By Cheyne Bull, adoptee
It was June 2020 and I was working in a frontline homeless service in the middle of a pandemic. My team were doing ‘fun’ activities each week to keep us connected and lighten the stress of our work. For this week’s activity, we each had to do a little presentation about how we had ended up in our current role supporting women experiencing homelessness.
When it came to my turn and I stood there in front of my team, I felt my heart rate accelerate. “I am adopted, so I become a fighter for social justice the minute I was born. When I was adopted, my birth triggered my involvement in a system set up to legally and physically separate me from my family, biology and any information or connection to who I am or where I came from. I became part of a silenced group of people with few rights. That’s how I became interested in social change and supporting disenfranchised people.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realised that they crystallised thoughts that had floated around in my head for some time. To me, my work with marginalised people had never been anything except personal.
I know that for the many of us adopted folks working in social services and advocacy, this will resonate. When we are fighting for oppressed people’s voices to be heard, we are asking to be heard too. When we advocate for better options for a child in state care, we are advocating for the care we never received. When we work to help others understand how trauma affect people and see them more likely to be homeless, incarcerated, experiencing mental health issues, we are asking that people try too to understand the impact of what has happened to us.
Since I said those words out loud last year, I have been practicing speaking up more. I’m back working with kids in care, which in one way or another I seem to always circle back to – though it was only a few weeks ago that I consciously connected the dots that I too was a child under the care of the state.
I had always understood that there were plenty of parallels between the kids I supported and my own life experiences, but the reality that I too had been allocated a case manager, had been discussed in meetings, had been assigned to a foster carer, had paperwork ticked off and ultimately sent on my way to a minimally assessed ‘forever family’ (who it turned out would struggle with the forever part), never fully coalesced for me until I was sitting in a meeting at an organisation that now paid my wages, with money made from government contracts paid to keep a broken system ticking over for another day.
So, to speaking up. I’ve been practicing. It feels awkward as hell and often ‘oversharing’ is frowned upon in an organisational model based on patriarchal systems that celebrate detached responses to the horror we see day in and day out working with the country’s most traumatised people. I remember once being told in a meeting at a leading service provider that I “needed to keep the emotion out” of a decision about exiting a young person out of the service and into homelessness. I remember a psychologist writing up a training proposal for working with adopted people and my feedback being requested as an afterthought only to be largely disregarded when I tried to highlight the difference between kids who have gone through adoption vs foster care.
None of that though is an excuse not to speak up. And like anything, the more I do it, the easier it gets. As I got started in my new role a few months ago, I was sure to include being adopted in my introduction. It’s damn relevant to the work we do and I’m now 40 years old and exhausted from not mentioning my adoption just to make life more comfortable for people around me. I recently referred to my experience getting my DHS case notes and records as an adult when coaching staff on how to write case notes sensitively (mine were short and redacted, but I haven’t forgotten the physical description that noted that I had a “wonky” eye).
In closing, this is a shout out to all adoptees, who have been slowly but surely (or quickly and loudly) outing yourself and speaking up as an adoptee – whether you are doing it at work, at your family Christmas or in your new mum’s group. Each time you do it, it will make it that much easier for the next person to do the same. And hopefully (we can but dream), make people think a little more critically about adoption. And for me at least, each time I do speak up, it scrapes off a just a little bit more of that shame that was imposed on me. The shame of being adopted is visceral, borne from an unsigned social contract that is broken the moment we demonstrate anything except extreme gratefulness for our trauma.
This article originally appeared in the August 2021 VANISH VOICE newsletter. Become a VANISH member to receive every edition or read past editions here.