Enduring the Severance:
Living in the Wake of a Life Rewritten
Beyond Severance:
What Comes After the Truth
For twenty articles, we unravelled the illusion — not from the surface, but from the final reckoning backward to the moment of severance.
Read stories on the list “Severance and Reclamation: The Adoptee’s Journey in Reverse” on Medium:
We traced the fractures, exposed the rewritten identities, stood toe to toe with the reality of adoption’s impact. Now, the question remains: What comes next?
The truth has been laid bare. Adoption is not just a personal loss — it is a systemic severance, an enforced erasure, an exile hidden beneath the language of love. We have confronted what was taken, acknowledged the rage and grief, and shattered the narratives that demanded silence.
But survival is not enough. Endurance is not the destination.
So, where do we go from here?
- How do adoptees exist beyond survival?
- What does reclamation look like in a world that denies what was lost
- How do we build something real when our foundation was stolen before we could stand on it?
The next phase is not about explaining the loss. It is about deciding what to do with it.
This is the path beyond severance. Not to healing, not to forgetting — but to something else entirely.
It is a strange thing to exist inside a story that was never truly yours, to wake each morning into a life that was manufactured to replace the one you were taken from. For years, I lived as if that story were real – because what other choice was there? The world around me reinforced it at every turn. *You were chosen. You were given a better life. You should be grateful.* Words that disguised the violence of severance, that buried the truth beneath a narrative meant to comfort everyone except the one who was taken.
But the body remembers what the mind was forced to forget.
I did not have the luxury of an origin story that remained intact. My history was altered before I could speak. My name was changed, my records sealed, my identity overwritten to fit the needs of others. Before I could form conscious memory, my subconscious was already shaped by the absence, by the loss no one would name.
When I was a child, I could feel it pressing against the edges of my existence – this vague but undeniable sense that something was “off.” My adoptive mother, despite her deep investment in the illusion, felt it too. She was drowning in her own grief, in her own loss, and yet she clung to me as if I were the solution as if I could undo the tragedy that preceded my arrival. But I was not a replacement. I was a living reminder of everything she had lost.
And when the illusion could no longer hold, when I began to seek my truth, the punishment was swift. My adoptive mother colluded with my ex-wife to take my children from me, ensuring that the cycle of estrangement and forced separation would continue. Severance was not just something that happened to me as an infant. It happened again and again and again. Each loss compounding the last, each exile reinforcing what I had always known deep down:
I was never meant to belong anywhere.
Now, I exist in the aftermath.
There is no reunion that undoes the damage. No justice that rewrites the past. No homecoming that makes me whole again. There is only endurance. The weight of what was lost, carried forward through time, unseen by those who refuse to acknowledge it.
I still move through the world as if I am part of it, because that is what is required to survive. I work, I speak, I go about my daily tasks. But beneath it all, I remain displaced. An outsider to my own life. A witness to a story that was forced upon me.
And yet, there is something in me that refuses to be erased.
I may not have the history I was meant to have, but I have the truth. And the truth, once reclaimed, is a foundation that cannot be taken.
The world will continue as it always has, pretending that adoption is simple, that severance does not wound, that gratitude can override grief. But I will not comply.
