear.

yearning /ˈjəːnɪŋ/

noun

An intense, persistent longing. A pull toward a place, a person, or a version of oneself not marked on any map.

Coda: Witness

abandonment is an ache.

adaptive calibration
before an adoptee
can have a name
for adoption.

amended ancestry.
blank certificate.
blood without belonging.

birth,
birthday,
choice,
chosen.

best,
but whose?

closed is not closure.
consent is not choice.
contact is not belonging.

grateful,
with debt.
lucky,
with loss.

coincidence
before DNA;
déjà vu
before recognition;
echo
before resemblance.

complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD),
dissociation,
flinch,
fog,
hypervigilance,
masking,
self-medication,
substance abuse:

trauma
with a trigger,
and silence
without story.

family is father and mother,
parent and sibling,
half-sibling and kin.

family is attachment,
love and loyalty,
grief and loss.

foster care,
placement,
limbo,
home.

foundling,
orphan,
found.

gotcha day
beside birthday.

forever
beside wait.

paperwork,
certificate,
record:

amended,
sealed,
in a vault.

privacy
with a secret.

non-identifying information
without an origin.

medical history
without history.

erasure
in a record.

truth
under privacy.

ancestry and heritage,
ethnicity and transracial,
nature and nurture,
inheritance and DNA.

mirror:

a match,
a stranger,
a resemblance,
recognition.

mother.
father.
namesake.
name.
identity.
roots.
ghost.
echo.
déjà vu.
coincidence.

normal?

nature or nurture?
kept or unkept?
chosen or wanted?
family or stranger?

search
with yearning.

wait
through time.

question
after question.

why?

open or closed.
contact or rejection.
relinquishment before reunion.
return to origin.

found,
but not closure.

loss with love.
grief with healing.
primal wound with scar.
whole,
not without trauma.

witness is story
after silence,

truth
after fog,

identity
after erasure,

whole
with scar,

love
with loss,

home
with yearning.

My dictionary begins by behaving like an instrument of authority: this word means this. But gradually it undermines its own authority. Definitions contradict one another. Cross-references loop backwards. Chosen points to choice. Family points towards both home and stranger. Whole refuses to mean unwounded. The lexicographical machinery begins breaking under the weight of my lived experience.

Then my poem arrived and abandoned definition altogether.

It takes the same vocabulary and says: perhaps meaning doesn’t live only in what these words mean. Perhaps it lives in what happens when we put them beside one another.

grateful / with debt
lucky / with loss
story / after silence
truth / after fog
whole / with scar

My dictionary tried to separate the words. My poem discovered that the truth is often between them.

Jonathan

A small invitation, before you go
If you found yourself somewhere in this lexicon, much of what sits beneath it lives in We the Unkept. It is the book I’ve been writing towards for a very long time, about relinquishment, identity, belonging, family, loss, love, and the long work of becoming the author of your own story.

It is available to pre-order now, and every person who chooses to stand beside the book this early helps make its eventual existence possible.

Pre-order We the Unkept →

The BBC recently marked a hundred years since adoption became legal in England and Wales by asking why adoptions are now at an all-time low.

“Three thousand children are waiting to be matched. Only 1,350 approved adoptive families are waiting for a child. Modern adoption: your stories?”

I read the comments.

Much of what followed was painful. Adoptive parents spoke about FASD, autism, disability, behavioural difficulties, diagnoses that took years to obtain, inadequate post-adoption support, marriages under strain, careers abandoned and families pushed well beyond what they believed they could endure.

Several made clear how much they loved their children, but the affection was often followed by a qualification. Had they known more. Had social services been more honest. Had the child’s needs been properly disclosed. Had they understood just how complex things would become. One parent said she would never recommend adoption. Another described the children’s additional needs as “surprises”. And beneath much of it I could hear something adoptees have heard in one form or another for generations:

“If only we had known what you were going to be like.”

Poor them. Seriously. Poor them. What did you think adoption was? There’s a question I apparently still have the temerity to ask. What exactly did prospective adopters imagine they were signing up for? That question isn’t about whether social workers should disclose medical history. They absolutely should. I’m just a bit over the vocal refrain from some adoptive parents demanding lifelong specialist support, not centred on the adopted child, but for them and the hard yards they’ve had to journey. Many don’t understand or acknowledge that adoption is not simply an unusual route to parenthood. It begins with a child losing a family. Of course, sometimes that separation is necessary. Remaining with a parent may be unsafe or impossible. Serious harm may already have occurred. None of that changes the basic chronology, though.

Before another family can become ours, something has already been severed. Yet the consequences of adoption are still discussed remarkably often as though someone failed to disclose a manufacturing fault. The child proves more difficult than expected. The behaviour is more complex. A diagnosis emerges years later. The birth mother drank. Records were incomplete. The social worker didn’t tell us everything. The implication doesn’t need to be spoken aloud. Had the full extent of the child’s difficulties been known, perhaps the decision would have been different. We wouldn’t be in the new family. You’d find us on the back wall, on the bottom shelf in the returns department. Imagine growing up inside that knowledge.

Relinquishment no longer belongs in the footnotes. I have read more than 1,200 firsthand accounts written by adoptees; from memoirs to blog posts, articles, posts and comments, poetry and prose. That’s not a scientific sample, and I would never pretend it is. They’re rarely in the public eye and meant largely for their peers. I accept these accounts can’t be treated as randomised evidence, but neither are they nothing. They represent more than 1,200 human beings trying to explain themselves.

The circumstances vary enormously: countries, eras, families, types of adoption, loving homes and abusive ones, successful reunions and devastating discoveries. Some writers are furious about adoption. Others remain ambivalent. Some value much of the life they were given while still struggling to understand why something described to them as wholly beautiful has never felt entirely beautiful from inside their own skin.

After reading those accounts and listening to other adoptees, examining my own life, I arrived at a conclusion that I once resisted. For many of us, relinquishment is not incidental background; it’s a gravitational event. Some hate the term relinquished, but it’s my truth. It is the core of our wound. If there are other scars, they all started here. Other experiences gather around it. Genetics may matter enormously. Prenatal conditions may matter. Abuse, neglect, poverty, institutional care and adoptive parenting can all alter the course of a life, sometimes dramatically. But I no longer accept the intellectual sleight of hand by which the one experience shared by every relinquished adoptee is repeatedly demoted because no ethical experiment could ever isolate it perfectly. Whatever language the state uses, something happened when that first connection was broken. A court can call it permanency. A file can call it placement, and an agency can call it adoption, but the nervous system doesn’t read court orders.

Concern about early separation didn’t suddenly arrive post 2001. Bowlby’s work on maternal separation dates back to the early 1950’s. Sure, his theories have been criticised, qualified and developed considerably since then, as they should have been, but society didn’t spend the intervening seventy years believing that attachment, caregiving and the disruption of early relationships were emotionally irrelevant.

Adoptee testimony has also been available for decades. We have written books, formed organisations, spoken publicly, searched for families, documented reunions, described our confusion about identity and questioned the legal fiction embedded in altered birth records. The issue was not simply that information didn’t exist. Quite often, people did not want to believe what adoptees were saying.

I suspect there was another dynamic at work too. Some adopters knew perfectly well that adoption could carry profound consequences but believed those consequences belonged mainly to badly handled adoptions or inadequate families. Their home would be different. Their love would be enough. Their child would know how deeply wanted they were. I get why that belief was attractive. But there is something deeply unsettling hidden inside it: the assumption that sufficiently good adoptive parenting can overcome relinquishment itself. Hint - it can’t. When a child later struggles despite all that love, attention turns elsewhere in search of an answer.

When the adoptee becomes the burden

This was the part of the BBC discussion I found hardest to stomach. It wasn’t the request for support. Adoptive families should have support if it’s centred on the child. It was the manner in which some children appeared inside the stories being told about them. They were complex, exhausting, disruptive. Careers had been sacrificed because of them. Marriages had collapsed. Allegations had followed. Ordinary family life had become impossible. Read enough accounts framed this way and the adopted child begins to resemble the cross a heroic parent has been asked to carry. Usually the account contains the necessary reassurance: I adore my child. I’m sure many of those parents do. But love doesn’t entitle somebody to make their own suffering the definitive account of somebody else’s life. Reverse the perspective for a moment.

Imagine an adoptee writing publicly about how exhausting their adoptive mother had been, how their father’s unresolved infertility shaped the family, how much therapy the emotional needs of the adopters eventually cost them, or how nobody had adequately warned the child what kind of adults they were going to be placed with. The adoptee would be accused of cruelty almost immediately. Yet adoptive parents can discuss children publicly as collections of diagnoses, behaviours, burdens and unintended consequences, and the discussion is often framed as courageous honesty. Something is badly wrong with the direction of the gaze.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is real. Prenatal alcohol exposure can cause serious lifelong impairment, and people affected by FASD deserve accurate diagnosis, knowledgeable care and none of the stigma that so often surrounds it. No family should spend six or ten years fighting for an assessment that could materially improve a child’s life. What really upsets me is the way FASD can function inside adoption conversations. It offers a wonderfully convenient place for others to situate the damage. Before the adoptive family entered the story and before social services took responsibility. Before the agency arranged the placement or foster care. Before legal severance, name changes, or the issuing of a new birth certificate. The injury is pushed all the way back into the womb and placed inside the mother’s body. The parcel, apparently, arrived at the shipping company already damaged. How fortunate for the shipping company.

One commenter stated confidently that the majority of adopted children end up with an FASD diagnosis. There’s no evidence I can find to support that claim. A meta-analysis involving children in care and adoption settings found an estimated prevalence of around 17 percent. That figure is high and deserves serious attention, but it is nowhere close to a majority. The issue that I’m unable to ignore, is not simply statistical exaggeration. Once FASD is allowed to become the dominant explanation, it can push everything else toward the edge of the frame. Alcohol exposure can be measured. It can be entered into medical notes. It has a diagnostic vocabulary. It has become an accepted and convenient belief masquerading as a truth. Relinquishment is more difficult to capture and more difficult to contend with. There’s no blood test for the disappearance of the only body an infant has ever known. No scan measures the loss of familiar smell, touch, voice and rhythm. We can’t place absence under a microscope. That doesn’t make absence biologically meaningless.

The apparatus was never just the government

On 2 July this year, the British government apologised for historic forced adoption. That acknowledgement matters. The Prime Minister accepted that the state bore responsibility for systems it had funded and legitimised. But an apology after decades of campaigning should not be confused with institutional courage. Survivors and adoptees had to drag much of this history into public view. And the machinery was never solely governmental.

Parliament’s own examination of historic adoption describes a network involving local authorities, medical professionals, voluntary adoption agencies, the Church of England, the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army. Mother and baby homes were operated across state, religious and charitable sectors, and testimony concerning mistreatment crossed those boundaries. These organisations didn;t merely stand beside the system while harm happened. They helped constitute it.

They housed mothers, counselled them, judged them, arranged placements, handled records and participated in the moral framework that turned unmarried pregnancy into shame and separation into a solution. The Catholic Church apologised for agencies acting in its name in 2016. The Church of England issued its own formal apology in June this year. Those apologies matter too, but none of these institutions deserves a standing ovation for eventually acknowledging truths that mothers and adoptees had spent decades trying to make audible. This shouldn’t go unsaid either: the apologies centred the mothers’, we were largely cc’d on the memo.

There’s also something worth noticing in how quickly the government separated history from the present after its apology, stressing that today’s adoption system is “fundamentally different”. Legally and procedurally, of course it is. But that doesn’t answer the more difficult question. Have we changed the underlying assumptions enough or at all?

Modern adoption (in England), largely involves children who have experienced serious adversity. Abuse, neglect, parental incapacity, violence, prenatal exposure and many other circumstances may precede adoption, and nobody should minimise these issues. But neither should the child losing the people they knew be minimised. That may mean parents, siblings, grandparents, foster carers, or several people in succession. The state alters the legal architecture of the child’s family and eventually gives permanence to another one. Sometimes it’s necessary for safety but necessary isn;t the same thing as psychologically neutral however.

A surgeon may have to amputate a limb to save somebody’s life. We don’t describe the amputation as harmless, nor would we tell the patient that grieving what was lost somehow represents ingratitude toward the surgeon. Adoption still has enormous difficulty holding that distinction.

We changed the system. Did we change the premise?

Modern adoption contains protections that didn’t exist during the forced-adoption era. Courts scrutinise placements and kinship alternatives receive greater consideration. Unmarried pregnancy is no longer treated by the state as moral contamination. Yet adoption still carries out a legal act of extraordinary magnitude. An existing family relationship is terminated and another legal lineage replaces it. An adopted person in England and Wales receives documentation that records the adoptive parents in parental roles and becomes the certificate ordinarily used as evidence of identity. We should stop treating the identity consequences of that as mysterious.

An adoptee in the BBC discussion described her second birth certificate as feeling like an ownership document. Another asked whether changing a child’s identity is necessarily the best possible expression of child welfare. One adoptee raised the existence of two birth certificates and the peculiar experience of possessing a legal document that names adoptive parents as though they had given birth. They are not theorising about what adoption might feel like; they have lived inside it, and those questions deserve something better than defensiveness.

Adult adoptees are not failed outcomes who have wandered inconveniently into a conversation about children. We are what adopted children become. Our testimony is not secondary evidence. We are the longitudinal study.

Yet adult adoptees remain remarkably easy to exclude from debates conducted in our interests. The Adoption Barometer’s 2026 survey found that only 27 percent of adult adoptees knew where they could obtain counselling, therapeutic or mental-health support attuned to their needs as adopted people, while 80 percent said peer support was, or would be, important to them. That should tell us something that we probably already know. The legal order may understand permanence, but the support system appears to think adoption has an expiry date somewhere around adulthood.

We are not evidence in somebody else’s parenting story. After a hundred years, the direction of the conversation itself needs changing. The shortage of approved adopters is not automatically the most important fact in the room. The child existed before the waiting family did. So the first questions should be about why children enter the system, how many could remain safely with relatives, what separation costs them, whether siblings are being preserved, what truthful access to identity looks like and why meaningful support so often weakens just as adoptees become old enough to interrogate what happened to them. Adoptive parents who are struggling should receive competent support so that their adopted children are helped. But that support cannot depend upon turning adopted people into pathology.

