The Parts of Me That Didn’t Fit: An Adoptee’s Journey of Identity, Belonging, and Continuing to Find Herself

For a long time, I didn’t have the words for some of the things I felt.

The wound of not fitting inI knew I was adopted.  I knew I was loved.  I knew I had been raised by people who loved and cared for me and who were my family.  And yet, there were parts of me that never quite seemed to fit.

There were things I felt deeply, ways I saw and responded to the world, and pieces of my personality and temperament that seemed to come out of nowhere.  And at times I would look around the family I was raised in and wonder, “Why am I like this when nobody else seems to be?”

As a child, I didn’t have the understanding to recognize that some of these differences might simply be a part of who I was.  Instead, like many children do, I looked inward, which often looked like this…..Is there something wrong with me?  Maybe I just need to try harder.  Maybe I need to be different.  Maybe I need to learn how to fit in.  Or worse, maybe I am just flawed beyond repair.

And I think this is one of the complicated things about adoption that we don’t talk about enough.  Sometimes the question isn’t simply, “Who are my biological parents (which can come with so much guilt and shame for even wondering)?”  Sometimes the question is actually, “Who am I when the people who raised me and the person I seem to be at my core don’t seem to match?”

That can be a very confusing place to live for a child, because children need to feel they belong.

And when belonging feels dependent, even subtly, on learning how to fit into the family around us, we can become very good at adapting.  We learn what is acceptable.  We learn what gets approval.  We learn what parts of ourselves seem easier for other people to love, or sometimes even just believe no part of who we are is lovable.  And sometimes without realizing it, we begin to lose touch with the difference between who we are and who we have learned to be.

There is another layer of this that can be difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it (we only know what we know through our experiences).

I was born with certain tendencies, ways of experiencing the world, emotions, sensitivities, interests, and ways of relating to others.  I was also raised in a family with its own values, beliefs, personalities, communication styles, expectations, and ways of doing things.  Of course, every family experiences differences between children and parents, and anyone can sometimes feel like the odd one out.  But adoption can add another layer, leaving an almost impossible question beneath it all, “Is this simply who I am, or do I need to change to belong?”

And when you don’t have the biological connection that might help you make sense of some of those similarities and differences, it can be harder to answer.  You can feel like you are constantly in your head trying to translate yourself.  Why do I feel things so deeply?  Why do I react this way?  Why don’t I seem to think about things the way my family does?  Why do certain things matter so much to me?  Why does this feel so natural to me when it seems so foreign to everyone else?  And when you don’t have an explanation, it is very easy for a child to make the explanation about themselves.

I think this is where some of the deepest wounds can begin.  Not necessarily because an adoptive family did something wrong.  Not because the child wasn’t loved.  And not because adoption itself can be reduced to one simple experience.  But because a child is trying to make sense of a world they don’t yet have the emotional or developmental capacity to understand.And sometimes the story they create to make sense of it is that they are the problem, which can be a continued theme for them throughout life.

And there can be another layer to this that is particularly complicated for an adoptive child.  Sometimes we are afraid to ask the questions that might help us understand ourselves.What if I ask about my biological parents and it hurts my parents who are raising me?

What if this has them think I don’t love them?

What if they think I am ungrateful?

What if I tell them that I feel different and they don’t understand?

What if I ask why I don’t look like them?

What if I want to know where I came from?

What if wanting to know means there is something wrong with me, or worse, has them stop loving me?

A child doesn’t necessarily need to be told, “Don’t ask those questions”.  Sometimes they simply pick up on the discomfort of the subject.  A change in tone.  A quick reassurance.  A subject that gets redirected.  A comment that suggests, “You are our child, and that’s all that matters”.

And of course, those words come from love.  An adoptive parent may desperately want their child to know that they are loved, chosen, wanted, and fully part of the family.  They may worry that acknowledging differences will somehow make those things bigger.  They may believe that if they simply treat their child like everyone else, the child won’t feel different.

Sometimes parents may also have their own discomfort, grief, fear, insecurity, or uncertainty around adoption that they don’t know how to talk about or simply don’t want to.

