The down side about being out of the fog is there is no reprieve from adoption awareness, which is why my friend probably mentioned it in the first place.  Here in Korea, of course, it’s even that much harder.  Working as an adoption reform activist, it’s freaking impossible.

I can recall about four years ago, about two and a half weeks into my Caribbean vacation, how I had to get away from my vacation but there was no escape.   There I was — in a third world country I’d never been before, searching for people I’d never met before to deliver aid, all the while trying to maneuver with poor foreign language skills while being hustled at every turn, eating and sleeping poorly, and wilting under the blazing sun.  I even found myself in the ludicrous position of having to take detours to the place I was staying in order to avoid a particular person who would turn my vacation into hell, all because connections to place can be both a positive and a negative thing.

On that day, I ducked into a hotel lobby and walked through to their outside bar area and found myself in an oasis of expats, decent food and drink, and attentive service.  And suddenly the misery, poverty, mean streets, stress of not being able to communicate, and the tension of being assaulted by a foreign culture that yelled loudly and laughed loudly and felt dangerous and all of the injustice and history and blood sacrifices of those people your heart empathized with in that place just melted away and I was restored for a few hours.  I left a new person; ready to hit the streets again.

In Korea, there is no such place for me.  In one world I am conspicuous.  In this world I am anomalous, and therefore also conspicuous, despite blending in…Step into an oasis and once again I am conspicuous.  Find others like yourself, and all they do is talk about their pain and discomfort.  So there is no real escape.  Ever.  Even when you ask for there to be a moratorium on adoption talk, they just. can’t. do. it.

I now know why most of the 500 who live here disappear.  Like me, they’re probably waiting for the first opportunity to get. the. hell. out. and escape from their identity exploration and move on to some place where people don’t talk and others don’t ask and you can just sip your drink in peace and re-charge.

Not that this is by any stretch of the imagination a vacation…

A friend wrote me the following:

I sometime wonder if it wouldn’t be better for me to have stayed a blinded adoptee thinking adoption is a wonderful thing helping orphans. My thoughts and feelings were like in a fog, so I didn’t pay attention to my thoughts and feelings. Now the fog lifted, my thoughts are clear, so are my feelings and the hurt and anger are more intense.

I write to her here instead of personally, because maybe it’s of value to others?  I too miss the fog.  (sigh)

But I also know it wouldn’t be better.

Everywhere I go, everyone I meet, is in one kind of fog or another:  blindly ricocheting from situation to situation at every point that resembles some unspeakable trauma.  It’s just easier to muddle on that way.  But for us adoptees, our fog was almost all-encompassing.  We have had to, you and I, carefully assemble our house of cards in order to prevail.  And I did it with passion, not recognizing that passion was misspent anger.  Over four decades of effort went into that house.  And then the house fell down and I almost didn’t live through it,  and there’s no desire to build anything that tenuous again.  This raw energy that comprises us, it’s the only thing real.  Hell, it’s the only thing left.

Like phobics we must be reconditioned and undergo aversion therapy.  How many times must someone with fear of heights stand on a dangerous precipice, looking down at the ground far below, before they can accept that they will not fall to their death?

How I wish being turned into an orphan was so simple to address.  How I wish we could know that this terror can never be replicated.  But it can and it is, over and over again:  with every relationship we can be abandoned all over again.  There’s nothing irrational about it.  We can and will be abandoned again.  We really can fall.  It’s not something we imagine.  It’s not about our free will and never was.

All my life I could not cry (except when angry – so I also worked hard at never being angry – ha! ADDED:  Well, that’s not true, of course I could shed tears, but I could not cry about what really bothered me:  even my crying was a lie)  It detracted from my mission to build a stronger, more love-worthy me.  But once a fog has lifted, there can be no pretenses about not being broken or having broken hearts.  Or being too strong to be affected by our broken hearts.  We must cry.  Deeply.  Completely.

These days, thoughts of the family who raised/abused me and the family that abandoned me bring sobbing with less and less frequency.  With every wave of sadness and despair the body-emptying crying jags and their tears become more impotent and pointless.  I stand there ferociously, with my teeth gritted, my fists clenched, my eyes closed and swollen and say, “hit me one more time.”  The blows get softer and then dissipate, and with it my anger.  The loss of family is becoming history.