There’s something obscene about asking an adoptee to absorb an adult’s account of how much their trauma cost the family while barely pausing over what the original trauma cost the person who lived it. Likewise, biology cannot remain the final dumping ground for responsibility. A birth mother may have drunk. She may have used drugs. She may have been abusive or dangerously incapable of parenting. Those facts can be true without rendering every later consequence biologically predetermined.

The system touched the child too.

So did removal.

So did separation.

So did placement.

So did adoption.

If we’re prepared to examine everything except those things, then we’re not searching very hard for causes, we’re searching for somewhere convenient to put them.

The damage in transit

A parcel reaches its destination damaged. Investigators scrutinise the sender for damage that existed before collection, but nobody examines the journey with the same intensity. The warehouse, the transfers, the waiting, the handlers, the changes of destination and the moment the original address disappeared from the paperwork somehow escape serious scrutiny. Attention remains fixed on the parcel and the person who first sent it. Then the recipient is praised for accepting it despite the condition in which it arrived. That, in essence, is what I heard beneath too many of those comments.

The warehouse escapes inspection. So does the length of the journey, the number of times the parcel was moved, the conditions in which it waited, or what might have happened when it was separated from everything familiar to it. Nobody seems particularly interested in what it means to change the documentation, send it to another address, give it another name, and declare the journey successfully completed. Instead, everyone gathers around the damaged parcel asking what was wrong with it before it arrived. Human beings are not parcels, of course, and that’s precisely why the metaphor is offensive and useful.

Sometimes you have to make the architecture ugly enough before people can see it. A century after legal adoption began in England and Wales, we remain remarkably comfortable asking what is wrong with adopted people. I’m far more interested in asking what happened to us. Those questions may sound similar but they’re not. One leads towards diagnosis; the other leads somewhere institutions have historically been much less willing to go. Accountability. What made me increasingly upset as I read the comments was where the explanation for everything was beginning to settle. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the system disappeared from view. The adopted, pathologised child remained. Just a small child left holding a diagnosis.

What have we learnt?

Today’s children enter adoption through different legal structures, but being different from the past cannot make the present immune from examination. Otherwise, an apology becomes merely something we say about history rather than something we learn from it. If the lesson of the last hundred years amounts to little more than “adoption used to be bad, modern adoption needs more adopters,” then I’m not sure we have understood the apology at all.

Adoptive parents need more support than many currently receive. That seems beyond argument. But we should be capable of providing it without constructing the adopted child as the source of every difficulty, turning biology into destiny, allowing diagnosis to become moral explanation, or blaming a birth mother for every complexity that emerges years later.

We should also resist the convenient assumption that every wound must have occurred before the adoption system touched the child. Some may have arisen from the strange human consequence of being told that losing one family was the necessary precondition for being allowed to belong to another.

A hundred years after adoption became law, perhaps the most important question isn’t why the parcel arrived damaged. Perhaps it is why the shipping company still seems so reluctant to examine the journey.

Jonathan

This essay touches on questions I explore more deeply in my forthcoming book, We the Unkept: what relinquishment does, what adoption asks us to call normal, and what happens when the institutions responsible for separation spend generations examining the child instead of the journey.

If this piece resonated with you, We the Unkept is currently available for pre-order through The Narrative Witness:

The Narrative Witness
Pre-order We the Unkept

The long, thin fellow was always rushing around breathless. Maybe that was why he didn’t say much. I never knew him long. He belonged to the Now crowd, and I didn’t hang out there often. I may have met him there once, though I couldn’t swear to it. I’ll tell you what happened later, but there’s plenty of time for that.

I have spent so long with the yesterdays that I’ve rarely seen the Nows. I’ve noticed the tomorrows are dying. I hope I get to see them properly before they’ve all gone.

It’s just that the yesterdays keep talking. They ask questions that are far too hard. Time said I should be patient and not take to heart what they’ve said. I try, but it’s not easy with so many of them, each wanting their say. It’s hard to hear them above the noise of their contradictions, let alone the gossip they share.

There are some particularly cruel ones. You should hear what they say. I try not to believe them, but they can be a persuasive bunch.

There was a time when I locked them in the past. It’s a small cupboard, and the lock isn’t great. It only held a few, and even then not very well. They kept getting out.

Sometimes, when the weather was good, I’d find the bestest of my friends. There was Halcyon, whom I’ve known since I was a kid. We never stayed in touch over the years, and we’ve met only a few times, but boy, oh boy, did he make an impression on me. I smile just hearing his name.

And then there’s Insouciance. She’s French. I loved the way she moved. It was almost as if she were floating. She had this air about her: carefree, light of load and smiling, always smiling. She didn’t know Time well. I was always surprised by how much she got away with. I’m not sure I ever could.

I loved her joie de vivre. I still remember how to play. I just haven’t had the time.

I thought I saw her yesterday, but it was only Déjà Vu. They’re so similar, it’s easy to get mixed up.

Anyway, Time’s flying. I’d better get on.

Now, where was I?

Ah, that’s right. It’s about time I told you about the clocks.

The clocks, the clocks. Now there’s a story. Perhaps you’d like to hear it. Do you have a minute or two to spare?

Oh, you do? That’s lovely. Thank you for your time. I’ll use it well, I promise.

I mentioned at the beginning that I had always wanted to collect clocks. That isn’t strictly true. Watches were more my thing, ever since I was young, perhaps ten or eleven.

They fascinated me. They held little worlds beneath their glass, the domed sky of their existence. They kept time, that much we all know, but it was their secrets that held me most. Their rituals. Their choreographed movement. Their exquisite, dazzling beauty. Peacock blue sapphires dancing with pigeon-blood red rubies, swimming in the champagne reflections of earth-mined diamonds. Imprints of Ceylon and Burma, and the alluvial riverbeds of Golconda, a monolithic silhouette casting long shadows over India’s Deccan Plateau.

When you held a watch in your hands, it was as if you could stretch across time and generations and touch the hands of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. The very hands of genius.

But now to matters of much greater import. I’m pressed for time, and I have but little of yours. Now is not the time to while away time on fanciful instruments of time.

Clocks, then. Yes. A timely reminder.

Father Time, in his timeless manner and infinite wisdom, decreed that there was a salutary lesson I must learn. It is a quest known to those who keep time for everyone but themselves.

I say quest. It is more of a reckoning.

It falls most heavily upon those engaged in excogitation, rumination, cogitation, deliberation, speculation, contemplation and cerebration. Ours is the Quest of the Twelve Clocks.

It is a perilous journey. It can take a lifetime, and many never make it, though many have tried. Of those who have, it is said they have never known such joy. If the rumours are to be believed, they get to live in the Now. By all accounts, that is where serenity is found. Peace is there too. I heard that from Meditation, so I assume it must be true.

Anyhow, Time waits for no man.

Let me tell you about the clocks. You may recognise a few of your own.

The first clock was not difficult to find.

It found me.

I heard it long before I saw it, labouring behind the walls, a heavy, grinding thing that sounded less like the passing of time and more like something trying to drag it back. It was called The Regret Engine, though there was no name engraved upon it. Regret never needs an introduction. We recognise each other straight away.

It had only one hand, and it pointed accusingly.

I tried to turn it backwards, naturally. You would too. There were whole years I wanted another look at. Conversations I would have handled better. Doors I would have kept open, others I would have bolted shut. I wanted five minutes with the man I was before he became the man I am, just long enough to warn him.

I had a great deal to say, though I suspect he wouldn’t have listened.

I didn’t.

The clock resisted me. Every attempt to move its hand backwards pushed it further forward.

“Regret has never been known for its fairness,” he replied.

“Can’t it be stopped?”

“Oh yes.”

“How?”

“Stop feeding it.”

---

Time could be infuriating like that. He spoke in riddles and behaved as if the answer were obvious. Still, I removed my hands from the clock, and after a while, perhaps a minute, perhaps a year, the grinding softened.

It didn’t stop, not completely, but it no longer drowned out everything else.

That was enough to let me hear the sea.

The water came from the second clock, The Tide Table of Sleep, a pale, moon-faced instrument set deep into the floor. Its dial was marked not in hours but fathoms. Each night I descended, though rarely far enough. Some nights I barely broke the surface. On others I sank through shoals of old conversations and woke with seaweed in my thoughts.

I had always assumed sleep was where one went to escape Time, but apparently he owned the night shift too.

“You’re tired,” he said.

“I know.”

“No. You know that you haven’t slept. That isn’t the same thing.”

---

The Tide Table showed me all the nights I had spent trying to solve tomorrow with yesterday’s evidence. It showed me the small hours I’d mistaken for a court of appeal, calling old witnesses back to the stand and demanding that memory settle matters it could barely recall.

At the bottom of the dial was a depth I had never reached. It was marked Rest.

I asked Time how one got there.

“By ceasing to swim.”

---

I promised to consider it, which was my usual way of avoiding anything that might help.

The third clock was smaller, almost delicate. The Half-Life of a Held Breath sat beneath a glass dome, its face misted from the inside. It had no winding key. It began whenever I stopped breathing.

It started with the reading of a letter.

It started with a telephone ringing in the night.

It started in rooms where someone said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

It had been running much longer than seemed physically possible.

I watched its tiny hand tremble between the moment before and the moment after. Apparently, I had spent a great deal of my life there, waiting for the rest of the sentence.

“You can let it out,” Time said.

“What?”

“The breath.”

“I wasn’t holding it.”

---

Time looked at the clock.

The clock looked at me.

I exhaled.

Somewhere deep inside the mechanism, a tiny valve opened. The hand fell to zero.

For one perfect second, there was no before and no after.

Then, startled by the absence, I drew another breath.

The fourth clock occupied an entire room. Two chairs faced one another beneath a single hanging light. Between them stood The Distance Between, though no clock was visible until I sat down.

The second chair remained empty.

Hands appeared upon the floor, stretching from my feet towards it. One measured what had been said. The other measured everything that hadn’t.

The second was considerably longer.

I watched the empty chair change occupants. A parent sat there, then a brother, then a woman I had loved, then a child who was no longer a child. Some were gone. Some were only elsewhere. Some had been sitting across from me for years without ever coming close.

Each time I rehearsed what I should have said, the room grew larger.

Each time I imagined what they should have said, the walls moved further apart.

“Surely distance is measured between two people,” I said.

“Usually by one,” said Time.

---

I tried calling across the room. I said I was sorry. I said I was angry. I said I had missed them. I said I had needed them. I said their leaving had not proved that I was unworthy of being kept, though it had taken me an awfully long time to understand that.

The chair did not always answer. Not everyone comes back simply because we finally find the words.

But the hands upon the floor shortened.

Not all the way. Just enough that I could see the chair for what it was.

A chair.

Not a verdict.

The fifth clock was kept in a library where the books had lost their titles. The Drift of Forgotten Names moved so slowly that I first thought it had stopped. Its hand travelled through the alphabet, wearing away the letters as it passed.

I found names I had spoken every day and names I had not said aloud in decades. Names of streets, dogs, teachers and friends. Names belonging to people whose faces had begun to soften at the edges. Names once whispered in the dark and shouted from doorways. Names written in birthday cards by hands now stilled.

There was another name too, one given to me before another was written over it. It was faint but not gone. I traced its shape beneath the glass and felt something in me answer.

“What happens when a name disappears?” I asked.

“Where from?”

“Memory.”

“Memory is only one place a name can live.”

---

I wanted to ask where else, but the clock gave a quiet movement, almost a shiver, and somewhere in the library a closed book fell open.

I left before I could read it.

The sixth clock was indecently cheerful. The Chronometer of Almosts clicked and chimed each time my life nearly became another one.

Almost stayed.

Almost left.

Almost spoke.

Almost remained silent.

Almost turned left at the corner, boarded the train, answered the telephone, took the job, kissed the girl, was kept, found the courage, lost the nerve.

Each click opened a small window through which I could glimpse another life continuing without me. There I was in cities I had never lived in, growing old beside people I had never met. There were children with my eyes who had never been born, and empty rooms where the children I knew had never arrived.

Some of those lives looked happier.

Others had simply arranged their sorrow differently.

I stood before the clock for far too long, watching the infinite procession of men I might have been.

“Which one was I supposed to become?” I asked.

---

Time shrugged.

“You might at least pretend there was a plan.”

“I might,” he said, “but you’d only spend the rest of your life regretting that you hadn’t followed it.”

---

The Chronometer clicked again.

This time, the little window showed me standing exactly where I was, staring into the life I already had as though it belonged to somebody else.

I turned away before I could miss it.

The seventh clock had no hands at all. The Weather of a Mood wore clouds across its face. A storm gathered as I approached, which seemed a little judgemental, though I had to admit it was accurate.

Its barometer fell without warning. Sunlight broke through and vanished. Whole winters arrived before breakfast. Small remarks became cold fronts. A certain song could bring rain in from the west.

For years, I had mistaken this weather for geography. If sadness settled over me, I assumed I lived there. If fear blew in, I believed it had come to stay. I furnished whole houses beneath temporary skies.

Time tapped the glass.

“Weather passes.”

“Not all of it.”

“No. But even the storms that return are not continuous. You simply remember the thunder better than the clearing.”

---

I waited.

A narrow strip of blue appeared upon the dial.

It wasn’t happiness exactly. More a small permission to believe the sky remained behind the weather.

The eighth clock could only be visited at the wrong time.

Fortunately, I was an experienced caller.

The Insomniac’s Meridian stood in a kitchen at 3:17 in the morning. Every kitchen, I think, becomes the same kitchen at 3:17. A glass of water. The low hum of the refrigerator. A window offering nothing but your own reflection.

This clock ticked only when the rest of the world was asleep. It measured the hours in questions.

What if?

Why didn’t you?

What happens when?

Do you remember?

How could they?

What will you do?

At 3:18, every question sounded urgent.

At 3:46, each became unanswerable.

At 4:12, they began breeding.

I sat at the table while the yesterdays convened a meeting in my head. Every version of me attended. The child had questions. The young man had accusations. The older man took minutes and pretended this was useful.

Then the long, thin fellow appeared, rushing breathlessly around the edge of the clock.

The second hand.

I recognised him from the Now crowd.

“Slow down,” I told him.

---

He seemed surprised.

“I’m not moving quickly,” he said. “You’re trying to hold me.”

---

Then he was gone.

Outside, a bird began before the light did.

The questions quietened, not because they had been answered, but because morning had arrived without consulting them.

The ninth clock was The Waiting Glass.

I knew it intimately.

I had waited for letters, diagnoses, apologies, departures and returns. I had waited for people to choose me, forgive me, remember me, understand me. I had waited for doors to open and for old doors to explain why they had closed.

