Ep. 13 – A Series of Unrelated Thoughts

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There isn’t yet a central theme to my life, there’s no grand thread to pull at, other than this–the worst that could have happened never did, and the strangest situations have all resolved themselves. All I did was ask the right questions for a long enough period of time, and I have had more than my share of luck along the way. I’m deeply grateful to everyone I’ve named, and thankful that you, as an audience and readership, have taken the time to listen and share my story.

Ep. 12 – Okay, Okay Already

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I realize that much of what I felt was displaced rage, an unending scream, buried behind my silent, infant mask I assumed at birth. As an adoptee, I feel I have always had a life-long infection, a buried, festering sore, at the breaking point where identity and the self in relation to the world index, the nexus where I meet others. Bridging that chasm means having a vision of what is possible. The bridge must be precise, but the chasm is itself un-chart-able. Adoptees are all left, more or less, with this bridge to construct, on their own, from their side of the canyon.

Ep. 11 – Fatherhood

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There is a phrase that I first encountered in Betty Jean Lifton’s book Journey of the Adopted Self, the term “genetic bewilderment” and “cumulative adoption trauma.” Becoming a father, meeting someone, finally, who looked like me, even if it took a few years to really become apparent, was a kind of anchor.

Ep. 10 – Warlock III (1999)

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You probably have not seen Warlock III: The End of Innocence (1999). Not a lot of people have. It was an outlier to a franchise that had marginal popularity in the 1980s and – to be clear – it was direct to video. It neither fits with the previous films from the Warlock franchise, nor is it particularly remarkable as a stand-alone horror film. It is, one might say, a “deep cut.” Unless you were looking for it, you likely have not seen this film. Yet, as an adoptee film, Warlock III does some remarkable things.

Ep. 9 – Co-Sign

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I do not think that I am an experiment, like the adoptee triplets Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman who were literally experimented on in the seventies and eighties, or that there has been a preponderance of surveillance of me… more than any other person in today’s society. But a life-long anxiety about my place in the world was made worse, not better, by the circumstances of my closed adoption.

Ep. 8 – The Paper Chase

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Idaho is not a large state, and there’s only so many people in it. I don’t think the state is run by heartless automatons, there’s a reason for these laws. But it’s absurd to deny me access to a document that only proves what I already know–my biological parentage is provably different from what they keep on file.

Ep. 7 – Private and Occulted Pains

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The experiences I had as a child were damaging, and happened at the hands of specific individuals, but the construct of abuse that I experienced came about through institutional forces and ideological pressures that we were all constrained by… I was raised in a world that no longer exists, only the ghosts and bones of it remain.

Ep. 6 – Personal Conspiracy Theories

Throughout my search I would give up for months, convinced that there was nothing more for me to discover. But what I’ve learned directly from my biological mother and biological father did help anchor me into my own narrative, I found the threads of my own story. Before I came into contact with them, I was left pondering a series of unconnected and yet interrelated facts, struggling to see if there might be meaning within those bits of data. And in wrestling with these fragments of narrative I find a unique, almost absurdist void of meaning that challenges my very notion of selfhood.

Ep. 5 – Twin Falls Memories

The Magic Valley landscape is broken apart by canyons and fences. The land around the town is a harsh, disrupted space, fueled by an agricultural boom generated from irrigation and lack of oversight in genetically modified organisms, pesticide usage, experimental fertilizers, and likely countless other environmentally unsound practices encouraged by the state of Idaho. My identity within that community never fully gelled, and I can remember when I first curdled, when I became unruly.

Ep. 4 – The Magic Valley

The first fourteen or so years of my life were spent in the Magic Valley, living in south-central Idaho. My memories of the earliest years of my life are necessarily blurred. But the stories I’ve been able to piece together through a combination of research, memory, and conversation are jarring…