When Our Communities Let Us Down: Five Things to Consider

When Our Communities Let Us Down

Five Things to Consider

As someone who has been “all in” with a community, I have begun to feel that I am moving away from it. It surprised me that I went from being so passionate to now feeling “meh” about it. 

For the last six months, after taking a new position at a local non-profit, I have been contemplating many things about my former community.  I say former because I feel like I am standing outside of it with one foot still there, but my heart and soul are reaching beyond its borders. Why does this happen?  Did the community let me down or is it something about me that has changed?  

Of course, I can only speak from my own personal experience with communities, religious and non-religious alike, but since the adoption community is the one since childhood that I have been part of the longest, I will focus on that. 

Here are five areas that I have explored internally but haven’t had a chance to put them out into the world until now.

1. Communities are made up of humans with different backgrounds

 The adoption community, where I have spent the greater part of a decade and a half writing, speaking and advocating, are a huge group of people from all over the USA and outside of it that have completely different backgrounds and personalities.  The thing we have in common is that somebody else chose to sever our biological connections and create a legal agreement pertaining to us (what we refer to as “adoption”).

 That’s our common thread.   

 When adopted people first come together, they are so relieved to be heard and understood that our personal differences fall away.  “You were also in a closed adoption?”  “You are in reunion with your birth parents?”  ME TOO!!!  Our community has all sorts of support groups and conferences to help educate the adoption community on the emotional and legal landmines adopted people (as well as birth parents) experience when trying to meet bio family members, tracking down our records, testing our DNA, etc. 

 It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of “how to’s” and “rules for engagement” and forget something that seems so obvious to me now:  the circumstances of what happened to us is what we have in common.  Read that again.  Our commonalities stem from what happened to us and not on who we are today.

 We may be on totally different political spectrums, have diverse childhoods, and varied educational backgrounds.  We may be part of the LGBTQIA community or not.  We may be transracial, transnational or not.  And we all have very unique personalities and trauma histories.  

 But we are all individuals and the reality is, we may not “click” just because we have this common experience.

2. When ego is in the driver’s seat, communities will struggle.

 Most of us have pain as it relates to our adoption experience and many of us will take it out on each other.  I have seen it repeatedly in our community, but I suspect this is true of any community.  

There is not enough post-adoption therapy to heal all the hurt and pain that adoptees carry around like a backpack.  Social media will give you a glimpse into the pain that many influencers are shoving down everybody’s throats.  And I understand why.  Adoptees have been traditionally gaslit by a society that wants to believe adoption is a win, win, win, when really, it’s a Band-Aid for a broken family. 

I have had amazing collaborative experiences with other adoptees.  My first book project, The Adoptee Survival Guide, was so entirely positive and uplifting that I took it for granted.  After the book was published, the Facebook room became a support group for many years.  I still consider the authors in that book friends of mine and I keep in touch with many of them.  That was 2015.

What I have seen in the last ten years since the publication of that book has been a lesson in “hurt people hurt people.”  I have been part of the adoptee rights community (a community within a community) where egos rule.  There is in-fighting and arguing about who is correct and who has the most credentials to back their “right-ness.”   The focus has gone from doing our best to advocate for our community to following particular cult-like leaders who people want to believe are experts. 

I have watched the adoption community collaborate with other communities who have different agendas but expected us to get on board before we were ready. 

Conferences have gone from being a place to connect with people to having a focus on continuing education for adoption professionals who rarely show up.  Most adoption professionals still buy into the “adoption is such a beautiful thing!”. 

By the time you pay to travel, pay the conference fee and spend your valuable time off work, you leave the conference with an emotional hangover and still wonder to yourself, “Did I even connect with one person at that place?”

Maybe you felt energized at the last adoption conference and I hope you did.  I didn’t.  I felt depleted.  I keep hoping for a place to connect with people and get something else instead.

3. Scarcity mindset, lack of commitment, and lack of money.  These are combined into one because they all bleed into each other.   Like in any non-profit environment, money is scarce and committed volunteers even scarcer.  And even if you are lucky and have a funder for your advocacy work, it comes with strings attached—ALWAYS.

People are busy raising their families, going to work and dealing with whatever life stage or crisis they are managing.  Most have limited budgets and limited time off work.  A very small group of us will commit to doing the work that this community so desperately needs. 

 Unfortunately, many of us will commit to doing something and then fail to do it but even worse fail to communicate that things have changed.  Ghosting is the thing nowadays and I have seen it in volunteers. 

 I appreciate a firm NO more than a YES and no follow-through at the eleventh-hour and without any conversation about what changed.  The adoption community owes a debt of gratitude to those who spend their personal time and money to advocate for others.  Show that appreciation by being reliable and donating, rather than shaming people you disagree with.

4.  Lack of diversity and feeling like an outsider.

The adoption community has never felt diverse enough. Several times, I have encouraged people of color to attend adoption conferences, and they have left or felt let down.  

And then with the late discovery of my Latina roots, I began to feel not included.  Some people told me that I became a trans-racial adoptee, others invited me to the Latin American adoptee groups, and still others who only see me as white, just ignored it.  Since I wasn’t born in Latin America, nor adopted from outside of the U.S., no group felt like it fit. 

Most of the time, with a few exceptions, people didn’t want to talk about it.  Because it’s not their experience.  This massive shift in my identity left me feeling unsupported in the community and standing on the outside.

This outsider status has been reaffirmed by my work as a genealogist.  As the sole adoptee in a group of “muggles” as adoptee Carolyn D’Agostino fondly refers to them, it’s been a challenge for me to fit in. 

5. Did I outgrow the community?

Everybody changes and grows.  I went from being someone who knew nothing about my background in 2006 to knowing more than the average person.  My identity has shifted massively in my 40s and 50s.  However, the same personality is still with me. 

I like to think this version is a little gentler and kinder to both me and others.  When I talk to people I haven’t seen in twenty or thirty years, they say, “you haven’t changed a bit!”.  I just laugh to myself because if they only knew how much has changed, they would be shocked.  But on the other end of this massive identity shift, I am still the same me that as a child, loved animals and talked to strangers like we had known each other for years.

As I am nearing my seventh decade, my former identity and adoption angst has left me.  Is it healed?  Maybe, maybe not.  But it’s gone.  I do not attribute this to a therapist or a positive birth family reunion; however, I acknowledge both of those are important on many people’s journeys.

One of the biggest healing aspects of my journey has been writing my memoir and having feedback and support from other adoptees.  I truly don’t think I could have published without them.  Getting my story on paper (or in a Word document to be exact) and then putting it out into the world, released something within me.  It felt like a burden I had once been carrying alone shifted into a shared burden.  Empathy and understanding when someone read my words and wrote to tell me what those words meant to them, was life changing.

A handful of people I have met in the adoption community, I now consider lifelong friends.  We have connected in person, on Zoom and at conferences.  Social media is the reason I have community; but sadly, it is also a part of how egos maintain themselves.

In the words of adoptive parent Lori Holden, it’s BOTH/AND.  Community is VITAL and yet can and will often let us down.

My hope is that moving forward our community can have less ego and more connection. 

 

Lynn Grubb is a closed-era adoptee, kinship adoptive parent and mother to an adult son and daughter and many fur-babies.  She has contributed her adoption experiences to adoption anthologies, podcast episodes and online writing projects. She published her memoir, Hidden Identity, in 2022 as a free podcast. Lynn is a guardian for her local juvenile and probate courts.  You can contact her at theadoptedgenealogist@gmail.com