The Waiting Glass resembled an hourglass, except the sand never reached the bottom. Each grain paused halfway, suspended in expectation.

“Who are you waiting for?” Time asked.

“No one in particular.”

---

The glass filled with faces.

“That’s quite a crowd for no one.”

---

Some people were coming, just slowly. Some had lost their way. Some had never promised to come at all. A few had been gone so long that waiting had become the only relationship we still had.

“What happens if I stop?”

“You’ll discover whether waiting was keeping them near or keeping you still.”

---

I turned the glass upon its side.

The sand remained suspended, but it was no longer falling.

I cannot tell you whether anyone arrived after that.

I had left the room.

The tenth clock had no audible tick. The Anniversary of an Unmarked Grief lived beneath the skin.

Its dates were not written in any calendar I owned, yet my body observed them faithfully. There were mornings when my chest remembered something my mind did not. Days when sorrow arrived without luggage and behaved as though it had a reservation.

I had called these moods. Weakness. Ingratitude. The weather again.

The clock knew better.

It held the dates of endings no one had named, separations that happened before language, losses for which there had been no funeral. It remembered the day a small body learnt that absence could be permanent. It remembered news received years later as if it had happened all at once.

“What date is it keeping?” I asked.

“All of them.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“It isn’t trying to be helpful. It’s trying to be remembered.”

---

So I sat with it.

I did not wind it or silence it. I didn’t ask it to prove what had happened. For once, I let the body finish a story without demanding that the mind provide footnotes.

Eventually, the clock warmed beneath my hand.

Or perhaps my hand warmed around it.

The eleventh was The Sigh Accumulator, and frankly, it was enormous.

It recorded every breath surrendered to the unchangeable. The small, daily capitulations. The letter that would never come. The person who would never understand. The conversation endlessly revised but never repeated.

Each sigh advanced the hand.

I watched years of breath disappear into its bellows.

“What happens when it’s full?” I asked.

“You stop trying to change what has already happened.”

“Is that acceptance?”

“Sometimes.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“Exhaustion wearing a respectable coat.”

---

I considered this.

There were things I had claimed to accept only because I no longer had the strength to fight them. There were other things I continued fighting because surrender felt too much like agreement.

Time, for once, did not rush me.

I placed both hands upon the clock and gave it the longest breath I had.

The bellows filled.

The hand moved.

Then, from somewhere inside, the clock breathed back.

Not a sigh.

A breath.

It was a small distinction, but an important one.

The twelfth clock waited at the end of a corridor lined with doors. Behind each was an ordinary afternoon.

A father lifted a child onto his shoulders.

Two brothers sat beneath a tree.

Someone waved from a kitchen window.

A woman laughed from another room.

A dog slept in a patch of sunlight.

Nothing of consequence appeared to be happening.

At the end stood The Last Ordinary Afternoon.

It was the most terrible clock of all because it counted down invisibly. No one knew when it had begun. No one recognised the final hour while standing inside it.

Its face showed a room I remembered. Perhaps you have one of your own. There were cups upon a table, a coat over the back of a chair, voices talking about nothing much. I knew, because the clock knew, that one day I would give anything to return to this unremarkable moment.

The hand approached twelve.

I panicked.

“Stop it.”

“I can’t,” said Time.

“Then take me back.”

“You’re already there.”

---

The people in the room continued talking. One of them asked me a question I could not hear because I was watching the clock.

The hand moved closer.

“I need more time.”

“You have all the time there is.”

“That isn’t enough.”

“It never is when you’re measuring it.”

---

The hand trembled upon the final mark.

I could keep watching. I could record the second, preserve the evidence, memorise the arrangement of every cup and chair so that later I might rebuild the room inside regret.

Or I could look away.

Someone laughed.

I turned towards the sound.

I cannot tell you what happened to the clock after that.

Perhaps it struck twelve. Perhaps it always had. Perhaps the ordinary afternoon ended, as ordinary afternoons do, without knowing it had been the last of anything.

I remember the light through the window.

I remember a cup warming both my hands.

I remember someone beside me beginning a story, and for once I did not interrupt to tell them we were running out of time.

When I returned to the corridor, Time was gone.

The Regret Engine still laboured somewhere behind me. The tides still rose and fell. Names continued their slow drifting. Almosts multiplied in the dark. People waited, bodies remembered, and ordinary afternoons slipped quietly into the past.

None of the clocks had been cured.

Neither had I.

At the end of the corridor stood a door I had not noticed before. It bore no number, only a small brass plate upon which someone had engraved a single word.

‘ NOW ’

I reached for the handle, but the door was already open.

Beyond it, there was no celestial music. No great peace descended. Halcyon wasn’t waiting with a welcoming committee, and Insouciance had not floated in from France. There was only a chair, a window, the sound of a bird and, somewhere nearby, water coming to the boil.

The long, thin fellow hurried past again.

“Is this it?” I called.

---

But the second hand never stayed long enough to answer.

I stepped inside.

Or perhaps I had been standing there for some time.

The kettle clicked off.

A bird landed upon the sill.

Someone asked whether now was a good time.

I looked down at my hands.

They were empty.

Then I looked up.

Jonathan

This essay touches on themes I explore more deeply in my forthcoming book, We the Unkept: the stories we inherit, the silences we are asked to carry, and the long work of understanding what time has done to us without allowing it to tell us who we must remain.

If this piece resonated with you, We the Unkept is currently available for pre-order at:

The Narrative Witness
https://www.thenarrativewitness.com/book

I’m eight, maybe nine, at a dinner party that belongs to the adults, in a house that belongs to my parents, wearing a white T-shirt with the initial J sewn onto the pocket. My twin brother wears the same shirt with a D. Someone at the table notices the initials and laughs, says something about how sensible, how tidy, to be able to tell us apart at a glance. My brother and I have already swapped shirts under the table, and we laugh too, between ourselves, at a joke the adults don’t know they’re half inside. That’s the earliest version I have of the room Ursula K. Le Guin would later describe to me: not a locked door in a basement, but a small, unspoken agreement at a dinner table that some things about us needed sorting, labelling, made legible for other people’s comfort, and that the sorting could be laughed at as long as nobody named what it was actually for.

I came to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” decades after most people meet it in a classroom, and I read it the way you read something that has been waiting for you. Le Guin describes a city of impossible happiness: festivals, music, a summer light that never quite leaves the sky. Then, almost as an aside, she takes you beneath one of the buildings to a locked room where a child sits in its own filth, half starved, half sentient, kept exactly at the point of suffering that makes everyone else’s joy possible. Every citizen of Omelas knows the child is there. Most of them, once they understand what its suffering buys them, choose to stay anyway. A few, having seen the room, walk out of the city and never come back, and Le Guin never tells us where they go.

What sent me further than the story itself was finding out where it came from. Le Guin didn’t invent the bargain; she inherited it, and said so plainly. In her afterword, she credits the philosopher William James, who in 1891 posed a version of the same question in an essay on moral life:

“What if millions could be kept “permanently happy” on the single condition that one soul, somewhere at the far edge of things, lived out “a life of lonely torture”?

James called the resulting scepticism a decent human instinct, something in us that recoils from happiness bought that way, even as something else in us reaches for it.

James, in turn, was echoing Dostoyevsky, whose Ivan Karamazov puts the question with a child instead of an abstraction:

“If the whole edifice of human happiness could be built on the “unavenged tears” of one tortured girl, would you agree to build it?”

Ivan’s answer is no, and he gives it not as sentiment but as the only moral position available to someone who has actually pictured the child.

Three writers, ninety years apart, sharpening the same thought until it had a face. That isn’t three ideas. That’s one idea getting older, and more precise, and harder to look away from.

I don’t think Omelas is a story about a fictional utopia at all. I think it’s a diagnostic instrument, and once I had it in my hand, I couldn’t put it down without pointing it at my own history.

Here is what I mean. Adoption, as a story society tells about itself, runs on a conversion: a child’s early loss becomes the raw material for someone else’s redemption. Not always cynically; often with real love attached, real sacrifice, years of ordinary care freely given. But the story needs the loss to have happened, needs it almost structurally, the way Omelas needs the room. Without the child who was given up, there’s no child to be chosen. Without the rupture, there’s no rescue to celebrate. The goodness of the adoptive world is lit, in part, by what the adopted child was made to carry first, and the culture around adoption, the agencies, the extended family, the language itself, depends on that conversion going unexamined. Say it plainly and the warmth gets uncomfortable. So mostly, nobody says it.

Somewhere in a filing cabinet, sent to me from the office of National Records, there is a letter from a social worker written not long after my brother and I were taken to the Moral Welfare Home.

I discovered that after barely seeing us during our month in the hospital, she had left my brother and me at her sister’s house, a woman already raising six children under the age of ten. I knew that she already had a three-year-old son whom she kept, and that within a year, she would give birth to another boy whom she would also keep. But we were the anomaly. At four months old, she picked us up and took us on a two-hour train ride, leaving us behind at the home until we were adopted at fourteen months old and taken to Zambia.

For years, before I ever read that letter, I had held onto a very specific image of my birth mother. The facts of our beginning were brutal enough that I needed to soften them with a blanket of my own making. To survive that asymmetry, I gave her the grace of a devastating grief.

I imagined the agonising weight of that empty pram, the terrible, quiet sacrifice she must have been enduring as the landscape rushed by. I made her heartbreak the reason for our abandonment. If she was broken by the journey, it meant we were at least worth mourning. I internalised it. I held it as a kind of self-harm, ensuring that my “truth” remained completely harmless to the woman who left us.

Then I read the social worker’s letter:

“the twins’ mother has asked if you would like the twin pram, she has no need of it now.”

I don’t know how many times I read that line before the phantom grief I had granted her finally dissolved. The sentence isn’t cruel. It’s practical, almost gentle, the kind of sentence a tired institution writes when it has run out of softer ones. But it is also a ledger entry.

The horror of that letter was the realisation that the tragedy I had imagined on that train ride back might never have existed. The pram wasn’t a tragic monument to the newborn life she had surrendered. It was surplus equipment. It must have been as much of an inconvenience to her as we were. That is the exact moment the apparatus converts a complicated story of loss into an item of furniture for someone else’s household. The pram didn’t get a new home. We did. Nobody in that sentence is really a villain, but nobody in that sentence knows what the pram actually cost.

I want to be exact about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying love wasn’t real, or that the people who raised me were keeping me in a closet under the house. Le Guin is careful here too: the citizens of Omelas aren’t monsters; they’re mostly people who’ve made a bargain they didn’t design and can’t easily undo. What I’m saying is that I was, for a long time, asked to be the unlit room so the rest of the house could be believed in as bright. Not asked in words. Asked in silences, and once, asked in laughter: the initials sewn on our pockets so we’d be legible to people who found our sameness charming and our history unspeakable in the same breath.

That’s the part Dostoyevsky and James and Le Guin let me finally name. Not “I was hurt,” which I’d known for years and which this book has already sat with elsewhere. Something colder and more specific: I was, at various points, the load-bearing wall in someone else’s architecture of goodness, and the whole structure depended on the wall staying quiet.

My brother was standing in the same room, wearing the shirt with my initials on it; he’s never needed Le Guin’s city to describe what he carries, or if he has, he hasn’t said so in my hearing. I mention this not to settle whose account is true, because I’ve come to think they can both be, the way two people can stand in the same house and describe entirely different weather coming through the same window. His truth doesn’t cancel mine. Mine doesn’t cancel his. We swapped shirts under that table and laughed at a joke only we understood, and even then, without knowing it,

Going back to that dinner table now, the borrowed shirt on my back, the adults laughing at initials that were meant to solve a problem they never said aloud, I don’t feel the anger I might once have reached for. I feel the cold clarity of recognition, which is its own kind of weather, quieter than rage and harder to dismiss. I wasn’t wrong to sense, even at eight, that something in the room wasn’t being said. I was standing in it. I just hadn’t yet been given the map, and neither, I suspect, had they, and neither, in his own way, has my brother needed the one I’ve drawn.

Le Guin’s story ends with the ones who walk away, and famously, she doesn’t tell us where they go. Not because she’s withholding an answer she has, but because the honest answer is that walking away from a bargain you’ve seen doesn’t resolve into a destination. It resolves into a direction, and you keep having to choose it, sentence by sentence, room by room, for as long as you’re required to decide what to do with what you now know. My brother may be choosing a different direction entirely, out of the same house, wearing the same shirt, and I don’t think Le Guin’s story asks us to agree on which way is out.

I still don’t know whether I’m one of the ones who walked, or one of the ones who stayed and found a way to live in the house while refusing to pretend the room isn’t there. Most days I suspect it isn’t a single choice at all, but something closer to a practice: noticing, each time warmth is offered to me or to someone I love, whether there’s a door beneath it that nobody’s opened, and asking, before I let myself enjoy the light, what exactly it was built to keep quiet

Jonathan

This essay touches on themes I explore deeply in my upcoming book, ‘We the Unkept’. If you are interested in untangling the stories we inherit and the rooms we are asked to keep quiet, the book is currently available for pre-sale at:

The Narrative Witness
https://www.thenarrativewitness.com/book

A birth certificate records that you arrived. An adoption certificate records that the law changed your family. Both are true. Neither can tell you who you became, what you lost, what you found, or how you carried those years.

For most people, that story is witnessed by family. It is remembered in photographs, conversations, shared history and resemblance. For many adoptees, that middle is left largely unwitnessed.

This essay is about that unwitnessed space, and why I came to realise that some of us must become the keepers of our own record.

“Somerset House will not hand you your own beginning. First, there’s a room and a counsellor the law insists must sit across from me before I am permitted to read the sentence that says I was born. She’s kind; she’s done this before. That is somehow the worst of it, that there’s a procedure for this, a chair worn smooth by other people arriving to be told, gently, on the record, that they exist. Then there’s a fee. You pay in the end to be introduced to yourself.”

That realisation became something much larger than an essay. It’s becoming a book. Today I’m quietly opening pre-orders for We the Unkept.

Some of us were signed away. Some were taken, sold, or quietly written into other families. The words we are handed for this, relinquishment, placement, a fresh start, were chosen to keep the peace, not the truth. This book keeps a different word.

To be unkept is to be the promise no one honoured. Not kept safe. Not kept whole. Not kept, in the one record that mattered, as we were born. And unkeptness is not a single event. It is a life lived at the edges: the last considered, the never picked, the overlooked, the unbelonged. Not kept once, and then kept out ever after.

