flight of ideas

Um... Okay!

DD’s GUIDE TO GROWING UP LIKE HER

Have a weird origin story. If possible, be born to a nameless single mother and adopted (as a baby) from a foundling hospital by lower-middle class suburbanites.

Read EVERYTHING.

(Also: start reading as early as possible. Extra points if no one remembers teaching you how.)

As a young child, have long conversations with imaginary friends. Start having similar conversations with media characters ASAP. (For example: a long discussion with the 1960s Mighty Mouse, which causes one of your parents, alarmed, to send you for psychiatric evaluation.) Continue these conversations into at least your mid-seventies.

Watch many cartoons. ALL THE CARTOONS. (And be unbelievably fortunate in having this phase occur during the golden age of Warner Bros. animation, so that buried deep in your ground-of-being are the classic Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoons, as is "What's Opera, Doc?".)

Be initially seriously freaked out by monster movies (i.e. the original 1954 Godzilla) until multiple viewings of one of the more ridiculous ones start to make you find them funny.* Thereafter, love them all desperately. And routinely, later, be inevitably on the monster's side.

Decide that you want to write a book. Write your first one at age eight, in crayon (and also draw the cover, because you think that novelists have to do that). Have serious concern about your inability to write as small as real writers seem able to do for their printed books. ...Keep writing anyway.

Survive elementary school (even though it's boring). Survive secondary school (still boring). Survive high school (ditto). Keep writing.

Have severe teenage crushes on select boy bands until you find a more suitable mass media personage to have a crush on. Get a haircut like his if you can talk your mom into it. Keep writing.

Spend at least one of your teenage years practicing how to put up just one eyebrow the way that character does (thereby permanently changing the shape of your face). Fascinated by that character, start writing your own stories about him, thereby inventing fanfic without knowing that (a) it had already been invented or (b) that it even had a name.

Write truly forgettable Star Trek/Monkees fusion fic. Burn it (mercifully) before anyone sees it. Then, more than half a century later, admit to its existence regardless, thereby possibly identifying yourself as some kind of masochist.

Put off career-choice issues as long as possible due to having realized that no career choice your high school recommends for you seems even vaguely sane. Find a friendly local college that will let you major in astrophysics, as astronomy is the only thing that interests you as much as reading science fiction, fantasy and fairy tales. Go to that college and (somehow) continue writing: Tolkien fanfic, this time.

While studying astrophysics, flunk calculus. Realize that this is probably a dealbreaker, and—after some thought—change streams, using the other half of your science-and-nursing scholarship (which is the only way you could ever have afforded to go to college at all) to go to nursing school instead. Meanwhile, start writing some strange kind of non-fanfic fiction about original characters in a medieval-flavored landscape with unexpected cultural add-ons that would doubtless make Tolkien shake his head in extreme bemusement.

Graduate nursing school. Continue writing while working in (at first) a truly dystopian psychiatric-hospital setting, and then (within a matter of months) in the most prestigious psychiatric clinic on the US's East Coast. Discover (in passing) that your colleagues do not consider your fiction anything to be concerned about in the professional sense, and are definitely absolutely unconcerned with any conversation you might ever have "had" with Mighty Mouse.

Meet a Star Trek writer at an early Trek convention. After becoming friends with him, eventually burn out on your clinic job and (at something of a loose end) go to work part time for your friend as his assistant. While doing that work, realize, to your utter shock, that it is apparently possible to actually make money doing the kind of writing you've spent a significant portion of your life so far doing for free. (An option that honest to God[dess] has never previously occurred to you until you see it happening in front of you every day.)

Emboldened by this realization, finish writing a book containing your non-fanfic characters and show it to your friend. To your complete shock, have it sell to an actual publisher a few weeks later. Have the book be nominated for awards within the year. Don't worry about winning them. Worry more about what the hell you should do next.

Figure out that the thing to do next is is write another book. (Which sells.) And another. And another.

Don't stop.

