ADOPTEE – unrelated thoughts: on being an unruly adoptee

Ep. 13 – A Series of Unrelated Thoughts

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. 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…

Ep. 3 – The Ten Commandments (1956)

In this episode I take a deep dive into DeMille’s 1956 film, particularly how it influenced me both as a child and later as an adult. I see in the film a desire to propagandize the importance of the adoptive mother.

Ep. 1 – Introductions

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My current name is Wes Unruh, but I was born “Boy Harper” in 1974, in Twin Falls, Idaho, at the Magic Valley Regional Medical Center, and I spent most of my life trying to learn that fact.