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It's my adoption day today! 💃🕺

I'm going to celebrate by getting my hair cut and eat some good food!! How do you mark adoption days? For me, it's like a second birthday and it used to be the only date that I was absolutely certain of. Now, I celebrate it with a somewhat tinged view, knowing what my parents over there think of this day vs my parents here. ❤️‍🩹

What a day they both had and how amazing it is to be experienced in so many different ways.

I experience this day as a positive thing. I'm going to go out and do something nice before I go to class later! 🧧

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Chúc mừng năm mới!!!

Happy new year! I hope everyone has a wonderful Lunar New Year filled with happiness, health and prosperity 🧧💃🐍🕺💖

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Happy Lunar New Year everyone! 🤗🎆🎉

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I managed to get my hands on some banh chung for Tet this year, but I don't know how to tell the seller/my relatives that I don't know how to eat this or how to reheat it or anything like that... it's sitting pretty in our fridge looking like a decoration

(ps please if anyone knows how to properly prepare and eat this... lmk 😭🙏)

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Dear ADOPTIVE PARENTS

Please keep your adopted kid's stories offline and never ever promote them to others. Nobody should know why your child is adopted or anything about their birth family. I see these adoptive mom influencers speak about their adopted child being born on drugs or being left on the side of the road. Why should anyone know this? They don't need to know. Please keep this information private. I'll even go as far as saying many people in your life don't need to see or know any information about the adoptee or their circumstances. You will seriously fuck your adopted kid up and break trust they have with you. Who wants to talk to someone who will put their business online? Does anyone talk to people about what sex position they were in when they did it? No. So why speak about personal things about your adopted child publicly

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this birth family reunion is everything i've ever wanted and yet i still feel so unfulfilled

my chest is still sore and aching but for different reasons, it's not going to go away

it still doesn't feel like it has happened - like i dreamt the whole thing up, but i didn't. maybe it's compartmentalising, maybe i need to talk about it more, or maybe being entirely in control of a situation for the first time is disorientating.

it feels like a lot.

a lot of people you tell expect you to be delighted and that everything is fine and that all of your issues go away once you've had your family reunion, you got what you wanted, you should be happy and fine now. it's not exactly the same as before, but it's similar, it's different, it's not the same, how can anything be the same again?

nothing is ever going to be the same again - i've just achieved one of my major lifetime goals, one of my biggest wishes, and it feels like everything and nothing has changed - still disorientating.

i'm riding the wave but the wave keeps getting bigger and smaller and I can't follow it. i hope it compartmentalises itself soon.

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reunion/meeting/re-meeting/getting to know your birth family is not smooth at all and I wish that non adoptees knew this and could hold more understanding and empathy for us who are trying our best to navigate this situation when all the barriers are stacked against you

it's not smooth like you see in the media, in your films and your games, and I wish that people could take their time to understand how different and difficult and easy and smooth and heartbreaking and simple and complicated it can be for so many of us.

please don't take your information for granted

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I miss my mom and dad and my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and all my relatives so very much, but I can't relate to you, I don't know you, I can't talk to you, I don't know how to relate to you, we're so different but we look the same, we have the same blood and DNA but I don't know you at all and you don't know me and I can't slot into your life and you can't slot into mine. I look at you through a screen through an app that will sell my data and I still can't understand you so we talk via text to speech robotic computer inhuman false voices, only the surface, never deeper. It's still like floating untethered in the sea and I don't know where I can land even though I found places to stay.

And yet I have my parents and sibling and relatives here and I am happy, I am happy and grateful because I want to be and nobody can tell me I'm not, but I still don't know if I fit in here, how can i relate to you, I will miss you so much if I leave, I miss you so much when im at work 40 mins away, we do not have the same DNA but I know you, you know me, I slot into this life, so why do I want more and more and more and why can't I be happy with what I have??