We the Unkept is a testimony in three registers: fragments in the felt present, essays that open the private wound into the system that made it, and poems for what argument cannot hold. It is written first for my daughters Ella and Imogen, so the record exists for them, and for everyone issued a story that was changed before they could speak.

We were not kept. So we are keeping the record ourselves.

If Life Between Papers resonates with you, I hope you’ll consider becoming one of the first readers to support We the Unkept.

The first edition will consist of 500 copies only, each numbered and signed by me, and available in paperback and hardback. You also have the option to have your name included on the Founding Witness page.

The essay is my gift. The book is the record I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to write.


Jonathan

Not because money heals the wound. It doesn’t. No payment can return the first mother’s smell to the infant body. No government scheme can restore the breast, the heartbeat, the name, the kinship map, the lost language of belonging. No cheque can lift a grown adoptee out of the fog and place them back at the beginning, whole and unsevered, before the paperwork, before the handover, before the state and church and charity and family court conspired with the moral weather of the age. But reparations matter because an apology without material consequence is only a confession spoken from a safe distance.

On 2 July 2026, Keir Starmer issued a formal state apology for historic forced adoption in England, acknowledging that mothers and adult adoptees were harmed by systems embedded across local authorities, voluntary and faith-based institutions, health and social care services, and parts of what is now the NHS. The government recognised that these practices were especially prevalent between 1949 and 1976, while also acknowledging that some experiences extended beyond those years.

That matters. It really does. For decades, adoptees and first mothers were asked to carry not only the wound, but the shame of the wound. Mothers were told they were immoral. Children grew up believing they were unwanted. Records were sealed, altered, misplaced, withheld, or rendered so difficult to access that the search itself became another small bureaucracy of abandonment. The Prime Minister’s statement recognised that sons and daughters were taken from their families and denied identity, history, and sometimes safety. It also acknowledged lifelong uncertainty, loss, questions around identity and belonging, and the effect on mental and physical health, relationships, and sense of self.

Those words matter. But words do not pay for therapy. Words do not retrieve a medical history before the diagnosis comes. Words do not restore decades of lost kinship. Words do not compensate the adoptee who has spent a lifetime building a self out of fragments, whispers, redacted pages, family resemblance, and the terrible arithmetic of absence.

The government has announced a £4 million support package over three years, aimed at improving access to adoption records, helping people reconnect with family, improving health support, developing peer support, creating a lived experience reference group, and documenting testimony. Again, that is not nothing. But it is also nowhere near enough.

The lifelong impact of adoption is not sentimental speculation. A 2020 meta-analysis found that adopted people had at least twice the risk of suicide attempts compared with the general population, with cohort studies showing a relative risk of 2.99. (Brieflands⁠) A national sample study on substance use disorders found adoptees had a 1.87-fold increase in the odds of any lifetime substance use disorder compared with non-adoptees. (PMC⁠) These figures do not mean every adoptee is broken. They do not mean every adoption was abusive. They do not erase those who had loving adoptive families. But they do demolish the fairytale that love is enough.

They make clear that the wound was not merely historical. It did not end when the adoption order was signed. It did not end when the child was renamed. It did not end when the adoptive parents took the baby home and the neighbours sent cards. It lived on in nervous systems, in relationships, in fear of abandonment, in addiction, in suicidality, in dissociation, in rage, in overachievement, in people-pleasing, in lifelong searches for faces that looked like ours.

The state did not simply move children from one home to another. It participated in a system that re-authored human beings. This is the part that still feels under-said. Most apologies for forced adoption quite rightly centre the mothers. Their suffering is immense. Many were young, frightened, shamed, institutionalised, coerced, punished in labour, denied choice, denied dignity, and then expected to go home empty-handed and silent. Their grief deserves witness. Their pain should not be softened or footnoted.

A mother, however young and brutalised, had a self before the wound. She had language. Memory. A body that had already begun to understand itself as separate from the world. She could, in theory, return to a pre-wound self, even if changed forever by what happened. The infant cannot. The infant is wounded at the threshold of selfhood. Before language. Before narrative. Before the mind can say, “This is grief.” Before the body can say, “This is abandonment.” Before the child can know there was a before.

That is why the adoptee wound is so difficult to explain. It is not remembered in the ordinary sense. It is lived as weather. As atmosphere. As a hairline crack in the foundations. As the strange suspicion that one arrived in the world already interrupted. And then, to make the private rupture official, the law steps in.

The state does not merely observe the severing. It validates it. It records it. It files it. It creates new paperwork around the wound and calls it family. It does not say, “A child has lost one world and entered another.” It says, “This is now the child’s world.” The old world becomes something to be applied for later, perhaps through forms, counselling requirements, intermediaries, fees, delays, and the emotional obstacle course of proving one’s right to oneself.

That is why reparations matter. Because the harm was not only emotional. It was civic. Legal. Medical. Relational. Financial. Spiritual. If the state could fund, legitimise, and allow the machinery of removal, it can fund the machinery of repair. Reparations should include direct financial redress for mothers and adoptees. Not as charity. Not as a benevolent gesture. As recognition that survivors have already paid, over and over again, from their own pockets and nervous systems.

They should include lifelong, specialist, trauma-informed therapy for adoptees and first mothers, not a few sessions with someone who has never understood relinquishment trauma. They should include properly funded intermediary services, because reunion is not a romantic ending. It is often a second earthquake. They should include full, unredacted access to records wherever possible, with a presumption that information about a person’s own life belongs first to that person.

They should include medical-history pathways, genetic screening where records are absent, and practical support for those whose lack of family health information has placed them at risk. They should include the right to restore original identity for adoptees who want it. They should include a serious public education project to dismantle the old mythology of adoption: the chosen child, the lucky child, the rescued child, the blank slate, the baby who will not remember, the grateful adoptee, the tidy ending. Because we did remember. Not in words, perhaps. Not in pictures. Not always in conscious thought. But the body kept the score long before we had a language for the wound.

So yes, I welcome the apology. I am glad the words were finally spoken. “The shame was never yours. The shame is ours.” That sentence matters. It may give some people breath. It may open a door. It may let a few old ghosts finally sit down. But the measure of an apology is not the tremble in the voice that gives it. The measure of an apology is what follows. A state that says sorry but will not repair is asking survivors to perform forgiveness while continuing to invoice them for the damage.

And adoptees have been paying that bill for long enough.

Jonathan

Nietzsche wrote of the spirit passing through three great metamorphoses. First the camel, who kneels and says, “Load me.” Then the lion, who walks into the desert to fight the dragon of “Thou shalt.” Then the child, who represents innocence after struggle, the sacred “yes” of beginning again, and the freedom to create new values from within.

I don’t think he was writing about adoption, not directly. But sometimes philosophy finds us where psychology can’t quite reach. Sometimes a myth walks into a wound and names the weather inside it.

For many adoptees, and certainly for me, identity has not been a straight road from innocence to adulthood. It’s been more like being born into one story, lifted out of it before memory could hold it, placed into another, then asked to call the second one natural. Not chosen exactly, not rescued exactly, not lost exactly, but rewritten so early that the original ink had no chance to dry.

The adoptee does not begin with a blank page. That’s one of the great misunderstandings. We begin with a page already written upon, removed from the book, rebound in another cover, given a new title, and told the binding is love.

And often it is love. That’s the complicated mercy of it. Love can be present and still not be the whole truth. Care can be real and still stand upon a rupture no one wants to name.

The camel is the first self I knew.

The camel is the child who carries the story before he has the language to question it. He carries gratitude, not as a feeling, but as furniture in the room. He carries the strange obligation to be evidence that the arrangement was good. He carries the smiling myth of the chosen child, that soft velvet phrase with teeth underneath it, because chosen is meant to make relinquishment disappear. Chosen is meant to turn abandonment into destiny, grief into blessing, severance into a ribbon tied neatly around a life.

The camel learns early that weight can be mistaken for worth. He learns to be easy. To be grateful. To be charming but not demanding. To fit into a family history already underway, like a late actor stepping onto a stage where everyone else knows the lines. He learns that resemblance is a language spoken all around him but never quite to him. Your father’s eyes. Your mother’s hands. Your grandmother’s laugh. These tiny daily sacraments of belonging. These ordinary mirrors. These quiet confirmations that say, you came from somewhere we can still see.

And the adoptee smiles from the edge of the photograph.

Because the camel survives by carrying. He carries questions quietly. He carries curiosity as if it were disloyalty. He carries grief without a funeral, because how do you mourn a mother you were told you didn’t lose, a country of origin you never got to inhabit, a first face that vanished before your own face knew how to answer it? He carries the original absence like a stone in the mouth. He speaks around it. He becomes fluent in adaptation and mute about origin.

This is not weakness. This is genius under pressure. This is the nervous system learning the politics of survival. The adoptee becomes an interpreter of rooms, a reader of faces, a weather vane for belonging. He senses withdrawal before anyone has turned away. He studies tone, silence, the weight of a pause.

He becomes agreeable because disagreement feels like exile. He becomes useful because usefulness is almost belonging. He becomes lovable by becoming less troublesome than his wound.

The broader psychology of adoption is full of camels. Children praised for resilience when what they’re really performing is disappearance. Children who become good because goodness is safer than need. Children who carry the family’s pride, the system’s justification, the social myth that adoption is a clean solution, a beautiful ending, a rescue with no remainder. But the body knows what the story refuses. The body remembers the first separation as climate. The body knows when continuity was broken, even if the mind is given a happier script.

My camel carried a twin shadow too. To be born alongside another self and still become divided by story is its own kind of fracture. The mirror was there, and yet the mirror was also taken into the same machinery of separation, naming, placement, and survival. We were not simply children. We were evidence, secrets, solutions, burdens, blessings, depending on who was holding the sentence.

The camel is the child in the children’s home. The camel is the boy in Zambia, under an enormous sky, learning to belong by becoming a shape that could travel. The camel is the one who doesn’t yet know that his life has been edited. He only knows that something in him is always listening for the sound of departure. And because the camel is noble, because he can endure, people mistake endurance for peace.

But there comes a time when the weight begins to speak.

It may begin as curiosity. A name. A document. A missing medical history. A birthday that feels less like celebration and more like an unanswered question. It may begin with standing in a bathroom, studying your own face, not out of vanity, but because your face is the only archive you’ve been allowed to keep. It may begin with microfiche, forms, records, small bureaucratic windows into a life that others sealed and stored. It may begin with the dawning realisation that your story was not merely unknown. It was managed.

This is where the lion appears.

The lion is born when the camel finally enters the desert of truth and discovers that the heaviest weight was never grief itself. It was obedience to a story that made grief unspeakable.

Nietzsche’s lion must confront the dragon whose scales are marked with “Thou shalt.” For the adoptee, that dragon is enormous. Thou shalt be grateful. Thou shalt not hurt your adoptive parents. Thou shalt not ask too much. Thou shalt accept that love cancels loss. Thou shalt not disturb the paperwork. Thou shalt not call secrecy violence. Thou shalt not say mother when the world has already assigned the word elsewhere. Thou shalt not notice that your birth certificate became a theatre prop. Thou shalt not ask who benefited from your not knowing.

The lion says no.

And for an adoptee, that no can feel monstrous at first. It can sound ungrateful even to our own ears. We have been trained so deeply in the etiquette of other people’s comfort that our first act of self-protection feels like cruelty. To search feels like betrayal. To name relinquishment feels like accusation. To ask for records feels like trespassing on your own life. To reject the perfect adoptee persona feels like setting fire to the only shelter you were given.

But the lion knows that a shelter built from silence is also a cage.

The lion does not arrive politely. It can’t. There is no genteel way to reclaim a self from a story that required your cooperation in your own erasure. The lion roars because a whisper has already failed. The lion tears because the fabric was already torn. The lion says, I will, because the adoptee has lived too long beneath the softer tyranny of, you should.

I will know and I will ask. I will look and I will name what happened.I will stop performing wholeness for people who are frightened by the fracture and I will not confuse gratitude with consent. I will not let love be used as a gag.

I will not remain small enough to keep the story comfortable.

This is the rupture stage, and rupture is not always beautiful. Sometimes it looks like anger, obsession. Sometimes it looks like an adult man becoming, for a while, the child no one had room for. The adoptee may search records with the hunger of a detective and the ache of an orphan. He may become relentless, not because names can save him, but because names prove that the namelessness was imposed. He may confront institutions that speak in passive language, as if babies drifted like leaves into new families, as if sealed files sealed nothing sacred, as if amended certificates were merely administrative and not existential.

The lion sees how society romanticises adoption because it prefers tidy endings to complex beginnings. He sees how the adopted child becomes a balm for adult grief, infertility, shame, family secrecy, social inconvenience, or moral discomfort. He sees how the original mother can be reduced to a paragraph, how the father can become a blank, how siblings can be turned into rumours, how medical history becomes collateral damage, how whakapapa can be severed and called process.

The lion’s gift is destruction.

Not destruction for its own sake. Not bitterness dressed as truth. The lion destroys what was never truly his. The false innocence. The compulsory gratitude. The borrowed narrative. The fragile peace maintained by the adoptee’s silence. The lion does not yet know how to build the new world. That is not his task. His task is to clear the ground. His task is to create the sacred no that makes a future yes possible.

In my own life, the lion has been the part of me that finally refused to be explained by other people’s convenience. The part that looked at the softened language and heard the hard fact beneath it. Not placed, but relinquished. Not simply adopted, but interrupted. Not blank, but overwritten. The part that understood I had spent years carrying an identity that fit me the way a child’s coat fits a grown man, sleeves too short, shoulders wrong, history stitched into the lining by someone else’s hand.

And yet the lion cannot be the final self.

This is difficult, because rebellion can feel like arrival when you’ve been obedient for too long. Anger can feel like oxygen when you’ve been suffocating inside politeness. Truth can become another hard country if we build our home only from refusal. The lion saves us from the inherited narrative, but he cannot give us innocence. He can break the tablets, but he cannot write the song.

For that, Nietzsche gives us the child.

The child is the most misunderstood stage. It is not regression. It is not naivety. It is not forgetting what happened, forgiving on command, or skipping barefoot through the ruins as if the ruins weren’t real. The child is innocence after knowledge. The child is play after grief. The child is the yes that comes after the no has done its holy work.

