I’ve returned to Twin Falls in 2019, and the town has grown into becoming a nerve center in the area, with bustling shopping and dense traffic late in the day. When I was young, the town was slower, dustier, strewn with tumbleweeds in empty lots, bike trails with handmade ramps. 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. The reality is that articulating the injury, explaining the damage, that adoption causes is nearly impossible for me, and others adopted in infancy. Pointing out specifics becomes a process of tallying up countless moments of insensitivity and bias, all of which are micro-aggressions that weigh down upon an adoptee while appearing from an un-adopted perspective as unrelated, over-exaggerated incidents. Worse still, an adoptee may become reactive, triggering overwhelming emotional responses to seemingly insignificant stimuli… going through daily routines only to be left anxious and overcome by emotion when an instance where adoption is brought up is exhausting, something I can attest to myself. Grieving and exploring the emotionality of being adopted creates rifts in the interpersonal relationships with one’s very caregivers. When I first thought about finding my biological family, it was a secret desire, something I kept to myself, like masturbation, or the Stephen King novels I borrowed from my friends. This episode explores how all of that congealed in my mind, during those last few years I lived in Twin Falls.
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