Finding Me

Happy National Adoption Month:  To promote awareness for children in foster care in the United States. It began  as National Adoption Week in 1976 by Governor Michael Dukakis and it was declared by President Reagan in 1984. Then it was expanded to a whole month by President Clinton. 

The Adoption Series will feature those in the adoption triad: The Birth Family, Adoptee, Adoptive Family. There may be differing opinions among those in the adoption community and that is ok. It is important to respect other's opinions and sometimes one can learn from someone's different opinions. 

This week in The Adoption Series: The Adoptee. The following post was written by an Adoptee. 

Please Remember that this post doesn't represent the opinions or experiences of all adoptees. This post only represents this adoptee's thoughts and opinions.

When I was in middle school, I loved playing sports and my favorite sport to play was football. Waking up early in the summer morning for practice, laughing with my friends on the sidelines, and fighting for each other on the field was the best. In football I wasn’t tall enough to play lineman and I wasn’t quick enough to play wide receiver, but what I could do was throw the ball. Every day in evenings when my dad got home from work I would ask him if we could go to the park and play catch. It was so much fun throwing the ball around with my friends and pretending like we were pros.  However, things changed and during my freshman year, I quite football after three weeks of practice and changed to running cross country. Why the change you might ask? I didn’t stop because I lost interest, but I simplycame to the realty that I wasn’t supposed to play football. You see I am an Asian guy and I also happen to not be the tallest person in the world. During my freshman year, I was faced with the reality that it didn’t matter how good I could throw if I couldn’t see over the guys in front of me. I was throwing blind. After a few really rough practices I decided football wasn’t for me. Now this was very tough time in my life for me, because it was hard watching my friends, who I grew up with, play the sport I loved.  Now I know this happens to most of us at some point in our lives where we realize that our bodies can’t match the things we want them to accomplish, but for me it was really tough as the only Asian in a school with all white kids. Also, being different didn’t stop at sports either. In high school, there was this girl I liked, and we had been friends a long time and had a variety of classes together. She was nice and sweet and she was the girl everyone wanted to be friends with. My sophomore in high school I asked her out and to my dismay she told me that she wasn’t interested in dating Asians, but still wanted to be friends. Now I get everyone has preferences and I understand that she has hers, but that didn’t stop the internal pain and rejection that I look happened every time I looked into the mirror. 

​For me, the hardest part of growing up was always being different from everyone else. Different from my parents, my teachers, and my friends. It was stressful, and now that I look back, I wish I had more connections with other Asians my age.

​However, I also want to add that as an adopted kid that things aren’t always going to bad, the key dealing with my struggles is controlling the things you can and letting go of the things you can’t because at the end of the day the only person I could be was me. 

​On the cross-country team, I made varsity my freshman year and was Captain the year after that. It wasn’t football, but because I worked hard I was able to find success as something I worked very hard for. I loved running so much that later in college I managed to run my first marathon.  My junior year in highschool I started dating this really cute American girl who I met in theater club. We aren’t dating today, but we grew as people together and shared a lot of happy memories. In college, I started to learn Chinese and made a few Chinese American friends who I consider good friends. So if there is any other adoptee out there reading this, I hope to tell them that it gets better and that I hope they aren’t afraid to be themselves. 

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