Isnt this everything I wanted?? To know both sides? So why can't I be happy with what I have? I'm so lucky, I had so much information, so more than what other people get, such an idealised reunion, my adoption was not coerced or forced, there is love and care and respect in every single facet of this existence from each part of the world I come from, so why can't I be happy with this??? Why can't i be happy with a double life or be happy with so much I have when so many others dont have it, and why didn't anyone tell me that reunion was going to be so painful along with the high of the joy of it 🥺

I want to know so much more about this and that and everything but this knowledge is going to hurt and I don't know if any of this is worth it if it's going to be too heavy to deal with

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I have no words to describe the amount of hurt I'm feeling or how to express it, but god i am hurting so much and I don't know who or what to pin it on, so I'm going to blame it on the period of time between my birthday and adoption day where I always feel these weird somatic bodily hurt-like sensations that suddenly go away after that time is up

I'm so tired, but I'm also so sad and so hurt and so lonely, so angry too, idk why. It's always been like that this time of year. It'll go away. It's here to stay for now until I can learn how to sit with it and ride it out for six weeks a year.

i feel so lonely and alone in the middle of so many people - I could reach out at any stage, im scared, im cringefailing, everyone is busy, its everyone else not me, they secretly dislike me, maybe its an excuse maybe its not, maybe I'm the one making excuses, its me and not everyone else, nothing is actually wrong, i cant trust you or get close to you because ill get hurt, and it's my fault somehow in the end again, maybe its not even "the adoption's fault" but I'm looking for something to blame and this is the easy way out. Idk what it is. Whatever.

maybe if you're adopted you can relate - maybe you can relate even if you're not.

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Nobody by Mitski is such a mood and I had to draw it.

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I hate when people say adoption isn't the same. That's not a microaggresion, that's just straight up aggressive. People are so chill saying that, why is it not socially acceptable for me to rage about it?

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today's my birthday

Today is also definitely my birthday, I had that verified lol

Mẹ messaged me, it's my first birthday after finding them again. I google translated the message from my mother.

"It's been XX years since I truly wished you a happy birthday"

"I miss you, my child, please be happy over there"

You're always expected to be happy on your birthday.

Of course I'm happy, of course I'm grateful, of course of course of course, but can't I be sad too? Can't I think about the alternative, how it could've been, what i missed, what was there, what didn't happen, how it didn't happen, everything that could've plausibly been but wasn't? What do you do in Vietnam for your birthday? What do you eat? I want to know, I want to know everything but i can't know. I want to talk to you but I can't understand you.

Whatever. I'll celebrate the Irish way with lots of beer, with all my friends and my family, I'm allowed to be grateful and melancholy at the same time.

Happy birthday to me

Chúc mừng sinh nhật

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posting this here but jfc it annoys me when non adoptees say they understand the struggle. no you do NOT. Being adopted is something you will never truly understand

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reunion/meeting/re-meeting/getting to know your birth family is not smooth at all and I wish that non adoptees knew this and could hold more understanding and empathy for us who are trying our best to navigate this situation when all the barriers are stacked against you

it's not smooth like you see in the media, in your films and your games, and I wish that people could take their time to understand how different and difficult and easy and smooth and heartbreaking and simple and complicated it can be for so many of us.

please don't take your information for granted

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“Your mom loved you so much she gave you away” do you know how brain dead that statement sounds?

And then society expects us to be okay.

Y’all can’t handle a man who hates you not texting you back but we must be okay with never knowing why

Love means being given away, without a second thought?

I hope y’all burn

Sincerely me

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sorry i woke up in my rantsona. but like seriously isn't it fucking twisted that every child in almost every country are basically legal property of their parents. like their parents have complete control over where they can go, who they can talk to, which words out of their mouth are truth or lies; they're allowed, encouraged even, to be the sole interface by which the child connects to everything else in this world. like isnt that extraordinary. like how is it a mystery to anyone that children are constantly dying under parental abuse or growing up into utterly dysfunctional traumatised adults. why are we talking about these nebulous narratives of "the unstoppable and nuanced cycle of abuse" instead of looking straight at the reality we've built specifically for this purpose