#14 What Now? The Path Beyond Existential Severance.
Once the cycle of existential denial is seen for what it is, once the severance is named and no longer hidden, there is an unavoidable question:
What now?
There is no returning to the illusion. No unknowing of what has been uncovered. The grief is real. The loss is real. The severance is real. But survival has always been real, too.
Here, at the edge of the known, we face the truth: healing does not mean erasure of pain. It means learning to exist without apology.
There Is No Perfect Resolution
No reunion, no knowledge of origins, no amount of understanding will fully restore what was lost. Some will search for their biological families and find them. Some will find only more silence, more severance. Some will create meaning where there was none, redefining what identity means on their own terms.
The lie of healing is that it will make the past irrelevant. It won’t. But it can change how the past exists within us. It can allow us to carry it without it consuming us.
We do not heal by becoming who we would have been.
We heal by learning to exist as we are now, fully aware of what was taken.
The Adoptee’s Choice:
To Speak or Stay Silent
Some will continue to fight for change – for open records, for reform, for acknowledgment of the damage adoption systems have caused. Others will choose to simply exist, refusing to spend their lives explaining their pain to those who refuse to understand.
- There is no right answer.
- There is no obligation to educate those who benefit from the lie.
- There is no duty to carry the weight of others’ comfort.
Speaking out is a choice. Silence is also a choice. Both are valid.
Reclaiming What Was Stolen
If we cannot return to who we were meant to be, then we must create space for who we are now.
That might mean:
- Taking back ancestral names.
- Searching for blood ties or making peace with never knowing.
- Creating art, stories, spaces where our truth exists without permission.
- Allowing ourselves to grieve without needing validation.
- Rejecting the expectation of gratitude, of performance, of forced belonging.
We do not need to be grateful for our survival. Survival is not a gift – it is a fight.
The World May Never Understand – But That Is No Longer Our Concern
The kept world will always struggle to grasp the depth of severance. They will continue to repeat their scripts, to insist that what happened was for the best, that love is enough, that adoption is beautiful.
We are no longer here to convince them otherwise.
We are here to exist. To live. To take up space without apology.
- The world does not need to understand us for us to be real.
- Our pain does not need validation to be true.
- We do not need permission to reclaim what was lost.
The Fall Has Already Happened
Now We Learn to Stand
We have already fallen. The severance has already occurred. There is no preventing it, no reversing it.
But we are still here. And now, we must decide:
- Do we remain in the fall, always searching for something to catch us?
- Or do we accept that there is no ground to return to – and build something new instead?
The fall was never ours to choose.
But what we do next is.
Hello, my name is Shane Bouel,
I’m a retired, qualified designer, lecturer & e-learning specialist seeking true connection.
I am an adoptee of forced adoption, living in Bali — a place that, like me, holds the weight of displacement and the echoes of histories rewritten. My journey is one of systematic erasure, existential severance, and, ultimately, reclamation.
Adoption is often seen as an act of love, a new beginning, a gift. But beneath that narrative lies a deeper, often unspoken truth — one of loss, identity fracture, and the struggle to exist in a world that does not recognise what has been taken.
I have spent years unravelling my own story, uncovering what was erased, and reclaiming the self that was meant to disappear. It has been a journey through grief, awakening, and profound transformation. And now, I invite you to walk that path with me.
From here, we embark on a journey together.
