I spend a lot of my time online in adoptee-centric spaces, but I don't comment often yet for two reasons. One, everything online has become so linked that I usually need to log out of accounts that identify me directly because not everyone in my families supports my delving into my own reality of living as an adoptee -- and I'm not ready to damage those bridges with my own truth. And two, because sometimes I still don't know what to say.

But finding adoptee-written and supported spaces online has made a WORLD of difference in my life, and I wish they had been around in my teenaged years, which did not go well. I thought I was going completely crazy a lot of the time because no one understood me when I tried to tell them what was going on. I didn't understand so much. Finding writings of other adoptees, I see myself and the things I didn't understand reflected over and over, in a way I never had. It's a different mirroring than the genetic mirroring I was looking for so hard, but it's just as important to me.

Because of adoptee-centric spaces online, I've come safely through several years that have been a whirlwind for me and included some contact with both sides of my first families. Without these spaces, even with the comments sections I sometimes need to avoid, I think I might still think I was losing all connection to reality. These spaces, where MY feelings can be validated by other adoptees' writings and experiences, are the only place where people don't ask me how other people feel about my decisions.

The family I've met so far were both strangers and family. And I'm okay with that. That's what complicated life as an adoptee means, at least to me.

Becky, I think that's Laura's point -- that there are children who need homes. That adoption, if it is to ever exist ethically, must do so because CHILDREN need homes, not because adults want to be parents. It sounds like semantics, like word play, but it isn't. When adoption is because adults want to be parents, then the focus of adoption is on the needs of adults. When adoption exists because children need homes, the childrens' needs become the center and focus of how adoption happens, and that means that some form of open adoption would become the norm, as we all need and want to know where we began, how we came to be.

This so very much reminds me of all of Matthew Salesses' discussions about what is adoption-related and what isn't -- how can any of us tell? It's so hard to separate who I am from my life experience as an adopted person that I have no clue if my rejection sensitivity is "just me" or "just me because I'm adopted." To a degree, it doesn't matter, but I'm working really hard on ID-ing the triggers so I can at least sit back and watch myself over-react without inflicting it on everyone around me.

I feel like I've taken my story back, and I own it now, but I also cannot share it as freely because the details are so much more personal now.

What gets me most as an adult, out of the fog, is thinking of another adoptee I know and how his story was shared between the adults when we were kids -- the speculation and discussion about the unknown details. It nauseates me now, and made me very uncomfortable then. There was just something not right about it.

I don't live in fear. But I fight for every bit of trust I place in other people. I fight my need to control anything that might affect me, even a little, so that I can trust other people. And I fight for understanding from some of those closest to me.

The first two are definitely worth it, on every level, in order to live the life I want to live and be the version of me I want to be. The last one hurts, specifically a few instances.

As a citizen of this country, I have a right to all legal documents the government holds on me, and my adoption should not change that. Adoptees do not deserve to be treated as second-class citizens in regards to access to government documents ABOUT US.

That's a completely different issue than relationships, and it is always hard to read when they are conflated. The government and laws control documents, not people.

As for relationships? I have a right to speak to anyone I encounter or seek out, whether they are genetically related to me or not. Any of those people have the right to tell me to buzz off. If I continue to pester someone, that's harassment. That is a completely separate issue from right to access my own files.