Been thinking a lot about adoption lately. Especially this line, which I read in an interview with the actor Simu Liu, from Legends of Shang-Chi and my favourite show, Kim’s Convenience.
This clearly resonates with me because, as my friend Mengfei Chen had told me before, about the idea of “leftover children”, the masses of kids who were left over to be raised by their grandparents, in China, while their parents were not there. And then when these children are re-united with their real parents, it feels as if they are being adopted.
I once had a therapist who told me that what I was experiencing and or suffering was a kind-of adoption, or she had put it, a kind-of being in fostered. But now I also see it as being a kind-of adoption, as well. How does it feel when you’ve been adopted by your own parents, and can you ever find it in your heart to forgive them? And what does that forgiveness look like? But it makes sense that I was (and am? I don’t know anymore) the most lost one.
The thing I understood the most about adoption was that you were being negged your whole life.
The biggest neg of my life
Yesterday I realised what the biggest neg of my life is. It was the one I had from my grandma. On some level I think my grandmother must know about this. It’s not so much of a fear that I have, but more of something I am afraid of on an intuitive level – or it was something that was made clear to me when I was I was abandoned.
I don’t understand why she brought up this point, to be frank. It had been hard my whole life not to feel like a charity case. And yet somehow internally I did feel like a charity case my whole life, and it affected my behaviour because I would let other people treat me this way. It didn’t help that I didn’t see myself represented anywhere when I was growing up in the UK. I think that’s why I looked to (albeit cool) other Asian cultures that had more representation at the time, such as Japanese culture.
So, with a lack of representation, shabby parents, and my own self-esteem issues things piled on top of each other, and eventually things became too much. It really showed itself because I was so interested in abusive people, male and female. I’ve often wondered about this particular interest of mine, in being collected by bad people. I think it reflects a much earlier sense of being abandoned and wanting that closure with newer people that I meet, so that I can finally close that chapter in my life.
I’ve had quite a few near misses in my life with abusive people, so much so that I have mistaken people who were safe to be unsafe. I would say that has been a pattern in my life. So sometimes I’ve had to let people go too soon, because I thought they were unsafe. All of this is from growing up with very unsafe people, which meant that there was and is a lot I could not trust. Of course there are children whose parents were nice to them, but I wasn’t one of these people.
I was one of those teenagers who didn’t believe in Love, letting their emo spirits soar.