Here are some things that I’ve been pondering lately:

• How does adoption affect the next generation? Do adoptees who have kids also tend to adopt? I know a few people in Facebook groups have also ended up adopting. Does that help their children sort out their emotions and sense of belonging earlier or just complicate it more?
• How is doing my thesis on adoption affecting my views on adoption? I think I’m getting more frustrated. I think I’ve been getting frustrated about a lot of things lately. There is a lot out of my control and writing an annotated bibliography about adoption books seems so arbitrary. But I also know that books helped me immensely when I was younger. I miss that mindset. Now I feel like I’m bombarded with the knowledge that regardless of what I do outside of reading, I will have to face an unjust world.
• I have to find hope and love in the interactions that I can. Sometimes I look at my family and get so deeply sad that we age and grow and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I wish I could have my mom in my life forever. I wish that my sister and I would always be physically close enough that I could just go to her bedroom and do work. But people move and world events change and we have different desires in life. I just worry so much about losing people and feeling helpless. I know that I have a choice in how I move in this world. Is there a right answer? There’s a stable one. But I don’t want to stay in this small town forever. I don’t think I could stand it.
• Here’s an essay I wrote recently about some works by Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon. It’s more personal than a usual academic essay, but it’s a glimpse into what I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s not fully formed and I need to go through some edits, but it expresses a lot of my frustrations lately.

“The Uses of the Erotic” dives into the intricacies of how sexuality and the erotic have simultaneously made someone inferior or weaker, while also being suspected of having power to wreak havoc on Western society. Audre Lorde argues that pornography is a “direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling” (Lorde, 1978, p. 1). This makes me question the way that we are brought up to believe that women should always be pleasing men. The idea of the housewife and female caretaker are deeply rooted in the denial of a woman’s power. When I was in middle school, one of my teachers said that one of the reasons men have oppressed women for so long is because of their fear. They fear how women can give birth and carry on generations. This idea sticks with me and informs the way that I think about this question. 

It also makes me wonder about those who do sex work or pornography for a living. Isn’t that also a reclamation of power and pleasure? But Lorde depicts how the spiritual world has been flattened to a world of ascetic in pornography, where one “aspires to feel nothing” (Lorde, 1978, p. 3). Or maybe she means that the porn industry has a tendency to reduce people to “objects of satisfaction” rather than imagining them complexly (Lorde, 1978, p. 5). 

Lorde’s definition of erotic is much different than I learned. She believes that we have learned only to view sex as erotic and capitalism has taken away the “erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment” that every day work also has (Lorde, 1978, p. 2). The erotic is not constrained to sexual occasions. It is the “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” which ultimately makes all the things we do on a daily basis worth doing (Lorde, 1978, p. 1). Rather than just getting by and earning wages, the erotic allows us to fully immerse ourselves in our experiences and live uninhibitedly. I have been struggling lately with this idea and Lorde is able to articulate my frustrations with the way the US frames jobs. I aspire to do work that fulfills me and uplifts my community. But oftentimes community work, activism, and work in the education sphere is underfunded, under resourced, and under supported. Get Out and “The Fact of Blackness” also touch on how racial constraints impact one’s ability to be in touch with their eroticism. If we are always struggling to survive, how can we let ourselves experience joy? But Lorde’s definition of the erotic as “creative energy empowered” builds hope in me (Lorde, 1978, p. 3). We are not constrained by a capitalist future because we can build better. I still struggle with thinking about how I, on an individual scale, can do this. Can I really feel like my role as a future teacher will help those around me when I have grown up in a society that primarily rewards capitalism, exploitation, and overworking oneself to keep those in power in power? 

The erotic allows us to connect with people and ease the fear of differences. It reminds us of our capacity to fully express and feel our emotions and that being satisfied and fulfilled is possible by ourselves. One of the quotes that touched me was: “For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society” (Lorde, 1978, p. 4). Fanon also speaks about how racism creates a world where a Black man cannot just be Black, but must also be “black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, x, p. 83). This ensnares people into boxes that they must define themselves by, a system that imposes itself on the oppressed. Rather than living as a Black individual who must live and find the erotic, now the White man has other expectations that objectify Black bodies. The pain of being stripped of your humanity and compassion runs deep and it hurts the one who dehumanizes you as well. Where is their erotic? 

Cara spoke about how “desire was hard to trust” after seeing family violence and struggling in a capitalist racist patriarchal system (Brown, 2019, p. 2). I think this is something most people have to unravel, especially those who have grown up in a world where they may have been neglected, abused, or abandoned. Fanon said “an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-N****” (Fanon, 2019, p. 92).

As an adoptee, I reflect on my own relationships with friends, families, teachers, etc. and I realize that most of it was motivated by fear. The fear of being not good enough or abandoned again. The fear of being deemed unworthy or miniscule. As I’ve gone through the CSCRE courses in colleges, I’ve done a lot of healing and unlearning. Knowing more about concepts such as Lorde’s definition of eroticism and what it means to be kind to yourself in a trauma-informed way are things that all people should learn. Compassion, fully feeling for and wanting the best for others, and taking action with that, is what I want and what I hope we can come to. This idea is complicated when people fetishize you, tell you to “go back where [you] belong” and mark you out as undeniably inferior (Fanon, 2019, p. 86). 

The idea of saying, “I love myself,” in the mirror holds a lot of shame for me. Like Fanon said, we are told all our lives that we are “hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother’s side, but by an entire race” (Fanon, 2019, p. 89). It is so powerful that Cara learned from a young age how important self-worth is. I think I have a lot of shame about being an adoptee, someone who grew up with such close proximity to Whiteness, but will never benefit in the same ways from it. I know that I grew up with privileges such as access to a good library, annual dentists’ appointments, and teachers who really cared about my growth. I feel guilty for having this and I wonder how much of it can be labelled as “White guilt” or “proximity-to-whiteness guilt.” I know that I also dealt with the prejudice that Fanon speaks about in “Black Skin, White Masks,” where POC are judged more harshly for their mistakes and taken for granted. 

I especially struggle with this thinking about how international relations work and how I came to the US. There was an abundance of child trafficking, forced sterilizations, and family separation going on in China, which caused the many international adoptions to occur. And it wasn’t until I went abroad to Asia that I started to process this. How does this background affect my erotic power? How do I fully experience my emotions and desire for a better world when I have not yet processed my own trauma and guilt? 

As someone who has struggled with an eating disorder, the idea of “tak[ing] up space, and show[ing] pleasure, show[ing] fear, show[ing] anger” unapologetically is something I also aspire to (Brown, 2019, p. 5). The speaker of “The Fact of Blackness” is “rehabilitated” as he has recognized that he must accept his Blackness and “embrace the world” for he is the world (Fanon, 2019, p. 97). These texts are meant for all marginalized communities and are a culmination of bitterness and resistance against an Empire of White supremacy and capitalism.

So much of my own liberation is due to the work that Black folks have been doing for decades. The interviewer says, “We’re not meant to suffer alone. We’re meant to experience pleasure and togetherness” and that ultimately is what I aim to do (Brown, 2019, p. 7). Through the destruction of systems that demonize or declare marginalized communities as inferior, we have to learn how to build community. I often think about my life philosophy and although it is easy to give into rage and grief, I want to lead with love.