Keep telling stories. Keep writing. Keep selling (even if sometimes circumstances require you to do this yourself). Never turn down offered work, especially in films and TV. (Specifically, when a story editor hunts you down after reading your first book and asks if you want to write cartoons, SAY YES for fuck's sake. Over time this will cause you significant aggro from badly-behaved directors and misogynistic production staff, but it will also be a source of great joy.)

Keep doing your work whatever continent you happen to be on, and meet many extraordinary people in the process. When you realize that one of these people whom you've run into is your soulmate—or you're his—snatch him as quickly as possible off the dating market and marry him before anybody else starts getting cute ideas on the subject.** Live many happy years with him, in which every day is an adventure. (Noting here that it really helps if he does the same kind of work you do. As Gandalf says, this "saves the long explanations needed" for so-called Normal People.)

Never give up your fandoms, no matter how old. Never be afraid to acquire new ones. (Because those fusion fics have to come from somewhere...) Keep working to find your joy. There's always more you haven't found yet.

Rinse. Repeat. Tell stories. Keep talking to people who aren't there (until you cause them to be, which you will discover is a full-time job, but one in which persistence pays off). Don't stop until you decide to give up breathing.

...And keep working that eyebrow. 😏

Anyway: that's what I've got on the subject so far. Do let me know how your project of Growing Up Like This turns out.

(And BTW, just so you know: the "growing up" part is optional.)

*It would be tempting to attribute this film to being the cause for your long fascination with Switzerland, but data to support this conclusion remains thin on the ground.

**NB: biological sex, gender, pronouns and and preferences of your soulmate may vary from any or all of your early expectations. Don't let that bother you. When you recognize the One, don't waste your chance.

So, a lot of kept think that adoption trauma is the child going through say foster care or the orphanage, and then coming out fucked up. (Probably as a result of through the grapevine talk about Eastern European orphanages) But Adoption trauma is a lot more complex, which is also why a lot of adoptees present with complex PTSD.

Adoption trauma includes, but is not limited to:

Genetic separation from our family. For us, it's often a death, but without the certainty since the majority of us can't find our birth families. Often adoptees have crippling abandonment issues.

Lack of mirroring in our immediate family so that we often feel separate.

Separation from siblings, if it was done in the name of adoption. (Twins and twin studies used adoption)

Not knowing our medical data, or being totally uncertain because of epigenetics.

The uncertainty eats at us.

Lost time with our birth family, even if we are in an open adoption.

Not being certain of our past because the information keeps changing on us. In movies, they make this "cute" but in reality, it causes spiraling depression.

*Sometimes* it is added with foster care and orphanages.

Finding out the systemic wrongs that formed the adoption industrial complex: Name your systemic wrong, adoption absorbed it all. Always causes us a spiral. We call it getting out of the fog.

Often not having defenses against Kept being invasive by asking questions that are boundary pushers. (I call this process grooming. My boundaries are still shaky.)

Being denied a voice in media and being told we don't understand adoption.

Being told that adoption fixed everything and is made up of cute babies.

Being told we are perpetual children. We could be older than the person talking to us and they will still talk down to us.

Being told the way to fix our adoption trauma is to adopt.

Often adoption trauma comes with created NDs and disabilities. C-PTSD, bipolar, depression, anxiety. But ALSO, ADHD (even if they were in a "loving" foster home), Sensory Processing disorder, etc.

Things that compound Adoption trauma often in our environment (beyond the usual):

People asking where our "real" parents are.

People asking us to choose parents by title, rather than by how they treated us when they find out we're adopted.

People auto-assuming the narrative of birth and adoptive parents for us in front of us rather than getting to know who they were as individuals.

People making jump assumptions about how adoption is—often as a magical cure.

People asking invasive medical or history questions because we said the word adopted, and super focusing on that without caring about our feelings and how we feel about our adoption and the adoption industrial complex.

People trying to comfort our adoptive parents that we look like them.

People threatening our safety by saying crap like, "We'll take you to the orphanage"

People calling our adoptive parents saviors.