So, differences can get glossed over….

“It doesn’t matter that you don’t look like us”.

“We don’t love you any differently than our other children”.

“We’re your real family”.

“All that matters is how much we wanted you”.

The intention may be to reassure, but for a child who is already wondering why they feel different, reassurance can sometimes unintentionally close the door to curiosity.  The child might be hearing something very different underneath those messages, which is “We’re not supposed to talk about that”, which can just reinforce that feeling of “there’s something very wrong with me”.

And so, they learn to keep the questions inside.  They might stop asking.  They may decide their curiosity is somehow hurtful.  They may learn to protect their parents from their feelings.  And this is where guilt can become particularly complicated, because the child may be carrying very real questions about identity, belonging, loss, and where they came from while simultaneously feeling responsible for making sure the people who raised them don’t feel rejected.  Many of us adoptees live in a state of hypervigilance, scanning for whatever could stop us from feeling connected, loved, safe, or secure in our relationships.  We become incredibly attuned to other people’s moods, reactions, and needs, sometimes before we have even had a chance to recognize our own.  We may become people pleasers, over-explainers, perfectionists, peacekeepers, or simply very good at being who we think others need us to be, because the thought of being rejected is an impossible one for us.

That’s a tremendous emotional burden for anyone to carry, let alone a child.

Perhaps what an adopted child sometimes needs most isn’t for someone to convince them that the differences don’t matter.  Perhaps what they need more is to hear someone say, “I can see that this matters to you.  You don’t have to protect me from your questions or feelings.  Let’s talk about it”.  Because acknowledging that something is different doesn’t diminish the love within an adoptive family.  Sometimes, it is precisely what allows a child to stop wondering whether their differences are something they need to hide.

It gives them permission to be curious about their own story. 

And perhaps most importantly, it gives them the opportunity to discover that being different doesn’t mean being wrong.

The wound of rejection and abandonment

This is a BIG one, and what I have learnt is that it is one that doesn’t seem to just conclude when you work with it, but one that bubbles up and resurfaces throughout life, as it is not a cut and dry wound.An adopted child may know intellectually that they were placed for adoption for reasons that had nothing to do with whether or not they were worthy of love, but knowing something intellectually and feeling it emotionally are two VERY different things.There is an early experience of separation that happened before we had the words to understand it.For an infant, separation from the person who carried and gave birth to them isn’t something that can simply be explained away.  There is no cognitive understanding of why it is happening.  There is only the experience of a familiar presence no longer being there, followed by the need to form attachment and safety with someone new.  Some adoptees describe this as a primal wound – the deep, preverbal impact of being separated from our birth mother before we could understand what was happening.

We now understand that our earliest relationships and experiences of safety can influence how we learn to relate to ourselves and to other people.  When an experience happens before we have language for it, we don’t necessarily remember it as a story.  Instead, its impact may be carried in our bodies, our emotional responses, and the ways we come to understand connection, safety, rejection, and belonging.  This does not mean that every adopted person will experience separation in the same way, or that adoption is the only determining factor in how someone will relate throughout their life, but for some of us, that early loss can become part of the emotional landscape we carry forward.  And as we grow, that experience can sometimes become woven into how we understand relationships, or even impact the feeling of devastation that can accompany the loss of a relationship.

For some adoptees, rejection may not feel like simply “this person doesn’t want to be with me anymore”.  It can touch something much older and much deeper…A breakup may feel like more than just the ending of that relationship.  A friendship ending may feel like more than just the loss of that friendship.  Someone pulling away may stir feelings that seem disproportionately painful to what is actually just happening in that moment.  The pain lingers.  It holds on and can bring hidden feelings from the past rushing forward like a tsunami, sometimes making the experience feel excruciatingly beyond unbearable.  And sometimes it can be difficult to understand why.We may find ourselves thinking, “Why am I reacting this strongly?”, “Why can’t I just let this go for good?”, “Why does this hurt so much?”.

