We Have Arrived

Being on a 15 hour flight is a little like hell. It is hard to believe it will end. Time ceases to cycle in the familiar ways. The sun still rises but it means less. Meals are brought out in what feels like arbitrary intervals and arbitrary purposes since I haven’t done anything to work […]

Air India Flight 126

There Sits a House

There Sits a House, illuminated by a flash. Bathed in artificial light. The roof is metal, worn, in visible disrepair. This house sits on an uneven dirt road. Flowering shrubs sprawl across the front creating a beautiful barrier, separate from passers by but not private, just distant. A few exhausted lines run from the rafters […]

They Say I Look Like Her

Resemblance is a strange concept. It overflows with subjectivity, devoid of neutrality or impartiality. Colored and formed in the image of past experiences. Reliant upon availability heuristics. They say I look like her. I don’t know how to understand that phrase. What does it mean to see yourself in others or them in yourself if […]

Fragile.

Less than an hour after the brief Skype conversation with Arun and Anjali the advertised email with a handful of pictures pings into my meticulously curated inbox. I hate having unread messages in my inbox, it feels like dishes pilled on the counter, calling for attention, guilt by neglect. The normal nag of this red […]

To Reunion or Not

Months ago, in therapy, I told Dr. R that I had some emotional fantasies about reunion allowing me to close a chapter in my life. Allowing me to move on to the rest of my life, clean and simple. In some ways not pursuing reunion feels like it is holding me back. Not being in […]

Driven by Guilt

I’ve been planing on going to India this winter for at least a few months now. It has been a stressful process and I’ve done a pretty good job of procrastinating about the important things like determining what I’m going to be doing while there. The idea really solidified itself after a few weeks of […]

4 years

Its been 4 year since I started writing and within the last two months I have done more to help myself process than in the previous 27 years. I started out writing, reading and trying to expose myself to others’ stories. When I began I just needed to know I wasn’t along asn an adoptee. […]

“Calcutta is my Mother”

I sometimes stumble across stories of other Indian Transracial Adoptees who have gotten some press, usually because they are in some stage of searching. This most recent story is being made into the movie “Calcutta is my Mother” which from the short trailer: https://vimeo.com/168535931 seems less about the act of searching for birth/first family than an […]

Do You Remember Me?

One of the adoption agencies that worked with my parents to help them identify a child was called Illien Adoption International. I’ll admit I have not done a lot of research about the organization and thus have not really formulated an opinion about whether or not I feel they are helping or hurting the cause, […]