I don’t have to have my whole life planned out. Living with someone who is constantly stressed about their future just compounds my own worries. I try to wake up every day and think about the things I can gain rather than the opportunities I’m missing, but I’m not always successful.

I’ve read a lot about adoptees going back to Asia recently and there are a lot of stories about Korean adoptees repatriating. Obviously, that’s not a choice for Chinese adoptees, but I like reading about people’s stories. (Note: there are some stories about Chinese adoptees returning to China, but there just aren’t as many narratives out there because the peak wave of Chinese adoption happened later). I was looking one adoptee’s blog about how he quit his corporate job and started travelling. It was really interesting to see where he’d been. Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Thailand, Korea, Cambodia, China, etc. His list went on and on. His name is Troy and he grew up in Colorado. He worked as a producer, consultant, English teacher, etc. But I noticed there weren’t any recent posts. I assumed he got tired of blogging. But, because I can’t let things go, I looked him up on LinkedIn. Maybe he had changed jobs again. Nothing there. But a Google search showed he had committed suicide a few years ago. Nobody can really know what goes through someone’s head when they decide to do this. But sometimes I worry that maybe one day I’ll end up like this too.

I over-think what my life has to be. And when I put myself in his shoes I wonder if I’ll end up the same way. Trying to travel and find out my “purpose” and getting even more confused. But I also look at stories like NikkiOften and get more hopeful. Nikki returned to Korea after being adopted and worked there through her twenties. She was able to reunite with her birth family and figured out she had nine siblings. She works in California now and makes cartoons about her life. Some are related to adoption and some are just everyday worries or silly thoughts.

Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom also makes similar comics. She’s a Korean adoptee who lives in Sweden. She started the #IAmNotaVirus campaign and does a lot of work around adoptee advocacy and writes/illustrates her own books. This started to tumble into a list of adoptees I like to follow, but I’ll just continue.

I also finished a book by Xinran about the One Child Policy and how it affected birth mothers in China. It’s called Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother and the author records her interviews of women from the late 1990s to mid-2000s. Some of the stories were so brutal. Many women had to kill their babies themselves, have a midwife do it, or abandon them, especially those who were in more rural areas. It wasn’t that they didn’t want a daughter, but rather that they couldn’t keep one. I think being abroad and also reading stories like this makes me realize that adoptees can never really count on “closure”.

Jenna Cook’s story also was really emotional to read about. She tried to find her birth parents and although 50 families tried to reach out, none of them were her biological ones. She now is a Sociology doctoral student at Harvard and does a lot of research about gender, fertility, immigration, and trauma. I don’t see myself staying in higher education, but I really appreciate all the work that other scholars do in areas like this.

One of my problems is that I try to think about all the possible outcomes of something before it even has happened. What if I waste my life at a dead-end job? What if I fail? What if I don’t get the opportunity I applied for? What are my backup options? Am I making the right decision? Is there a right decision? What if I don’t have friends? What if I’m not doing enough? And then I end up making spreadsheets and lists of all the various paths I can take. And sometimes this has worked out well. Applying for scholarships and colleges meant that I needed to have that kind of information. But right now? It’s more stressful than helpful. I don’t even know if I will end up liking TEFL. But I keep looking up graduate programs or fellowships or alternative teaching certificates and I can’t stop myself from snowballing. Would I come back to the states for a few years and get certified and then go abroad again? Should I have just majored in English education like I had planned? But then I wouldn’t have been able to study abroad or take more Asian American Studies courses. But will my friendships and relationships last if I keep moving around?

Maybe I’d like user-interface design? I joined a bunch of online groups and asked questions to people who work in the field. I even went to a few online workshops for it. It’s not like I felt drawn to the job, but wouldn’t it make sense? Or what about getting into a graduate program in Korea? Or what if I want to go back to China? Or what if I do a Fulbright or Peace Corps or graduate degree somewhere else? I spend too much time on LinkedIn or job boards or fellowship websites comparing myself to others. I get frustrated because I want stability, but I also have no idea where to go from here. And I compare myself to my sister even though the work that she is doing is not appealing at all to me. I cannot work in local politics and listening to her meetings just reinforces that. So, here’s to figuring something out this year. Thanks for reading this far. It’s almost 2 am and I just needed to get all of this off of my chest.