Perhaps part of the answer is that the loss in front of us isn’t the only loss we are responding to.  Sometimes a present-day loss can brush up against an old wound.  It can awaken something preverbal and deeply familiar – the raw feeling of someone important being ripped away, the remembrance that connection can easily disappear in a split second, or the question of whether we were somehow just not enough to make someone stay (yet again).

This doesn’t mean that every difficult relationship experience is caused by adoption, or that every adoptee will experience rejection in this way, but for some of us, the emotional response to a present-day loss can carry the weight of more than what is happening right now.  And like with any sort of grief, there is often no notice of when or where it is going to hit.

And one of the main things I have come to understand about these wounds through my own experience, as well as others’ experiences that have been shared with me, is that wounds aren’t necessarily finished simply because we have talked about them, understood them, or even healed parts of them.  As one layer peels back, another is exposed.

Life has a way of touching those tender places again….

A relationship ending.

Someone we love becoming ill.

The death of a parent.

Becoming a parent ourselves.

Finding new information about our biological family.

Moments where we feel that information rather than just hear it.

Meeting our biological family, when and if that becomes possible, and whatever that experience brings.

Reaching an age when we begin to see our childhood through different eyes.

Or even something as seemingly ordinary as looking in the mirror and recognizing a feature that looks like someone we have never known.

These can all unexpectedly bring something to the surface.

The wound isn’t necessarily opening because we have failed to heal - healing is an ongoing journey.  Sometimes we are simply meeting an old experience from a new place in our lives.  And perhaps that is why adoption can feel like something that unfolds throughout a lifetime rather than something that happened in childhood.  We continue to grow.  Our understanding changes.  We gain language for the things we couldn’t name before.  We discover pieces of our history.  We experience losses and beginnings of our own.

And with each stage of life, we may find ourselves returning to questions we thought we had already answered.

Who am I?

Where do I belong?

What parts of me are mine?

Why do I always feel this way?

And, perhaps most importantly, can I finally trust that I don’t have to change who I am in order to be loved?

Moving from “what is wrong with me?” to “Who am I?”

And perhaps these are not questions we need to answer all at once.  Maybe part of the healing is simply learning that we are allowed to ask them.  To become curious about ourselves without immediately assuming there is something wrong with us.  To notice the ways we have adapted to belong, and gently begin to wonder, “Is this who I am, or is this who I learned I needed to be?”

For me, I think this is where some of the deepest work begins.  Not trying to decide which family, which history, or which version of myself is the “real” one.  Not in having to choose between loving the people who raised me and wanting to understand, be with, and love the people I came from.  There can be room for all of it.

I can love my family and still wonder where certain parts of me came from.  I can be grateful for how I was raised and still grieve what I lost.  And in my situation, I can love the family I was raised in and the family I came from. I can understand why I learned to be sensitive to other people’s feelings, to adapt, to people-please, to work hard to belong, and still decide that I don’t have to live that way forever.

Perhaps healing is not about becoming someone completely different.  Maybe it is about becoming curious enough to discover the parts of ourselves that were there before we learned to make ourselves fit.

The parts that were never wrong.

The parts that didn’t need fixing.

The parts that simply needed to be known. 

And maybe, over time, we can begin to replace the question, “What is wrong with me?” with something much more compassionate, “What happened to me?  What did I learn from it?  What parts of that learning still serve me?  And who am I underneath all the ways I learned to survive?”

I don’t think adoption, or the losses and experiences that come with it, are something we necessarily “get over”.  It can become part of the landscape of who we are.  A story that we understand differently as we move through the different seasons of our lives.  But perhaps we can reach a place where we truly feel and believe that belonging no longer means abandoning pieces of ourselves.  Where being different doesn’t mean being wrong.  Where curiosity doesn’t mean disloyalty.  Where loving the people who raised us does not require us to stop wondering or wanting to connect with where we came from.  And perhaps most importantly, where we can finally begin to trust that we don’t have to change who we are in order to be loved.

Maybe the journey isn’t about finding the person we were supposed to be.  Maybe it is about finally getting to know and love the person who has been there all along.