These days, when a twinge of sadness hits me I listen to it.  I hit replay.  I hit replay again and again and again, until I’m bored.  And then I file it away and add it to my collection, which has become this calcified and fossilized super structure much stronger than my house of cards ever was.  Sounds like my next art project.

The thing that haunts me, however, is the knowledge we are all always truly and existentially alone, despite it being human nature to attempt to transcend that state.  I question whether it is possible.   The loss of people I allow myself to love who reject me is not something I want to replay.

The fog let me lull myself into believing I wasn’t alone.  I do miss that.

But it is better — at least I tell myself it is better.  Maybe not for me, but for others.  Because I can’t help other people going through this if I don’t recognize there is a problem.  And the ignorance of the fog also made me vulnerable:  dangerously, soul crushingly vulnerable.  And helping others, ultimately, benefits me.

No human being should ever be put in this position.  We must live to save, to bear testimony and witness that cuts through this fog, which provides the smokescreen perpetuating  this crime perpetrated upon the weak and innocent.

Let the pain and anger hit me again and again.  Inure  me to its suffering  so I can rise up stronger in defense of those that can’t defend themselves.  And even if I can’t take back what was stolen from me,  I can at least try to begin an authentic life that is unquestionably mine.

the boy asked the girl if there was a half moon in korea too.  she went up on the roof and the sky was covered in clouds and she told him that maybe he would see clouds tomorrow, as his tomorrow is her today.

and she listened to his song over and over and over and remembered asking her father if it was true that you could drill through the center of the earth and come out in china.

how is it she’s always on the wrong side of the world?  how she wishes she could drill through time and gravity and start over.

There is no school today, as it’s a school holiday:  the founding of the school.  Despite having much to do, I am distracted.

In the absence of air-conditioning, the fan emits this low noise pollution, sucking in organic matter through the window and blowing it and formerly undetected fine white powder from the installation fabric across everything.  It clings to every surface and then to my half naked body which moves restlessly from place to place to place.  It’s pernicious, this grit.  How many cleanings will it take for it to disappear?

I try to make myself feel better:  I watch movies, I pick up and drop several projects, I go for a walk, I check out another health club, I look for activities to join, I remember I should eat, etc., but nothing engages me and I just make the circuit of my room over and over again.  I feel lost.

Jane’s writing from the TRACK blog grabs my attention:

Each misplaced, forgotten, thrown away, ripped-up, spilled-on, smeared, misstamped, lost and found again later tag still represents one child, one file. We keep finding stray tags now — one at a time, sets of them– unlabeled, unaccounted for. I found a stray tag today next to the door of my apartment, next to the garbage can and the shoes. “Where do you belong, little girl? How did you get here?”

I feel like that lost tag.  I am that lost tag.

I am out of place.  I am out of time.  Despite my best efforts, I am always orphaned and alone and abandoned.  Love is a privilege denied me.  The losses collect. The white dust is like the grief I can’t wash away.

I know it’s not finished and it’s badly edited, but I don’t know how much longer I can linger on this and stay healthy, so here is my unfinished video gift to Kim Sook Ja and all the other Korean adoptees out there in the world who, despite their best efforts, sing private songs of lamentation when they long to sing for joy:

I hope they have some company, wherever they ended up:  someone to take their part and soothe them.  This is the best I can do:  say I understand the loss and isolation you have felt/feel.

You are not alone.

is good enough for you to peek at:

A collection of one

I still have two more collections to add and some more photos.  I also have to figure out how to make it accept Korean fonts so I insert the translated versions of the speech, statement, about the collection and introductory welcome message, but that might be awhile so I just want to get it out there as is.

I think it turned out well, and I’m also a day or two away from posting a youtube video.  We’ve probably got a partial installation lined up, so those of you in Seoul who missed it might get a chance to experience it.  I’ll keep you updated.

So this weekend, I get to work on the installation some more.  Yayy!

friends came to visit

and they brought the SEWING MACHINE with them!

exciting things are about to happen in Korea

I got the best 4th of July email ever

my daughter is helping me search for Kim Sook Ja

I bought a farm fresh watermelon that practically split itself open for me and it’s yummy

lately I’m turning heads in a good way and I don’t understand it, but okay…

My experiments making new paper out of old this weekend have worked out really well.