I Have Spent My Entire Life Looking For My Face In the Face of Strangers

I have 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 people.

Understanding the puzzle pieces of their family story is a privilege that most carry unremarked. They don’t even know how lucky they are to exist in a world where they don’t have to look around corners for fragments of who they might be.

The true betrayal is in the denial of hope.

Adopted people live continually astride both the future and the past. People like us must chase a future (like everyone else) while systematically being denied any semblance of a past.

For me, this denial came from the hands of the women in my life. An adopted mother who allowed crucial information about my biological father to be destroyed. A birth mother who lied to everyone about my existence, who regularly denied me, and in her final betrayal claimed a head injury that had erased me (and my biological father) entirely from her memory.

Women who hated themselves and wanted me to hate myself too. Women who wanted to rip apart their past so badly they were willing to rip up an infant between them.

The examples remain sprinkled throughout my life. They pepper my memories like open wounds.

When I was ten my adopted mother took me to Florida to see my birth mother. We were going to see a movie together, I was told. Birdcage with Nathan Lane and Robin Williams. We parked outside the theatre and waited. My birth mother never showed up. A few days later we made the trek out to her house to meet her. She spent the entirety of the visit in another room and refused to speak to me or acknowledge me.

Where others think of their ancestors, the treks and sacrifices that were made to bring them to this point in the world, these are the memories that I have.

I don’t have ancestors. I have selfish women hiding me away beneath the folds of pain they don’t have the courage to confront or resolve.

That’s the true betrayal that both of these women are guilty of in my life. That is the role they play in creating the haunting hum of questions that now fill up those shameful, secret spaces in my life.

They denied me the hope of an understanding of myself. They denied me a chance to exist as a normal person without a constantly questioned past.

I will never know who I am or the history that brought me here.

There are no answers for me. No solutions to this loss of hope. In many ways, I don’t exist. I am a person without roots. An intruder, a refugee in the history of the family that chose to scoop me up from the trash, take on the burden that is me.

In some ways that is beautiful. If I have no history, if I have no link to the past, then I am a free agent. My plate is cleared, there are no ancestral sacrifices for me to reimburse. I am myself, an entirely clean slate, who can choose to become a part of a different sort of legacy.

In other ways, though, this secret makes me sad. It fills me with shame and with a unique loneliness that no one around me can relate to.

What would it really have cost those women to give me some hint of the past? What was in my birth mother that she could throw me away? What was in my adopted mother that she could carelessly erase something she knew would be important?

Entire chapters of my story have been deleted, and now it is up to me to make sense of the ending. Back to front. Like all adopted people, that is how I get to live my life from this moment on.

In the midst of it all, I only hope for one thing: that someday I will be able to touch that tangible thread of that past. I am able to hold on, grip it tight, and know that it is my line, my connection to the incredibly complex history of our species and the world we’ve made.

A vain hope, maybe, in a life that has been filled with denial as much as it has been filled with grace. For now, the secret remains. I will continue to seek my face in the face of strangers and wonder, “Where am I in all of this?”

© E.B. Johnson 2023

E.B. Johnson is a writer, NLPMP, and podcaster who helps women recover after a lifetime of trauma and narcissistic abuse. Using somatic techniques and neurolinguistic frameworks, she teaches survivors how to reclaim their lives through the power of nervous system regulation.