Parents expecting us to be "teachable moments" for fucking adults. Child safety comes first, you assholes.

People saying, "But I know someone who adopted and those children don't have trauma." Yeah, because people go around talking about their trauma freely when you get the above behavior?

People calling us angry for asking for better child welfare laws.

Rehoming and the whole situation that allows that to happen. STOP REHOMING.

Death— Adoptees and Foster Youth are notoriously bad at handling death.

But you're not really _fill in heritage_ because you're adopted.

Seeing Adoptive Parents get PAID for talking about adoption while we get DENIED unless we write a memoir, which then is marketed to only adoptees. (Our pictures always get plastered onto those articles written by adoptive parents, in which case we get harassed even more.)

For interracial adoptees, often we get paraded out as proof that our parents are "not racist", which the system is built on racism.

How much did you cost?

Every time we talk we have to talk about our birth parents and adoptive parents and how "good" or "bad" they are in polarizing terms.

BTW, for Adoptive Parents: Teach boundaries first. CHILD SAFETY COMES FIRST. Invasive questions: The child has a right to refuse. Any questions about cost, not in front of your kid.

The thing is that people often think adoption is this magical place that heals all hurts in a way that they don't imagine in other scenarios.

If your parent died, and the other parent remarried and you got a step-parent, no one would say to you, "Oh, well you got a new parent, so you can FORGET about your dead parent." Absolutely they do this with adoption. People don't treat losing parents as a trauma. But adoption does that. And we don't know if they are alive or dead.

If you met a stranger on the street, would you ask them, "Hey how much do you weigh and how much do you make in a year?" NO, right? But with adoption, for some reason, people think it is.

On the street you meet someone that looks sad. They tell you their mother died, but they just realized they don't know their family history. And would you seriously tell them, well, it's not that bad, trauma affects us all differently? Fuck no. You'd be called a cold heartless jerk. And rightfully so. But with adoption 100% this is called acceptable. Look, you're adopted, so it's not that baddd... is it?

Which parent do you want to shoot more? Your mommy or your daddy? YOU MUST CHOOSE. No reasonable person says this, but people ask us which set of parents we love more as if we are experiments. You do get the twin experiments were amoral, right? RIGHT? We got the answer through genetics and epigenetics. A mix of both. So shut up with this question. We get to choose by the quality of the relationship as us as individuals. Just like when someone has two sisters, they don't go, welp, I can't have a second sister. You go by how the person treats you. BTW, this question is totally anti-queer too. And queer people don't have to buy into this het normativity at all and say there are only two.

Why does the word "adoption" make it like it's unicorns shitting glittering rainbow poop. Adoption agencies got to dominate the narrative, and it acts like an advertisement to say you get to save your child, thus own them. But as I said before, saving a person doesn't give you the right to own them, and saviorism and parenting don't mix. Altruism isn't "What's in it for me?" Is that what the Christians are teaching about adoption? Look, you get to "save" this child and then discount price to own them for life. Certainly not what Jesus taught. There's stories of Jesus making sure that only true orphans ended up with new parents, and preferably in their own families. (Because I bothered to read the Bible as a Jew.)

That said some things Adoptees would like as alternatives:

Permanent Guardianship. It's worked in Australia and New Zealand.

Queer communal families instead of adoption. Like Andrew Solomon and a lot of queer families are finding ways around adoption and IVF. They partner up with other queer people, so that children know their genetic past. (Also remember that adoption preys on queer people)

Communal families? Doesn't have to be queer. Do you need to raise your own blood?

Intrafamily adoption with support.

Foster Care people are trained in mental health support and required to do so. (This was a proposal under Obama)

Adoptive Parents (if there has to be some) are trained in trauma and for the harder cases, the children go to them.

That we fix all systemic wrongs feeding the system. i.e. get rid of the 99% bloat.

Adoption agencies are abolished. Instead it goes through courts (which is possible if you cut down the influx).

In cases of abuse, the children can put put into protective custody, but get an option of a free name change upon becoming an adult.