The Burden of Gratitude

I have had feelings of being a burden ever since I can remember.

It may just be a human's natural response to hearing that our first mom's couldn't keep us, feeling so absolutely terrible and undeserving of live, and then understanding that someone across the world deigned to take you in. They didn't have to. There are a thousand what-ifs in between and I could have easily ended up with another family on another continent. It makes my current life and situation seem so fragile because the chances of everything happening were so incredibly slim that to feel deserving or having the right to enjoy any of it feels precarious. It could so easily not have been. There was nothing keeping you safe and no guarantee you would have ever made it this far. I think adoptees, even when they're young, understand this on their immature level, and it shapes the way we view the world.

Oprah and other successful people have this gratitude journal where they write down things they're grateful for that day. My mom thought it would be a good idea if I started one as I already kept normal journals, but it was just too difficult for me. I couldn't get over the "gratitude hump," and everyday I'd sit and think of all the things I was grateful for and just feel terrible as I had to come face to face with the feeling that I did not deserve my life. I wrote, "I'm thankful for my family, and my food and shelter." and "I'm happy I have parents." Because so easily, these could have been for someone else. So easily I could be back in China in an orphanage...or dead...or in a sweatshop. So easily, this life could not have been my life. And what made me worth this life anyway when it clearly wasn't meant for me, me the individual. They would have done the same for any baby. I wasn't special.

It felt like I was in a constant state of guilt and shame and gratitude that other kids just weren't, and what made me different was that I was adopted. Apparently, adoptees are not afforded the same rights as other kids. They can have love and food and shelter and that is simply how it is. But we? We can only have love and food and shelter on the goodness of someone else's charity and we are not enough to have earned the right to have basic human rights in and of ourselves. So, that gratitude journal didn't work out. I was too depressed to continue. I would have written down everything under the sun because I had to be grateful for enjoying everything which I did not deserve, as I didn't deserve anything, that would have been literally everything.

Adoptee gratitude comes up a lot whenever a lot of adoptees or adoptive parents get in a room or online chatroom together. It happens because some adoptive parents actually feel entitled to our gratitude and some adoptees are willing to throw under adoptees under the bus by really playing up that "grateful adoptee" line, just to be labelled a "good" adoptee. Adoptees can't be good or bad. We just are.

Even though I consider myself to be level-headed, I do get annoyed when someone's kissing up way too hard to random stranger adoptive parents online. Everything just screams "I'm desperate for validation!" Please, oh, please, like me, like me! I'm a good adoptee. I'm not an angry adoptee. I'm a grateful adoptee. I have had a good adoption. I have not had a bad adoption. Oh, give me a break. I bet you shit packing peanuts too.

No matter where you were born, or under what circumstances, adopted, non-adopted, you name it, I think we all need to do better to take care of one another. An adoptee cannot be expected to be grateful for life. That's just cruel to tell a two year old they have a life debt to their adoptive parents that will never expire and their life isn't their own to have and to enjoy. But we also need to be kinder to ourselves.

Nothing can diminish another human's value in life and we should live our lives the way we want to, to the fullest capacity, because we're not going to get another one.

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Further reading on "How to Be Adopted" blog: I am not grateful to my parents for adopting me