I Have Spent My Entire Life Looking For My Face in the Faces of Strangers
Ihave a secret that I have never told anyone in my life before. Not my family, not my friends, not my partner, or anyone else close to me. It’s a secret I’ve kept preciously close to my chest, guarding it like some shameful relic. A trinket I can neither rid myself of nor expose for fear of exposing myself.
What is that secret? What is that great shame? That my life, my mind, is possessed by a frantic heartbeat. A rhythm of childish desperation and a need to find root in the world.
I have spent my entire life looking for my face in the face of anyone and everyone I meet. The curse of the adopted child, I am nothing if not a scanner in this world, searching for some sign of existence belonging to the limited one I’ve been handed.
This is what it means to be an adopted adult.
Days of my life, weeks and months, have been spent studying people I know and people I’ve ever met. I drink in their features and rush to the mirror of my mind to compare them to my own. Do they have my nose? Do they have eyes like mine? Skin like mine? Could they hide a piece of me in them? What about the other way around?
Understanding the puzzle pieces of family history is a privilege unremarked.
I don’t know when this habit began. If someone pushed me to the edge of a cliff and screamed, “When did you start looking for a trace of yourself?” I would have no moment to answer them. It was a slow slide. An almost glacial descent into the spiral of thread-pulling that must exist for all adopted people.
However it started, whenever it started, it was slow. Drip by drip, it became the hidden rhythm in my mind. Where do you come from? Where do you come from? Where do you come from? I was possessed by it. Obsessed with it. Consumed by a fire of curiosity that burned me up from the inside out.
Most people are lucky enough to never know this consumption. To not know what it means to have no trace of yourself, no root in the histories that are so central to who we are as…
0 Comments