I wasn’t adopted at birth.
Before I was 7 weeks old, I had four different caregivers—
after surviving two abortion attempts.

I arrived into the world as a disruption.
Unwanted. Unexpected.
And already deeply imprinted by chaos I couldn’t yet name.

So I became the good girl.
The chameleon.
The one who didn’t ask too many questions.

But beneath the smile was a little girl wondering,
“Where do I really come from?”
“Why do I feel like such a burden?”
“What parts of me have to disappear in order to be accepted?”

Years later, reunion cracked everything open.
Some answers came. Many didn’t.
But what I found was deeper:
a mirror to my pain, a map back to myself,
and a grief I could no longer outrun.

I learned to perform connection before I ever got to feel it.
I carried invisible grief in a body that looked fine from the outside.
And I silenced the ache, even as it whispered through my nervous system, my relationships, my sense of self.

It took years before I realized I was living in fragments.
And even longer before I stopped trying to fix what was never broken.

My healing hasn’t been linear.
It’s been layered, cellular, and sacred.
A return. A reckoning. A remembering.

I’ve met the parts of me that once protected me with perfection, people-pleasing, and proving.
I’ve grieved the birth mother I never really knew and can still grieve the versions of me that never got to be.

And I’ve come home to a truth no one could give me:
I am mine. I always was.

I love the version of me I am becoming and the resilience that has brought me to where I am today.
I honestly wouldn’t trade the triggers that led to trauma responses because they have taught me so much…

Adoption is complicated.
But I am not confused anymore about my worth.

This is the face of someone who stopped performing and started belonging—to herself first.
And from that place, I built a coaching program to help other adoptees do the same.
Because being in a community where you are seen, heard, understood and witnessed is priceless.

I share this not because it’s tied up in a bow…
But because it’s real.
And real deserves to be witnessed.