Adoption is a psychological barrier

Shane Bouel
Thoughtless Delineation
2 min readApr 4, 2017

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Adoption is a psychological barrier. Not knowing how or why you got there. It feels like you are forced to live your life in a bubble chained to the ground that belongs to someone else.

AI-Generated adoptee art

Inside your head, your brain feels like it’s being restricted, with a thick invisible fog that’s anchored at the base of your skull with an axe. Physically your voice has been stolen from you by society and held to ransom. Your heart feels crushed with grief and loss. Your perception of life is skewed into one that others expect you to have. Your abilities and life skills are severely hampered, distorted and delayed. Your identity is confused. When you finally see a way out, its like you’ve been drugged, your consciousness stumbles out of the fog while your body and your abilities hit against every obstacle imaginable. The only way out usually means walking through your adoptive family’s collective heart. Bloodied guilt drags behind you like a constant reminder of where you’ve come from. Waves of pain and guilt hold on to you trying to pull you back in.

The light ahead is blissful yet I feel lost, not knowing where to go, or what to do next or even how to do it. The unknown is frightening but I feel compelled to breathe like it’s my first breath and take each step, one at a time in hope that I will eventually find myself wherever that may be.

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Shane Bouel
Thoughtless Delineation

Using creativity to lift standards of ethics & morality by questioning half-truths and denouncing the conservancy of inhumane ideologies.