For the adoptee, the child is not found at the end of the search, because the search rarely ends in the way we secretly hope it will. Biology is not a time machine. A birth mother is not an undoing. A father’s name is not a childhood returned. Siblings may be strangers. An identical twin may carry the ache of sameness without the comfort of closeness. Records may answer one question and awaken ten more. The family we find may not be able to receive the person we became in their absence. The child is not the reward for finding everyone.

The child is the self who emerges when we stop outsourcing our legitimacy to the missing.

The adoptee begins, slowly, to understand that origin is not only what happened before memory. Origin can also be what we make from the materials that survived. A scar can become a sentence. A question can become a compass. A wound can become a witness. The self can be authored, not from denial, but from fierce tenderness toward the facts.

The child says, I was interrupted, but I’m not only interruption.

I was relinquished, but I’m not only relinquishment. I was renamed, but I’m not only the name I was given. I was adapted, but I’m not only adaptation. I was abstracted, but I can return myself to form.

This is not healing in the glossy sense. I’ve become suspicious of that word when it’s used like a deadline, a moral achievement, or a tidy after photo. Some losses are not healed. They are integrated. They are carried differently. They become less like a stone in the mouth and more like a river under the house. Still there. Still shaping the ground. But no longer requiring the whole structure to pretend it was built on air.

The child creates because creation is the opposite of erasure.

To write, then, becomes more than expression. It becomes re-origining. Not inventing a false past, but refusing to let the official story have the last word. Every sentence becomes a small act of retrieval. Every metaphor becomes a lantern lowered into the well. Every page says, this happened inside a human being, not inside a file.

For the wider adoptee community, this child-self may be the beginning of a different psychology altogether. One not built around compliance or pathology, rescue or resentment, but around authorship. We don’t need to remain camels under gratitude. We don’t need to remain lions forever roaring at the dragon. We can become children in the sacred sense. Makers of meaning. Players of the new game. Not innocent because nothing happened, but innocent because what happened no longer owns the whole field of play.

The child is the adoptee who can hold contradiction without being split by it. My adoptive family gave me a life, and adoption cost me a life. I was loved, and I was severed. I adapted, and I disappeared. I found truths, and they did not make me whole in the simple way I once imagined. I’m grateful for care, and I will not let gratitude silence grief. I can honour what held me and still name what harmed me. I can belong to more than one story without being possessed by any of them.

This is the self-authored identity. Not the fantasy of complete repair, but the dignity of composition. A life gathered from fragments. A man no longer waiting for the world to hand him a coherent narrative, but sitting at the desk with all his ghosts, all his mothers, all his names, all his absences, all his countries, all his unfinished selves, and saying, I’ll take it from here.

The metamorphosis of adoptee identity is not a climb toward certainty. It is a movement from burden, to refusal, to creation. The camel teaches endurance. The lion teaches freedom. The child teaches authorship.

And perhaps the final miracle is this: the adoptee, who was once made the object of other people’s decisions, becomes the subject of his own life. Not chosen in the sentimental sense, not rescued into gratitude, not completed by discovery, but self-choosing. Self-naming. Self-witnessing.

The child does not erase the camel or silence the lion. He blesses them. He knows the camel carried what the child was too young to lift. He knows the lion fought what the child should never have had to face. He gathers them both, not as shameful former selves, but as ancestors of becoming.

Then he begins. Not from the beginning he was denied, but from the beginning he can make.

A clean page, but not a blank one. A page with pressure marks beneath it. A page with ghosts in the grain. A page where the old story can still be seen if the light falls sideways.

And finally, at last, a page that belongs to him.

Jonathan

Not because someone says something unusually cruel. Not because the mask slips in any theatrical way. Often, it is much quieter than that. A phrase. A deflection. A fear placed in the centre of the room where the child should be. A sentence so seemingly reasonable, so upholstered in good intention, that it takes a moment to register the violence of what has been left out.

This happened recently in a discussion about adoption.

The founding question was posted by Dr Barbara Sumner, author of Tree of Strangers and her latest book, On Human Adoption and the Manufacture of Identity. She is also the creator of Adoption Deconstructed, a weekly Substack column examining the hidden architecture of adoption, its laws, language, cultural narratives and lived realities.

Her question was simple. Devastatingly so.

Is there a circumstance of genuine need that requires the permanent destruction of a person’s identity as the price of their care? What these children need is what all people need: to be safe, to be loved, and to know who they are.

It is that last need that is always left off in any argument supporting human adoption.

So can there be a good adoption?

There it was. The question was not whether children should be left unsafe, or whether all birth parents are capable, or whether adoptive parents can love. It was not even a question about whether care is sometimes urgently needed. Of course children need safety. Of course some families cannot provide it. Of course love can arrive from unexpected places and matter profoundly.

But this was not a question about whether care is necessary. It was a question about price. What price are we willing to ask a child to pay in exchange for care? More specifically, is there any circumstance in which a child’s original identity must be permanently destroyed, legally overwritten, socially re-authored and narratively replaced in order for that child to be safe and loved?

That should be the centre of the room. But almost immediately, as so often happens when adoptees begin to speak about adoption as a structure rather than a sentimental rescue story, the centre moved.

An adoptive parent responded:

Good and evil are human constructs.

You’d have to ask the people involved; all of them.

Ideally, you’d know what the other option(s) would have resulted in, so you could compare; but you don’t.

As an adoptive parent, my worst fear is that my daughter rejects me, a fear shared by biological parents.

I don’t want to get into her biological family’s business, but parenting was not an option for them. There was a genuine need; how well we meet it, time will tell. But we have stayed in touch with those family members who desire it; and I hope my daughter can be proud of both her biological and adoptive heritages.

There, in miniature, was the disconnect. The adoptee question: can care exist without identity destruction? The adoptive parent answer: my worst fear is that my daughter rejects me.

I do not doubt the sincerity of that fear. I do not doubt that adoptive parents, like all parents, fear failure, rejection, estrangement, the possibility of looking back and realising that love was not enough, or was misdirected, or was entangled with something unexamined.

But sincerity is not the same as clarity. And love does not automatically make the loved child the centre of the story.

The elephant is this: adoption is not merely the provision of care. It is the manufacture of a new identity through the legal displacement of an original one. It is not simply a child moving house. It is not simply a child gaining parents. It is not simply love arriving where love was needed.

In its plenary form, adoption extinguishes one legal kinship and creates another. It alters birth records. It reassigns lineage. It converts strangers into legal parents and often converts actual parents into legally irrelevant figures. It can make siblings into legal strangers, grandparents into nobody, aunties and uncles into ghosts, ancestry into a sealed file, and origin into a privilege granted or withheld by adults.

This is where myth-making and meaning-making collide. Adoptive culture, particularly in its more sentimental form, is built on myth-making. It tells a story in which a child needed a family, a family wanted a child, and love made everyone whole. It is a story of rescue, destiny, gratitude and belonging. It reassures the adults. It comforts the institutions. It allows society to outsource the complexity of family separation into a photograph of smiling people on a courthouse step.

Adoptees, by contrast, are so often left with the lifelong work of meaning-making. We are handed the fragments and asked to call them a life. We are asked to make sense of absence, sealed records, altered names, genetic bewilderment, borrowed belonging, inherited silence, forbidden grief and the strange psychological vertigo of being told that the story written over us was for our own good. We are expected to be fluent in gratitude before we are permitted to speak in grief.

My response to the adoptive parent tried to name that disconnect.

I said that the original post was asking whether there is ever a circumstance that justifies the permanent legal and social destruction of a person’s original identity as the price of their care. It was not asking whether children should be left unsafe, unloved or unsupported. It was asking why safety and love must so often come bundled with erasure.

I pointed out that “good and evil are human constructs” felt like a philosophical sidestep around a very material reality. Adoption is not abstract for the person adopted. It is not a thought experiment. It is a legal, relational, psychological, genealogical and bodily severance. It changes names, records, kinship, belonging, inheritance, narrative and identity. For the adoptee, these are not constructs. They are lived consequences.

I also pointed out what seemed most revealing to me: in a conversation about what adoption costs the child, the first wound centred was the possible wound to the adoptive parent.

Again, I do not dismiss that as untrue. But I cannot ignore its placement.

The adoptee is expected to carry the rupture, the gratitude, the divided loyalties, the questions, the grief, the identity confusion, and then also the emotional reassurance of the adults around them.

This is one of the hidden burdens of adoption. The child is not only moved, renamed, reclassified and re-storied.

When the adopted person grows up and refuses to offer uncomplicated absolution, the system hears rejection. The adoptive parent hears betrayal. Society hears ingratitude. But many adoptees are not rejecting people. We are rejecting the lie.

The adoptive parent later replied:

Lotta stuff to unpack here. Don’t have time to reply to everybody! Sorry, may get back to it.

EVERY parent fears screwing up their children. Raising kids is important.

I told you I wasn’t getting into her birth-family’s business.

One interesting thing I see recurring is the belief or idea that people would have been better off with their birth families. Possibly true, but what you’re comparing is often a fantasy; what the last 10, 20, or 30 years might have been like. No different than imagining what might have happened if you’d married someone other than your spouse.

There is an element of choice, of course, babies don’t CHOOSE to be adopted, but then, they don’t choose their birth parents, either. The assumption that children should ALWAYS stay with their biological parents isn’t realistic.

This isn’t to say that exploitative adoption doesn’t exist; but, the groups I have worked with try very hard not to be exploitative. I could give details, but it’s not my intention to argue the nuances. The question was, “is a good adoption theoretically possible?” and, of course, it is.

A “good” adoption does create at least a legal and cultural heritage, if not a biological one. Both are important; it’s up to the child whether they are equal, or one is “more” important than the other.

I’m not going to argue whether or not MY adoption situation is “good” or “bad.” You have your life experiences, which lead you to your conclusions, and I have mine. Ultimately, my daughter will be the primary judge of that.

If you want to debate the actual question, “is there such a thing as a ‘good’ adoption,” I’m willing.

“Good and evil are human constructs” means a “good” adoption is one that people say is “good.” Many people might have valid opinions on that; primarily the adoptee, but also the biological parents, and the adoptive parents. An adoption is “good” if the people involved say it is good.

This isn’t about defending my daughter’s case particularly. It’s about adoption in general. Some of the generalities you make are valid, in general; whether they apply in my daughter’s case is for her, and me, and her biological family, among others, to decide.

Your post ends with the assumption that adoption equals identity destruction. I would return that this is not necessarily the case.

I was genuinely grateful that he replied. Most do not. And yet his response deepened rather than resolved the problem. Because again, the structural question was softened into an interpersonal one. Again, the child’s experience was placed among adult perspectives, as though everyone standing around the event of adoption has an equivalent interpretive claim on what it means.

“Many people might have valid opinions,” he said. “Primarily the adoptee, but also the biological parents, and the adoptive parents.”

This is where I think the argument turns. Because yes, many people may have perspectives on an adoption. Birth parents have a perspective. Adoptive parents have a perspective. Social workers have a perspective. Courts have a perspective. Agencies have a perspective. Extended family, therapists, siblings, communities and cultures may all have perspectives.

But perspective is not authority. To say that the adoptee is the “primary” judge is still, to my mind, too diluted. The adoptee is not the primary judge. The adoptee is the judge.

Everyone else is a witness, participant, beneficiary, contributor, caregiver, relative, architect, bystander or inheritor of the story. But the adopted person is the one who must live inside the arrangement. The adopted person is the one whose identity was acted upon before they could speak. The adopted person is the one whose kinship was rewritten. The adopted person is the one who may have to spend decades trying to reconcile love with loss, gratitude with anger, safety with severance, belonging with exile.

For adoptive parents to insist that they too get a casting vote on whether an adoption is “good” feels to me like marking your own homework. Or perhaps awarding yourself first prize in the human race, not a participation award in Human Kind.

That may sound flippant, but beneath the humour is something serious. Systems of power almost always want to participate in judging their own benevolence. The powerful rarely see themselves as powerful. They see themselves as necessary, helpful, loving, reasonable, realistic. They see themselves as the ones who stepped in when others failed.

But the person helped may still have been harmed by the terms of the help. That is the part adoption culture struggles to hold. A child can be unsafe with their birth family and still be harmed by adoption. A birth parent can be unable to parent and still matter. An adoptive parent can love deeply and still participate in erasure. A system can intend protection and still manufacture loss. These truths do not cancel one another out. They ask us to become honest enough to hold more than one reality at the same time, especially when the simpler story is the one that keeps the adults comfortable.

An adoption can be non-exploitative in intent and still be structurally coercive, identity-altering, grief-producing and morally unresolved. This is not contradiction. It is the complexity adoptees have been forced to inhabit while others debate theory.

One of the most troubling elements of the adoptive parent’s response was the comparison between adoptee longing and imagining what might have happened if one had married someone else.

This is a profound category error. An adoptee wondering about the life they lost is not indulging in romantic counterfactual fantasy. This is not the ordinary human speculation of roads not taken, of a different spouse, a different job, a different city, or some imagined parallel life. It is the loss of origin. It is the absence of the faces from which your face came, the missing medical history, the severed siblinghood, the mother tongue you may never have heard.

It is the genetic bewilderment of growing up physically unrelated to everyone in your home, the strange ache of resemblance denied, and the knowledge that somewhere, perhaps, there are people who move like you, laugh like you, think like you, and carry your hands, your eyes, your temper, your gifts, your wounds.

It is not fantasy. It is the mind reaching toward the shape of what was removed. To call that fantasy is to misunderstand the wound.

Of course adoptees imagine. Absence requires imagination. Silence becomes a canvas because the facts were withheld, obscured, sealed, falsified or made emotionally dangerous. But the imagining is not the wound. The wound is the deprivation that made imagining necessary.

The adoptive parent also wrote, “babies don’t choose to be adopted, but then, they don’t choose their birth parents, either.”

Again, this sounds reasonable until examined. No one chooses to be born. That is the universal human condition. But not everyone is legally transferred from one family system into another. Not everyone has their original kinship overwritten. Not everyone is issued a new identity that can function, socially and legally, as though the first one did not matter. Not everyone is asked to treat the second narrative as the primary narrative while carrying the first in private, if they are permitted to carry it at all.

Not choosing one’s birth parents is not the same as being removed from them, renamed, re-recorded and told this is simply another version of family. The comparison collapses the specific violence of adoption into the general randomness of existence.

