For an adoptee this should be rephrased to, wherever you go there part of you arrives. Understand that many adoptees can go on through life never knowing where they started. Consider this, people generally like a predictable and peaceful life. Some of us get to a plateau and enjoy the view. Other’s turn about and see how far they have come and marvel. While others see the climb ahead and brace themselves for the next journey.
It is this latter group that tend to be the adoptees who cannot simply come to terms with a life that has no background beyond the moment they arrived on this planet. Still, there are even portions of that population of adoptees who have always been in some kind of pain over the separation that began at birth.
I guess I would categorize myself as an adoptee who needed to know, but was not tormented with the idea of never finding out. It was not that I did not care; there just was not a distressing factor that agitated my mind. Still when presented with the ability and means to look, I could not keep from falling deeper down the rabbit hole.
When adoptees entertain the notion that there might be more to gain by turning about and looking into the foundations of their nature the decision to move forward and act upon this curiosity becomes a unique and a very personal decision.
I may hold out a hand to lend effort and skills toward an adoptee or birth parents search, but there is no place in my assistance to push people to commit, stay involved, or throw in the towel. I can share my own experiences and try and inspire people to consider what might be along their path, but this really isn’t like my own search. I will certainly revel in our successes, but I am not emotionally involved to each search. There is simply more at stake for individuals than for the guide.
Every so often on a search I will turn about and gauge the interest of the searchers. It is not unusual for people to want to divert their attention to other personal matters that take precedence and put their search on the backburner for a while. You won’t find me encouraging that, but whatever the reason I am obliged to follow. Searching for birth family can take a toll on people. Especially when we hit brick walls or don’t see much progress.
On other occasions there may be someone who cannot get enough updates on whatever movement can be documented. These are times I encourage searches to learn about their genealogy, DNA test results, and other more traditional search methodologies to engage in and contribute to their search.
Once contact is made with our genetic relatives, be they distant cousins or much closer, detecting similarities in them can start to seep into our consciousness. This is where we start to really understand more deeply those missing elements of our nature taking hold and filling in the darkness before our birth. Then it is conceivable we really understand the differences between knowing our roots and being without them more succinctly. The verbal brevity of, “wherever you go, there you are” means something different than it did before. Simply because there is more of you there that you can identify with, when prior to finding biological family you did not even know these factors were less poignant and natural in scope and depth than previously identified.