Twenty-nine years of being between somewhere and nowhere
A lot has changed since the blog post I wrote exactly a year ago on my 28th birthday.
If someone had told me back then that I would meet my sister only months later, I would have laughed at the absurdity of that. But it really did happen.
Since then I've grown closer to my birth family, which I try not to take for granted. It also makes me hesitate though. More has happened in 2025 than in the past 10 years combined. I feel guilty, like my adoptive parents are breathing down my neck even though my contact with them is almost zero. I'm not sure that sensation will ever dissipate. I have had nightmares of them finding this blog.
That risk has paid off though. I'm warming up to things. As in, allowing myself to actually believe to some degree that everything that happened 29 years ago was a misunderstanding that could have happened to any woman trapped by society and an alcoholic partner in post-Soviet Russia. Maybe it was not entirely due to me being unwanted or unlovable, though I doubt I will ever fully shake that idea. It's not like I couldn't previously recognize these things that were outside of my control. It's just an entirely other thing to let those things marinate in my brain.
My biological siblings, especially my sister, have done a good job of making me feel like my presence is missed. While it saddens me that they feel a void in their lives because of the decision their mother made all those years ago, it's also reassuring that it really does go both ways. My sister admitted she was willing to fly to any country to meet me and was also relieved afterwards. I genuinely think that I have become attached to her, and it feels good because it feels right.
It isn't perfect though. Communicating with my birth mother, the first person to have sent me a birthday greeting this year, is awkward at best. I've emphasized that I harbor no resentment toward her, and I think I am fairly mature about it all. Still, I somehow find it is becoming more difficult for me myself to believe that since she and I have increased our contact. I hope this doesn't show because I think my sister also blames her, and I don't want to exacerbate that. I need to be real with myself though and come to terms with that rejection a bit better so that I hopefully forgive her entirely someday. Or come closer to doing so.
I still haven't been back to Russia. I could, but I don't know when that will be. I could write a novel about that. I still have abandonment issues. I'm still avoidant and detached. I still find myself wishing I were someone else entirely, also craving a proper family instead of two makeshift ones (okay, maybe it's more like one, and it isn't the happy-go-lucky outcome that anyone expects from adoption) because I've never attached to any parental figure in my life.
So, I'm still situated in this same camp as last year: between somewhere and nowhere. The difference now is that it's a little less distressing. Not like a home, but at least it's become a space where I feel a little less like I'm ready to combust within a few days.
This sentiment could very well change within the next year, but for now I'm nestling into the idea that I will never "solve" my adoption issues. Maybe they aren't even meant to be solved. They're just part of me, there wherever I go. They're part of how I interact with people. They're part of how I see and position myself in the world. My abandoned self, my adoptive parents, my birth family---they're always there.
I still sabotage relationships, am too hard on myself, and long for things that I've lost but also never properly known or had. I cannot become complacent (and don't see how I ever could), as I want to become better and have so much work to do, but maybe all these things don't need to be solved by next month. I've spent my twenties rushing---to learn Russian well enough to communicate with my family, to shut others out, to learn every intricacy behind current geopolitical events. But maybe it's okay to not rush for a bit, to acknowledge that I'm on steadier ground sometimes.
It's hard to describe all this to anyone who hasn't been adopted let alone by narcissistic adoptive parents and from a country that isn't friends with the United States, but I do find some solace in writing about it on my angsty blog. So, here's to another year of that.
I still hate my birthday, but today I feel more immune to the birthday flu than I have ever before in my twenties.