These statements may be true in the broadest sense, but they can also function as a fog machine. Because if everything is complicated, nothing is accountable. If all parents fear failure, then the adoptive parent’s fear is made to stand beside adoptee rupture as though they are comparable wounds. If all identity is constructed, then manufactured identity is quietly treated as no different from lived identity. If all families are imperfect, then the legal destruction of one family and the creation of another becomes just another variation in human domestic life, rather than a profound intervention into a child’s origin, kinship and selfhood.

But adoption is not merely variation.

It is intervention, it is apparatus. It is law, language, market, mythology, bureaucracy, paperwork, court order, amended certificate, cultural script, and too often, adult desire dressed in child welfare language.

That is why Dr Sumner’s question matters so much. She does not ask whether children need care. She asks why identity destruction is so often made the price of that care. And that is where the system remains broken.

Because even now, after all the testimony, memoir, research, activism, reunion stories, sealed records campaigns, trauma-informed language and adoptee-led critique, the apparatus still behaves as though the main problem is how to make adoption kinder, not how to ask whether its foundational assumptions are morally defensible.

Because from where they stand, the elephant is not there. From where they stand, the child was saved. From where we stand, the child was also severed. This is the great dissonance.

Adoption asks adoptees to metabolise two opposing truths at once. You may have been loved, and you may have been erased. You may have been protected, and you may have been harmed. You may have gained family, and you may have lost family. You may be grateful for care, and furious at the terms under which care was given. You may love your adoptive parents and still refuse the story that made them your only parents.

But adult adoption culture often prefers moral neatness.

Good adoption. Bad adoption. Loving adoption. Exploitative adoption. Happy adoptee. Angry adoptee. Grateful child. Bitter adult. These categories protect the myth.

They allow adoptive parents to say, “Well, ours was good.”
They allow agencies to say, “We try very hard not to be exploitative.”
They allow society to say, “Surely some children need adoption.”

But adoptee testimony keeps making the question more difficult. What if the problem is not only bad adoption, or that the problem is adoption’s need to call itself good? What if the entire system depends on turning adult intention into child benefit, without waiting for the child to grow old enough to testify? What if the word “good” is doing too much moral laundering?

The adoptive parent wrote that a good adoption creates legal and cultural heritage, if not a biological one. This deserves close attention.

Yes, legal and cultural ties can matter. An adoptive family can become meaningful, formative, cherished, beloved. A child may absorb traditions, language, habits, humour, food, faith, landscape, music, class, culture and kinship from the family that raises them. None of that should be dismissed. But created heritage is not the same as inherited heritage.

One may become real. The other was already real. The danger is not in recognising adoptive belonging. The danger is in using adoptive belonging to neutralise original belonging. A second heritage may be added. But in adoption, it is too often added by legally removing, minimising or subordinating the first. It does not simply sit beside origin. It frequently stands on top of it.

And then the adoptee is told they are lucky to have both. But many adoptees do not experience “both” as abundance.

And then adults ask whether the adoption was good. This is why the adoptee must be the judge. Not because adoptees are always objective. No human being is. Not because every adoptee will reach the same conclusion. We will not. Not because adoptive parents have nothing to say. They do. Not because birth parents have no grief, no account, no moral claim. They absolutely do.

But because the adoptee is the person whose life became the site of everyone else’s decision. The adoptee is the only person who carries the whole consequence. To give the adults an equal vote in declaring adoption good is to confuse participation with ownership. It is to allow the architects of the arrangement to review the building while the resident is still trying to find the stairs in the dark.

This does not mean an adoptee’s judgment will be simple, immediate or fixed. Many of us revise our own understanding over time. What we called good at twenty may look different at forty. What we defended at thirty may collapse at fifty. What we could not bear to know when young may become the only truth we can live with later.

That, too, is part of the meaning-making. Adoptees often come to ourselves late, not because we are slow, but because so much of the world was arranged to delay our recognition. We were given words like lucky before we were allowed words like loss. We were handed family trees with branches missing and taught not to stare too long at the gaps. We were given origin stories softened for adult comfort, gratitude as a survival strategy, and a version of belonging that sometimes required self-abandonment as proof. By the time we begin to understand what happened to us, we are often not discovering something new, but finally finding language for what some part of us has always known.

And then, years later, when the body remembers what the story denied, we are told we are making generalisations.

This is why I remain troubled by the intransigence of so many adoptive parents in these conversations. Not all, of course. Some listen with humility. Some understand that the child they love has an interiority they do not own. Some are willing to sit inside discomfort without rushing to restore themselves as good.

But many double down. They double down on intention and rescue, on the inadequacy of the birth family, on the familiar refuge of “every parent makes mistakes.” They say “my child will decide,” while still reserving interpretive rights for themselves. They continue to frame adoption as addition rather than replacement, as though a second story can simply be written over the first without consequence. They double down on myth-making while adoptees are still trying to survive the long, unfinished labour of meaning-making.

And perhaps that is what makes these exchanges so exhausting. Adoptees are not merely debating ideas. We are trying to describe the room from beneath the furniture. We are trying to say there is an elephant here, and it has been standing on us for decades. But those who benefit from the room’s arrangement are often busy admiring the wallpaper.

Where does this leave us? I do not think this leaves us with easy answers. In truth, I no longer trust easy answers in adoption.

Every one of these sentences may contain a fragment of truth, but every one can also be used as a weapon. A soft sentence can still do hard work. A comforting phrase can still close a door. The way forward, if there is one, begins by refusing the seduction of moral simplicity. Children need safety, yes, but they also need love, continuity, truth, origin, and kinship where it can be preserved safely. They need records that do not lie. They need adults who do not confuse possession with care, or permanence with ownership. They need systems that support families before replacing them, and models of guardianship, permanency and protection that do not require identity death as the price of survival.

And adoptees need to be believed. Not only when we are grateful, agreeable, reconciled or easy to love. Not only when our adoptive parents approve of what we say. Not only when our birth families were obviously unsafe, or when our grief arrives tidy, polite, footnoted and professionally palatable. Not only when we agree to call the arrangement good. We need to be believed when our testimony unsettles the room, when our grief complicates the rescue story, when our love and our loss refuse to stand on opposite sides of the argument.

We need to be believed when we say that something foundational was taken. That love did not undo it. That identity is not a luxury item to be added later, once safety has been secured. Identity is part of safety. Truth is part of safety. Origin is part of safety. Continuity is part of safety.

To be loved without being known is a strange kind of hunger, and to be protected at the cost of being rewritten is a strange kind of rescue. To be given a family through the legal disappearance of another is a strange kind of belonging. It’s frankly bizarre!

This is where we are today. Still standing in the same room. Still pointing. Still watching the elephant breathe. Still listening to people explain, kindly and reasonably, that perhaps it is not really an elephant at all. Perhaps it is a chair. Perhaps a shadow. Perhaps a fantasy. Perhaps something only angry adoptees can see.

The elephant is not our imagination. It is the shape of what was done and then denied. If adoption is to have any moral future, it will not come from adoptive parents reassuring one another that good adoption is theoretically possible. It will not come from agencies polishing language. It will not come from systems asking how to make severance more compassionate.

It will come from a much harder honesty. It will come when we admit that care and erasure should never have been made companions and when birth families are supported before they are judged deficient. It will come when permanence is no longer confused with ownership and truth is not treated as a threat to attachment. It will come when adoptees are not asked to validate the emotional needs of the adults who benefited from their displacement and when the child’s future testimony matters more than the adult’s present reassurance.

It will come when we stop asking whether adoption can be good and start asking why the child had to lose so much in order for adults to call it so.

Until then, adoptees will continue doing what we have always done. We will gather the fragments and name the architecture. We will trouble the myth, refuse the bargain, and speak of mothers and strangers, records and ghosts, love and rupture, safety and severance. We will keep bringing language to the places where silence was installed. We will keep insisting that the last need, to know who we are, is not an optional extra, not a sentimental indulgence, not something to be postponed until after safety has been secured. It is part of safety itself.

It is not sentimental. It is not fantasy. It is not a philosophical construct. It is the human right beneath all the paperwork.

To be safe.
To be loved.
To know who we are.

Not one instead of the other. All three. Always.

Jonathan

“The horrors of war pale beside the loss of a mother.” — Anna Freud

On the first of January, 2026, I found my voice, and I’ve come to believe the world will never quite forgive me for it. Not because I did anything wrong, but because I refused, finally, to pretend. I’m a man who answers the questions life puts to him honestly, and somewhere along the way I discovered that honesty, in a world built on performance, is the most dangerous thing a person can offer. From the very first word, I was already condemned. Not by any law, but by my refusal to stay silent, and my deeper refusal to lie in order to be liked.

What followed wasn’t a confession so much as a reckoning held in public. Across 162 days, I wrote 49 times. Each post was a small act of trespass against the version of myself I was supposed to keep performing. And the world, it turned out, was listening more closely than I expected: 72,246 impressions, 3,732 interactions, 814 comments and replies, 638 new people who chose to follow the thread of someone simply telling the truth. I don’t recite those numbers out of vanity. I recite them because they’re proof that silence isn’t the only thing that travels. Honesty has a reach of its own.

Every comment became a mirror, every reply a small collision between who others had assumed I was, and who I’d decided to become. Some came closer for it. Some recoiled. Both, in their way, confirmed the same thing: that a voice, once found, can’t be un-heard, and a man who stops performing can’t easily be filed back into the role he abandoned.

And here’s the part I didn’t anticipate. I want to acknowledge my kith of the unkept, some of whom, standing on the shoulders of my words, have seen a little further and looked a little deeper. Through what I wrote, they found things in themselves that were always known but never named, waiting in the language of time for someone to say them first. That my words could carry that far, could land with that kind of resonance in so many, has been reward enough on its own.

But it gave me something I hadn’t gone looking for. Watching what my honesty unlocked in others, I came to understand that my own healing may never have been the goal at all. Recognition was. Not to be mended, but to have what happened named plainly and counted as real, because some wounds don’t ask to be closed so much as they ask, simply, to be believed.

Because there’s no adoption without trauma, adoption isn’t a solution to trauma; it’s the trauma: the first severance, and then a lifelong negotiation with loss that most people never see, because it wears the costume of a happy ending. We’re taught to read it as rescue. I’ve lived it as a wound that learned to keep walking.

There is, whether we admit it aloud or not, a quiet hierarchy of suffering, a scorecard by which we rank what’s allowed to count as real pain. I know what sits at the top of it, and society does too. And I reach for that top deliberately, because it’s the only way to expose the thing no one will say: adoption is the single trauma a person is expected to be grateful for. Imagine sitting a small boy down and asking him to say thank you for the worst thing ever done to him by a man. We’d recognise the obscenity of that instantly in any other context. Only here, only with this, do we hand the child the wound and the script of gratitude, and call his thanks proof that no harm was done. That’s the arithmetic I’ve lived with. And it’s the silence I finally chose to break.

For breaking it, I’ve paid in the oldest currency there is. Those who had been closest, for the longest, found that the very words drawing strangers near opened a distance instead. It was as though my sentences assembled themselves line astern, falling into formation behind me, and with each one I wrote, they pushed me further from the shore of belonging I’d always known. I don’t believe they meant to. Familiarity has its own gravity, and a man who changes shape mid-voyage becomes hard to hold onto from the land. They’d loved a fixed point. I’d become a moving one.

So I set sail anyway, not away from them out of spite, but toward the horizon of becoming, because that was the only direction the truth would let me face. Some distances aren’t rejections. Some are simply the width of open water between who I was asked to remain and who I was always going to be.

I’m not the story I was told. I’m the story I wrote, and I’m allowed to survive the truth I tell. That last part matters most, because the great fear of honesty is never that it’ll be spoken; it’s that the speaker won’t outlive the speaking. I have. I do. Identity, I’ve learned, isn’t found in the narratives we inherit, nor in the ones handed to us by people who needed us to stay small. It’s found in the silence we finally choose to break, in the precise moment we decide that being misunderstood honestly, is worth more than being approved of as a lie.

And beyond the confines of my well-worn story, the one I knew by heart, the one that no longer fit, I found a canvas waiting. Not finished. Not given. Blank in the way only beginnings are blank. The work of becoming had been there all along. I only had to set down the old script long enough to pick up the brush.

What I’ve made since isn’t a finished thing, and I’ve stopped pretending it should be. The brush became a pen. The pen became a practice. And the practice, slowly, became a name for what I’d been doing all along: narrative repair. Not the erasing of what happened, not a tidier story laid over the true one, but the patient work of taking a life that was authored for me and learning, line by line, to author it myself. To go back to the severance at the beginning and refuse, at last, to call it a gift.

Somewhere in that work, I understood what I’d become: not the subject of the story, and no longer only its author, but its witness. The one who stays in the room with what happened and won’t look away, won’t soften it into rescue, won’t sign the receipt of gratitude. That’s the heading I write under now: The Narrative Witness. It’s becoming a book, though it’s always been more than a book: it’s the standing offer I make to everyone still holding a wound that wears the costume of a happy ending, that it can be named, that it can be believed, that you’re allowed to survive the truth you tell.

I don’t know the far shore yet. I’m still on the open water. But I’m no longer drifting, and I’m no longer pretending the old harbour was home. I’m writing my way toward land, and this time, the story is mine, and maybe it’s a shore on which a man can stand and finally know what it is to be whole.

Jonathan

Support The Narrative Witness

Some of you will already know that. You may have seen me mention the possibility elsewhere, or ask what shape a book might take. Some readers have asked when I would write one, usually after recognising their own experience in something I had published. I have answered cautiously, not because the thought was new, but because I needed the work to reveal what kind of book it wanted to become.

Substack has mostly been the place where I bring finished pieces. It is less often the room in which I think aloud about what they might become together. Yet the essays, fragments, poems and reflections I have published here and elsewhere have gradually begun to arrange themselves around a larger centre: adoption, relinquishment, identity, memory, the body and its stubborn fidelity to what happened before language. The strange lifelong work of becoming the author of a life whose first chapter was written in your absence.

More of this writing found an early life in the Adoptology Facebook group, where I began publishing in January. Again and again, people responded not simply with praise but with recognition: I thought that was only me. You have given words to something I have never been able to explain. This is my life too.

Those responses changed my understanding of what I was making. The writing remained mine, rooted in the particular history of my own relinquishment and the life that followed, but it was no longer mine alone in quite the same way. It had begun to witness something shared.

That is how The Narrative Witness came into being.

It is the working home for a literary memoir about adoption, relinquishment, identity, memory and authorship. The book itself will eventually have its own title. For now, The Narrative Witness names the larger intention around it: to create writing in which the relinquished adult is no longer a supporting character inside somebody else’s account of adoption.

