Adoptees & Being Beholden | Musings of A Black Female TRA

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the work I have started to do to publish a book of poems that I wrote as an adolescent and how I wanted the proceeds from selling that book to help with funding my efforts to grow The Daily Adoptee.

What I didn’t write about is how even thinking of asking for people to pay for something that I am putting a lot of effort and skill into made me feel dirty, unworthy and:

Beholden.

It’s also not lost on me that I was penning a piece that would be so relevant as our country is in the beginning stages of a pandemic. A crisis is a major, unavoidable, trigger for those who are adopted or are in foster care. One of the reasons I feel triggered in this new climate is that I was trained not to ask for more. Literally.

I grew up hearing repeatedly that I was “lucky.” My first APs loved to tell me I should be grateful and more appreciative of the fact that I was able to have 3 meals a day and a roof over my head instead of “laying in a ditch somewhere” because my biological mother gave me up for adoption. The constant reminder that I had better than I should have EVER had is one of those unspeakable acts of racism that transracial adoptees silently absorb alone. It’s why we preach that “saviorism” is so harmful.

That warped my sense of duty. The pressure I felt even as a child to fit into a mold they had created for me to show them that I was indeed ‘grateful and appreciative” of them wanting to have a family was strong. In a cruel twist of fate, I was asked to be grateful for being neglected, unnurtured, manipulated, beaten and forgotten.

It gives a different ring to when people tell you “It’s so nice you were adopted by such a nice family.” The child I was tried until I realized they would never accept anything less than absolute control of my body, hopes, and dreams (and even then there would be dissatisfaction). My health included.

Because to them “We didn’t have do adopt you.”

And that’s how I learned its better to do what you can for yourself versus relying on others to help ease or pave your way. I learned that my very existence meant I owed a debt and I wanted to make sure I didn’t own anyone else my livelihood or identity.

This feeling of being beholden plagues many adoptees throughout our lives. It’s the trauma trait that I have to constantly work at “relearning.” It never goes away. As I see other TRA’s building their platforms and businesses I wonder if this plagues them too. Because we have so much to offer. We’re already getting people to realize the sounding voice of our unique experiences of being adopted gives them some of the most important voices to changing and reforming our era’s welfare and family systems worldwide.

We are the link. Our stories are so varied but I feel the cumulation of the most pressing issues in our countries flow through us just as much as they flow through any other socio-economic “class” of person.

So to my fellow adoptees: We aren’t beholden when we ask people who want access to our knowledge. If this is the work we are building our careers on? Our post-secondary, masters, and advanced degrees, and all of the time and money we are investing in our side-hustles or our main jobs and businesses providing products and services, working in every industry on this planet; however, you’ve decided to make an impact on the world. We can ask for more. We’re just learning to feel comfortable doing it. Many of us face intentional and unintentional gaslighting about our worth through the most important development stages of a child’s life.

Learning that I viewed myself worth as being directly correlated to feeling worthy to receive help in the first place was painful. It’s still such a painful growing process.

But.

We not only owe ourselves of owning our worth; we’re changing the world in BIG ways and we are proud of it. We know what we are doing works. Adoptive parents know it too because they are engaging with our content and telling us how they have learned so much.

But we can’t do this for free. If its a workbook, merchandise, special content, 1-to-1 consults, adoptee mentoring sessions, mental health services, etc, etc, etc. You have to invest in our businesses and the fact we are an important part of the future of our world.

Adoptees that are building dreams and goals and businesses, don’t let this current climate that we’re in let you fall too far back on our old triggers. What you are pricing your products and services at is valid, your hard work and insights deserve to be recognized and celebrated.