Sophie

“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption—individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice—in terms of right or wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“Catherine was right. Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did. The silence now is not so different from the lonely holidays I endured over the years, an extension of the months of silence we’d exchanged but more total. There is one major difference: I don’t have to work on earning his love anymore.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“The belief that I’d actually been wanted from the beginning, paired with the sure knowledge that my adoptive parents loved me, allowed me to grasp at self-worth, despite my doubts; to grow up and live my life free of the darkest feelings of abandonment.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know