This will not be a tidy book. It will not offer adoption as a completed rescue story, nor healing as a polished destination. It will not demand that unresolved lives resolve themselves for the comfort of the reader.

I want the book to hold the body beside the archive, the adult beside the infant, the life that was lived beside the life that might have been. I want it to ask what becomes possible when an adoptee stops waiting to be accurately described by others and begins to write from the sovereign centre of their own experience.

I also want it to contain air: land, daughters, work, winter light, the cabin I am building by hand. The ordinary material world in which a life continues while a person is trying to understand its beginning.

The book is still evolving. There are decisions I have not made, including how the stories of other adoptees might enter it and what ethical form that shared testimony should take. I would rather make those decisions carefully and visibly than pretend the project arrived fully resolved.

What I do know is that before I can responsibly launch a Kickstarter campaign, I need to learn whether a sufficiently large audience is willing to help this book enter the world.

A few days ago, I created a pre-launch home for the project and asked people to register their support. At the time of writing, 45 people have put their hands up. Forty-one have confirmed their email addresses, and another four registrations are still waiting for confirmation.

That may be a modest beginning, but it is a real one. Most arrived through a single post in the Adoptology group. Others came from friends and family, some of whom have known me through lives that now seem almost implausibly distant from this one: advertising agencies in London and New York, before the cabin, the tractors, the creek, the book and the quieter work of becoming more recognisably myself.

I have not yet extended that invitation properly to the 135 people who subscribe here. I am doing so now.

Registering your support is free. It is not a purchase, a pledge or an obligation to back the eventual Kickstarter campaign. It is a measurable expression of interest, a way of telling me that the book has begun to move beyond private conviction and into a community of people willing to say: yes, I want to see this made.

Support The Narrative Witness

Once the official Kickstarter pre-launch page exists, I will ask supporters to follow the project there too. Registering through The Narrative Witness allows me to build and care for a direct relationship with the book’s early audience. Following on Kickstarter will later make that audience visible on the platform where the campaign must prove itself.

I would also like to give something in return.

Anyone who registers and confirms their early support for the book will be offered a complimentary one-year paid subscription to my Substack. This will include access to paid essays and reflections, along with occasional material from behind the making of the book: manuscript fragments, audio readings, notes on form and the ethical or editorial decisions that accompany a project like this. The offer also extends to those who have already registered.

It is a thank you for arriving before certainty, but I don’t want it to obscure the actual request. I am not trying to manufacture a large email list. I am trying to discover whether there is a real audience for this book before asking a crowdfunding campaign, editors, designers, contributors and readers to carry the cost and risk of bringing it into the world.

Forty-five people have begun to answer that question. Perhaps you will be one of the next.

If this writing has helped you recognise something in your own life, please register. If you are not adopted but the work has changed how you understand adoption, relinquishment, identity or grief, please register. If you cannot imagine backing the eventual campaign financially but still want the book to exist, your registration matters.

And if someone came to mind while reading this, I would be grateful if you sent the project to them.

Register your support:

https://thenarrativewitness.com

For years, I wrote because language was the only place where I could put the unfinished parts of my life without first making them acceptable. Then other people began to recognise themselves in the sentences.

That recognition did not finish the story. It did something more useful.

It gave the story somewhere to go.

Jonathan

It is a beautiful discipline. I have only one quarrel with it.

I never came down.

Stand Behind the Book

Read more

To understand it you have to start with the story they told about us, because we were raised inside that story the way a fish is raised inside water, never once seeing the thing it breathes. The story goes like this. We started badly and we ended well. We were the rescued, the chosen, the fortunate ones lifted out of one life and set down softly in a kinder one. And the only fitting response to a rescue is gratitude. So gratitude became the air in the house, unspoken and total, and it sealed our mouths before we’d even learned there might be something we needed to say. You cannot grieve a thing you’ve been instructed to be thankful for. You cannot hold a funeral at your own rescue. So the grief went elsewhere, the way grief always does. It found other doors.

Here is one of the doors it finds. We become the people who can build the whole cathedral and then, on the morning it’s finished, stand in the nave with a lit match in our hand. We reach the very lip of the good thing, the job, the marriage, the belonging we swore was all we ever wanted, and something old and wordless in us bends down and picks up a stone. From the outside this looks like self sabotage, a kind of stupidity, a stubborn refusal to be happy. What the outside can’t see is a child who learned the hardest lesson a human being can learn, and learned it before there were any words to cushion the blow. That the very people you need most can hand you to a stranger and walk away. After a lesson like that, leaving first isn’t madness. It’s strategy. We leave before we can be left. We burn the house down ourselves so that no one can ever take it from us. It is the most logical thing in the world, and it has cost some of us nearly everything we had.

And there’s the other face of the same wound, which is the reaching. If some of us run, others of us chase. We throw ourselves at edges, at speed, at strangers, at anything carrying enough voltage to be felt through the numbness, because a body that has been braced since birth will choose danger over emptiness every time, at least danger is proof that you’re still here. We move through lovers like rooms in a house we are searching, looking for the one face that was taken from us before we could fix it in memory, never quite finding it, never quite able to stop. We bounce, as they like to say, from one thing to the next, and they mistake the bouncing for appetite, or recklessness, or a failure to commit. It is none of those either. It is a search party. It is a small person still hunting, in every new face and every fresh thrill, for the first connection that was severed, and trying to prove, over and over and over, that this time they will be the one who gets to stay.

This isn’t only poetry. The shadow of it shows up in the cold arithmetic, and the arithmetic only ever leans one way. Adopted people are close to four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who were kept, a gap that stubbornly remains even after researchers strip out every other risk they can think to measure. Walk into a clinic for substance treatment and you will find us there in numbers wildly disproportionate to how few of us there are in the world at all. I want to be careful here, because by most measures most of us are fine. We hold down jobs and raise our children and laugh at the dinner table. The effect sizes the studies turn up are, on paper, small. But small and relentless is its own kind of devastation, because it means there is a current running beneath all of us, and for some it pulls them the whole way under. We are not weak. We have simply been swimming, our entire lives, against something the kept have never once had to feel against their legs.

And when the mind refuses to carry a thing, the body quietly volunteers to hold it instead. Ask a room full of adoptees about their stomachs and watch the hands rise. We are a people of knotted guts and unaccountable nausea, of the churn that no scan and no test ever fully explains. For years I thought this was coincidence. It is not. The newest research takes infant animals and separates them from their mothers, and what it discovers is that the gut itself, the long wiring that runs between belly and brain, grows differently after that severing, tuned for the rest of its life toward alarm and toward pain. In human children, any early rupture at all lifts the odds of exactly these troubles. Sit with that for a moment. The single experiment that best explains our aching stomachs is an experiment about taking the newborn away from the mother. The body kept the ledger that our memory was far too young to write, and it has been quietly settling the account every day since.

There is one more room in the gallery, and this one is lined with mirrors that never quite hold a reflection. It’s where we keep the imposter, the one who walks into every room already certain of being found out and asked to leave. Of course we carry this. We were edited out of our own first chapter. The opening pages of nearly everyone else’s story are simply there, assumed, a mother’s face and a family name and a long line of people reaching back into the dark. Ours were lifted out and replaced, and however tender the replacement was, some animal part of us has always known the book was rebound by another hand. So we perform belonging the way an actor performs a part, word perfect and never once at home in it, forever braced for the tap on the shoulder that tells us the role was never really ours.

For most of my life the question hanging over me was the wrong question. What is wrong with you. It hummed under every report card and every collapsed relationship, under every doctor’s helpless shrug. What is wrong with you. And the true answer to that question is nothing. There is nothing wrong with us. The right question, the one almost no one ever thought to kneel down and ask, is softer, and it changes everything it touches. Not what is wrong with you. What happened to you. Because the moment you ask the second question, the entire catalogue rearranges itself before your eyes. The leaving, the numbing, the chasing, the burning, the bracing, the churning gut, the long trail of nearlys. None of it is damage. All of it is design. These are the strategies of an infant nervous system that was handed an impossible equation before it could speak a single word, and that solved it the only way left open, by staying ready, staying armoured, staying always within one stride of the door. We were not broken by what happened to us. We were shaped by it. We adapted, and we adapted brilliantly, to a world that proved to us early and without appeal that safety could be taken away in a single afternoon.

So I don’t call it sabotage anymore when I set the good thing down and walk. I call it an old friend. The one who kept me alive when I was far too small to keep myself, still faithfully reporting for a war that ended decades ago, still standing guard at a door that no one is coming through. I’m learning, slowly and imperfectly, to thank that friend, and to tell it that it can finally rest. That is the closest thing to healing I have found. Not the repair of something that was never once faulty, but the long, late work of understanding it. And if you have read this far and you are not one of us, then I will leave you with the only thing I would ever ask you to carry out of here. When you next meet one of us standing at the very edge of our own good fortune, reaching down for the match, do not ask us what is wrong. Ask us what happened. And then do the bravest thing of all, the thing the world has never once managed to do for us. Stay long enough to hear the whole of the answer.

Jonathan

There's a marketplace, and it never closes. Its lanterns burn through every hour, the stalls pressed shoulder to shoulder, and the criers all promise the same thing in a thousand bright voices. Heal here. Mend here. Come and be made whole. The aisles are crowded with the wounded, and I move among them the way you move through a language you only half understand, catching the shape of the words but never quite the meaning underneath them. I belong to this crowd and I don't. We have all been hurt. But somewhere in the noise my particular grief has been folded into the general grief, like a single dark thread woven so deep into the cloth that no one can find it anymore, least of all me.

I want to begin with what's good, because there is good. We have learned, as a society, to kneel down to the height of a child and look them in the eye. We have learned to believe them. The whole apparatus of care has turned slowly on its axis until the child sits at the centre of it, and that turning took generations and courage and the testimony of people who were not believed in their own time. I honour it. I have watched institutions bend themselves toward the small and the unheard, and I've felt something close to hope. The deluge that followed has its beauty too, all those voices, the apps glowing in the dark like a thousand small windows, the kind strangers offering their reflections to anyone awake at three in the morning.

And yet.

The wound I carry was made before I had a word for wound. Before I had a word for anything at all. Picture a house, and picture the crack that runs through it. Most cracks come later, after the walls are up, after the family has moved in and learned to live around the draught. You can point to those. You can say, here, this is where it split, this was the winter it happened. But mine runs through the foundation itself, poured before the first brick was ever set, so that everything built on top of it has stood slightly out of true ever since. I cannot point to the winter. There was no winter. There was only the first rupture, the severing of the one tie that nearly every other living thing on earth is permitted to keep at least long enough to remember it. I lost the heartbeat I had been tuned to for nine months. I lost the scent, the rhythm, the particular weather of one body, and I lost all of it before I could form a single image to keep. You cannot grieve a photograph you were never given. You can only ache toward the place on the wall where it should have hung.

This is what gets lost in the marketplace. The criers speak of healing as though all of us arrived with the same kind of break, as though the salve that soothes a wound on the skin will somehow close a fault in the bedrock. I'm not holding up a scorecard. I have never wanted to weigh my pain against anyone else's and call mine the heavier thing. Pain has no weight. But there is a difference between a hurt done to a self that had already formed, that had edges and a name and some sense of where it ended, and a hurt done before any of that existed. The kept child, even the badly kept child, the neglected and the struck and the spoken to with contempt, that child at least began life inside the gravity of the people who made them. The harm came as weather to a landscape already standing. Mine came as the absence of the landscape itself.

And here is the part that almost nobody says aloud. We don't get to choose one wound over the other. So many of us were handed both. We were cut from the root and then transplanted into soil that was sometimes no kinder than the soil our kept counterparts knew. The same coldness. The same cruelty. The same long silences pressing down on the dinner table. So we carry the first rupture and then the second one stacked on top of it, like a photograph exposed twice, two images bleeding through each other until you can no longer tell which ghost is which. To then be told that our story is simply one more entry in the great ledger of childhood harm is to be asked to forget the first exposure entirely, to behave as though the picture began on the day someone else's hands developed it.

People want to help. I believe that, I truly do. They reach out from the warm middle of their own kept lives and they offer me the tools that worked for them. Re-parent yourself, they say. Talk to your inner child. Sit the small one down and tell them they were always loved. I understand the tenderness in it, but I want to ask them gently what they think they're describing. To re-parent a self, there has to be a self to return to, some memory of being held that you can lean back into and mend. What do you do when the original was never written down? They imagine I can drag the dead up over the threshold and seat them at the table and finally ask my questions, as though the answers were only ever waiting just out of reach. But the dead don't speak, and the missing don't answer, and the inner child they want me to comfort isn't a child who was wronged inside a room. That child lost the room. The house. The country. The whole first world, before ever having eyes to watch it go.

Conversation doesn't cure this. I've sat in enough rooms to know. You can name a thing for years, turn it over and over in the light, give it the cleanest and truest words you've ever found, and at the end of all that careful naming it sits exactly where it always sat. Insight is a beautiful key, and it fits a great many locks, but it has never once fit this one. Healing, for us, is not the prize you win at the end of an awakening. There's no morning you wake into finally repaired, blinking at a self made new. That's a story the marketplace tells because the story sells, and I don't blame the sellers their living, but I won't be buying it anymore.

So what's left, if not the cure they keep holding out. I think it's something smaller than a cure and somehow far larger. I think it's being seen. Not analysed, not solved, not handed a worksheet and a breathing exercise. Seen. To have someone look straight at the fault in the foundation and not reach for plaster, not flinch, not pull the language of repair out of their pocket, but simply say, yes, I see where the house split. I know that draught. I feel it in my own walls when the wind turns. There is a particular relief that arrives when you no longer have to translate yourself. With my own, I don't reach for metaphor, because none is needed between us. We speak in a shorthand worn smooth by the same loss. A look does it. A silence does it. We recognise each other the way one bird knows the call of its own kind across a whole field of strangers, and in that recognition something in me that has been standing braced for a lifetime finally, briefly, sets itself down.

It grieves me that this seems to be where the road ends, that the deepest understanding I'll ever find appears to live only among the others who were cut from the same first cloth. I wish it were wider than that. I wish the marketplace could hold it, that the kind strangers in their three a.m. windows could reach it. But maybe that's the truth of any wound that goes deep enough. Maybe the most foundational losses can only ever be fully witnessed by the ones who carry the matching crack, and everyone else, however loving, however well meant, is only ever reading us in translation.

