The Residue of Exhaustion:

Living in the Aftermath of Adoption

I had not known that exhaustion could calcify in the bones, that it could settle itself like sediment along the banks of the body, that it could follow me from the early records of my life – documents I had never seen, written in a hand I would never recognize – to the quiet heat of Ubud, where I now found myself, watching the last tourists filter out of the market stalls, their arms burdened with batik prints and carved wooden Buddhas.

I had come here not to escape but to outlive the weight of everything that had preceded this moment: the carefully constructed silences of my childhood, the ruptures in my identity that adoption had grafted onto my existence like a second, unasked-for skin. In the afternoons, I would sit under the woven rattan roof of a café, the air thick with clove smoke and the scent of rain, and watch as the jungle pressed itself against the edges of town, its vines curling over stone shrines, its roots slipping into the crevices of walls meant to hold them at bay.

There is something about living in a place that is neither home nor foreign, a space that does not demand explanations. In Bali, no one asks about lineage, about surnames or birth records, about the quiet severances that occur in government offices thousands of miles away. Here, the weight of identity is not inscribed in paperwork but in the rhythm of life, the daily offerings placed on doorsteps, the slow unraveling of the day into dusk.

Yet the exhaustion does not dissolve. It follows me through the humid streets, through the hush of temple courtyards, through the sleepless nights where my mind turns over the same questions, tracing the fault lines of a history that is mine and yet not mine. What does one do with a story that refuses to be whole? How does one continue living when the past does not allow for continuity, only for fragments, for gaps where something was taken before it could ever be named?

Some mornings, as the first light filters through the palm leaves, I feel the presence of something close to understanding – a moment in which the weight lifts, in which I can walk through the market, past the baskets of tamarind and frangipani, without feeling like a visitor in my own life. But then the knowledge returns, insidious as the humidity that clings to my skin: no amount of distance, no geography, no quiet life carved out on an island far from where it all began will undo the fundamental truth.

Adoption is not a beginning. It is an interruption. And now, in the long aftermath, I am learning – slowly, painfully – how to live fully past it’s wake.

The days stretch into one another, a slow procession of sunrises and humid twilights. The market vendors recognize me now, though they do not ask questions. There is a quiet relief in this – being seen but not examined, existing without the expectation of explanation. Yet the weight lingers. It has taken on new forms, settling into the smallest gestures: the way my voice hesitates over names I did not fully own, the way my breath catches when I hear a language I do not speak.

It is a strange thing to live in the aftermath of something that is never spoken aloud. The rupture does not announce itself, but it shapes everything. It is there in the spaces between conversations, in the blank fields of official documents, in the casual assumption that identity is an answer rather than a question. It follows me through the world like an unseen current, pulling at the edges of an already-frayed sense of self.

I once believed that distance would lessen its grip, that a place untouched by the history of my own displacement might allow me to move freely, to exist outside the constraints of a narrative I never chose. But history is insidious. It does not stay contained in the past; it seeps into the present, into the choices I make, into the quiet knowledge that I am always both too much and not enough – too distant from the life I was meant to have, too shaped by its absence to ever truly escape it.

There are moments of stillness, though. Small mercies. The warmth of the sea against my skin, the weight of a ripe mango in my hand, the gentle rhythm of a kampung waking. There are days when I forget, just for a moment, the fracture at the center of my existence. But forgetting is not the same as healing. And I am learning that some wounds do not close. They become part of the landscape, like roots breaking through stone, like vines reclaiming what was once lost.

I walk through the streets at dusk, the air thick with incense and distant music. I do not know if there is a way forward, only that I am still here, carrying the weight of something unspoken, searching for something familiar yet distant.