So I've stopped asking the world to heal me, because I no longer believe that's a thing the world can do. I ask only to be seen as I am, on my own terms, in my own language, without being quietly folded back into a story that was never mine to begin with. And if you're standing in that marketplace too, catching the shape of the words but never their meaning, then I'll leave you with the only question I've found worth carrying. It isn't how do I become whole again, because there was never a whole to return to.

The question is quieter and far harder than that. Who can bear to look at the part of me that was broken before I existed, and stay?

Jonathan

I heard it before I saw it. Not literally, perhaps, but in the way you hear certain things before you understand them. The way an adoptee hears the word belonging and feels the gap between its sound and its meaning. There was a note. Hemingway, friendship, kindness.

There was rust along the paper guide, a patina of honest work, the kind of beauty that only accumulates in the hands of someone who meant what they were saying. I carried it inside and set it on the table and felt, without quite knowing why, that something had just walked through my door that was larger than the sum of its mechanical parts.

I'm a man who believes in the logic of coincidence. Not superstition, not the universe conspiring, but the way meaning accretes around certain moments when you've been paying close enough attention.

You notice the pattern because you've earned the pattern. And so when I searched, almost casually, for the writers who had bent their shoulders over this same machine, I wasn't prepared for what I found.

Eleanor Alice Burford. Known to the world as Jean Plaidy. As Victoria Holt. As Philippa Carr. As half a dozen other names she wore like rooms in a house too large for any single identity to fill.

She published over 450 books. She wrote 5,000 words a day. She wrote them on an Imperial 66, and beneath her fingers the keys struck ribbon and ribbon struck page, and out came stories obsessively, almost compulsively threaded through with the same wound: the hidden child, the secret lineage, the foundling standing at the gate of a great house, wondering if the blood inside the walls is her own.

I sat with that for a while.

She wrote about orphans discovering aristocratic heritage not as escapism but as necessity, the way a person who has circled a locked room long enough will eventually begin to describe its dimensions in extraordinary detail. Her Gothic heroines didn't simply have murky origins. They were defined by them, animated by the hunger to know where they came from, to press their hands against the cold stone of history and feel it give back warmth.

She didn't write about adoption from a distance. She wrote toward something. Repeatedly. Compulsively. In a body of work so vast it could fill a room.

Literary biographers have long noted that her private life, her childless marriage, her fierce guardedness, seemed to exert a gravitational pull on her fiction. She didn't write about adoption from a distance. She wrote toward something. Repeatedly. Compulsively. In a body of work so vast it could fill a room. And now her machine sits on my table.

When I press a key on this typewriter, I'm not pressing metal. I'm pressing time. I'm pressing the accumulated weight of every word that passed through this mechanism before mine, every story that climbed from someone's chest and travelled down through their arms and landed, letter by letter, into the world.

The ribbon may be dry. The keys may stick. But there's a kind of conduction available here that no digital interface has ever offered me. Touch is not a metaphor. Touch is the thing itself. Harry gave me something different when he left this on my step. Not just a typewriter. A lineage.

Because here is what moves me past the point of coincidence into something that feels closer to covenant: Eleanor Burford spent her life typing stories about children who didn't know where they came from, on the very same model of machine that now sits before me, a man who has spent his life living one. She built her cathedral out of foundlings.

I've been building mine, stone by uncertain stone, out of my own. And for decades, without knowing each other, without any possible knowledge of each other, we have been reaching toward the same questions through the same mechanism, with the same hunger, our fingers tracing the same letters in the same order, separated only by time.

There's a word I've been looking for. Not reunion, exactly. Not inheritance. Something quieter. The word for when you discover that the question you thought was yours alone has already been asked a thousand times, in a thousand different forms, by hands that pressed the same keys before yours, Harry's shop is gone. But he left a door open.

And so I find myself here, building a cabin with my own hands I intend for my daughters, with a machine that has already carried more of my story than I've yet written, asking the only question that really matters:

What does it mean that the wound which has shaped a life can also, pressed into the right mechanism at the right moment, become the very thing that connects us across time to the hands of genius and shapes our next chapter?

Jonathan

My name could be that of many. History remembers some of them. Others, it has quietly misplaced. But every one of them begins the same way: with a child and a disappearance.

My name is Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. I was twenty months old when someone climbed a ladder into my nursery in East Amwell, New Jersey, on the night of March 1st, 1932 and carried me out of my crib.

The world erupted.

More than a hundred thousand people joined the search. Police, soldiers, reporters, volunteers. Newspapers roared with headlines. Radios carried updates into living rooms across America.

The journalist H. L. Mencken called it “the biggest story since the Resurrection.” America called it the crime of the century. Because a child had been taken.

And when a child is taken, the world knows the word for it.

My name is Jaycee Dugard. I was eleven years old when a car stopped beside me as I walked to my school bus stop in Lake Tahoe, California. Two adults stepped out. Seconds later I was gone.

My face travelled the country on missing posters. My name appeared on television broadcasts. People searched forests, roadsides and empty fields hoping to be the one who found me.

For eighteen years, I lived inside a hidden backyard prison. But the world never stopped calling my name.

Because when a child disappears, people recognise the crime.

My name is Paul Fronczak. I was one day old. A woman dressed as a nurse lifted me from my crib at Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital in 1964 and walked out the door with me. The search for me became the largest manhunt in Chicago’s history.

Police mobilised. Volunteers combed the city. Newspapers ran my photograph again and again. A newborn had been stolen.

The world understood immediately what had happened.

My name is Jonathan Lyon. I was twelve months old when I was taken. But there were no sirens. No search parties. No posters stapled to telephone poles. No reporters asking where I had gone. No manhunt. No headlines.

Because my story had been given another word, adoption.

A word that quiets the alarms. A word that smooths the violence of separation into something polite and celebratory. Where other stolen children inspire outrage, adopted children are expected to inspire gratitude. The same rupture told in a different language.

From the outside, it looks like kindness. A child saved. A family formed. A life improved. People smile when they say the word. They imagine rescue. They imagine love.

They imagine a story that begins badly and ends well. But the child at the centre of that story still experiences the same first moment. The same vanishing. The same unanswerable question.

Where did my mother go?

Anna Freud once wrote:

“The horrors of war pale beside the loss of a mother.”

It is a sentence that unsettles people. War feels louder. Larger. More catastrophic. But the psyche does not measure loss in explosions. It measures it in rupture.

In the sudden disappearance of the person whose voice, smell, warmth, and heartbeat formed the entire architecture of the child’s world.

For some children, the world names that rupture honestly, Abduction. The word triggers sirens, search dogs and headlines. It mobilises a society. It declares: something terrible has happened here.

For others, the world chooses a softer story. A Hallmark version. One where loss becomes rescue. Where severance becomes salvation. Where the stolen child grows up smiling in a framed photograph. And the word used for that story is Adoption.

The world knows the names of children like Charles Lindbergh Jr. The world remembers Jaycee Dugard. The world searched desperately for Paul Fronczak.

Their stories live in history because society recognised what had been done to them. A child had been taken.

But there are millions of other children whose disappearances were never called crimes. Their stories begin with the same loss. The same severing. The same erased beginning. Yet the world tells them they were lucky.

Lucky to be chosen. Lucky to be loved. Lucky to have been given a better life. And so they grow up inside a strange contradiction. Carrying a wound the world insists is a gift.

Clawing through the rubble of their own erased origins, fingernails packed with the dust of a demolished beginning. Trying to explain a grief that others cannot see. Because the language used to describe what happened to them refuses to acknowledge that anything was lost at all. But every story in this piece begins the same way.

A child.

A disappearance.

A mother gone.

Only the name of the crime changes.

Jonathan

There are some griefs that don’t arrive as memories but as symptoms. A tightening in the chest when love gets too close. A tumultuous stomach as weather before a storm, and a breath that never quite reaches the depth of your lungs.

I’ve often felt that adoption writes itself into the body long before we ever learn the language to describe it. Not metaphorically. Literally.

As if relinquishment isn’t only an emotional event but a physiological one. As if the body remembers what the mind was too young to record.

I’ve never been able to breathe deeply. Not really. Even as a child I remember the strange frustration of it. Other kids seemed able to fill themselves effortlessly with air, expanding like sails catching wind. I breathed like someone borrowing oxygen from the world instead of belonging to it. Short breaths. Shallow breaths. Careful breaths.

When I played sports, I could feel it. Not just exhaustion, but restriction. Like my body was guarding itself from something invisible. As though somewhere beneath my ribs there was an old hand pressed gently but firmly against my sternum saying, Not too much. Don’t open fully. Don’t trust the world enough to inhale it.

And maybe that sounds poetic. Maybe it sounds dramatic. But I’ve heard enough adoptees describe the same sensation to wonder whether this isn’t coincidence at all. Maybe the body never forgets the first abandonment.

Science has begun to acknowledge what trauma survivors have always known. The body keeps score. Trauma doesn’t simply live in recollection. It lives in nervous systems. In cortisol levels. In hypervigilance. In digestion. In inflammation. In sleep. In breathing patterns.

So what happens when the trauma occurs before language? Before cognition? Before identity itself What happens when the rupture occurs at the precise moment the nervous system is first learning whether the world is safe?

For most infants, the mother is the first universe. Her heartbeat becomes weather. Her voice becomes geography. Her scent becomes home itself. Before we understand love intellectually, we understand it biologically. We’re regulated through proximity. Through touch. Through the rhythmic choreography of feeding, holding, soothing, breathing.

Then imagine that universe disappearing. Not because the infant understands the social context of adoption. Not because blame exists. But because separation exists.

And separation, at its core, is physiological. I sometimes think adoptees spend the rest of their lives trying to complete an interrupted inhale. Not just emotionally. Cellularly.

There’s something haunting to me about the vagus nerve. The great wandering nerve. The invisible river running from brainstem to abdomen, threading itself through the organs like a line stitched through fabric. It regulates rest, digestion, calm, emotional safety. It’s deeply connected to breath.

Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve. It tells the body it’s safe enough to soften. But what if your body learned the opposite at the beginning? What if your earliest lesson was that attachment disappears?

Perhaps that’s why so many adoptees seem suspended between yearning and vigilance. Between wanting intimacy and fearing annihilation. The nervous system becomes a smoke alarm that never stops listening for fire.

And the body adapts. Of course it adapts. Children always adapt. The tragedy is that adaptation often becomes identity.

The shallow breath becomes normal.

The tight stomach becomes personality.

The hyper-independence becomes maturity.

The emotional scanning becomes empathy.

The inability to fully rest becomes ambition.

People praise survivors for surviving without noticing survival itself can become a prison.

I’ve also noticed how many adoptees speak about stomach issues. Digestive problems. IBS. Chronic tension held in the abdomen like a fist that never unclenches. Anxiety that lives below the ribs. A constant feeling of unease with no obvious source.

And I can’t help but wonder whether there’s symbolism hidden inside the biology. The abdomen is where our first connection existed. The umbilical cord wasn’t just a medical structure. It was dependency made visible. Nourishment made physical. The first proof that we belonged to someone before we belonged to ourselves. Then one day it was cut.

Every human being experiences that severance physically through birth, but adoption can create a second severance. One that arrives not through biology but through absence.

Perhaps the body doesn’t distinguish between metaphor and memory as cleanly as we do. Perhaps the belly remembers what the mind cannot articulate.

I think about trees sometimes. How arborists can read the history of trauma in the rings hidden inside the trunk. Drought leaves a mark. Fire leaves a mark. Lightning leaves a mark. The tree continues growing around the wound, but the wound becomes part of the architecture. Maybe adoptees grow like that.

Maybe we become beautiful despite the rupture, but also because we spent our lives growing around it. There’s a particular loneliness in carrying a wound that society insists should only be discussed as gratitude.

Adoption narratives are often framed through rescue, salvation, fortune. We’re expected to speak in the language of blessings while quietly metabolising the language of loss. But the body refuses propaganda. The nervous system doesn’t care about social etiquette.

A child can be deeply loved by adoptive parents and still carry the imprint of separation. Those truths aren’t enemies. They can coexist painfully and honestly together. Love after rupture doesn’t erase rupture.

Sometimes I wonder how many adoptees are walking around believing their bodies are faulty when in reality their bodies are speaking perfectly coherent grief.

What if anxiety isn’t always pathology but memory What if hypervigilance is the nervous system’s attempt to prevent another disappearance? What if the body stays partially clenched because somewhere deep within us exists the ancient understanding that people leave? And what if healing isn’t about becoming “normal” but finally teaching the body that the story changed?

Maybe that’s why breathwork affects some adoptees so profoundly. It isn’t just relaxation. It’s renegotiation. Each deep breath becomes a conversation with the nervous system. A quiet insistence that says, You survived the severance. You can stop bracing now. Though even writing that feels too simple. Because some wounds don’t vanish. They echo.

I’m not interested in pretending healing is linear or complete. I think some grief becomes part of our ecosystem. It changes shape over time but never entirely leaves. Like scar tissue beneath skin, invisible to strangers but felt whenever rain approaches. Still, there’s something sacred in naming it. In saying perhaps the body has been trying to tell the truth all along.

Perhaps adoptees aren’t weak because we struggle with regulation, trust, anxiety, intimacy, or chronic physical tension. Perhaps we are bodies that adapted brilliantly to impossible beginnings. A body that learned to survive separation before it understood language deserves compassion, not judgment.

Sometimes I place my hand over my chest and try to breathe deeper than feels natural. Not performatively. Not spiritually. Just gently. Patiently. As though I’m trying to convince some frightened animal within me that oxygen isn’t scarce anymore.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes my lungs open for a few miraculous seconds and I feel grief rush in behind the air, as though sorrow itself had been waiting at the threshold all these years.

And perhaps that’s the hidden terror of deep breathing for some adoptees. To breathe fully may also mean to feel fully. To unclench may mean to remember.

Because what if the shallow breath was never failure at all? What if it was protection? What if somewhere inside the adoptee body exists an ancient intelligence whispering:

If you never inhale completely, maybe loss can never completely enter you again.

But I wonder too whether healing begins the moment we risk the deeper breath anyway.

Not because it erases what happened or reunion fixes it. Not that love rewrites the nervous system overnight or understanding suddenly untangles decades of embodied grief. But because every full breath becomes an act of defiance against the original rupture.

A declaration that says: I’m still here.

Perhaps the adoptee body never stops searching for the breath it lost when separation entered the room.

Jonathan