The Journey: A Scholarly Personal Narrative
Two years ago, I took the ferry from Jack London Square into San Francisco with some friends. Once we de-boarded the ship, somewhere along the Embarcadero, we came across an artisan selling pieces of wood with quotes burned into the sides. Each of us bought the wood-burned wisdom that spoke to us in that specific moment. The one I chose had a question from Mary Oliver (1992): “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (p. 94). Even though I haven’t read any other poem by Mary Oliver, her question struck me for the simple fact that I didn’t know. For the first time in my life, I felt adrift, and beyond that, an extreme pull towards something different from the incredibly precious life I’ve lived—a pull towards the wild.
I’ve had other strong pulls in my lifetime, some of which I’ve ignored out of fear, suffering, or a willful lack of interest. I have faith in humanity, and I have faith in beauty. I’m ready to be more wild with my life and fully embrace the things that give it meaning: creativity, freedom of expression, deep thought, and healing, which has led me to the Transformative Studies (TSD) Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. This is how I began my Autobiographical Statement for the TSD program when I applied. What I didn’t realize was that while I was ready to fully embrace my life, that also meant fully embracing, or “surrendering” to the feelings of being adrift, or I wouldn’t know what it really means to be wild. Because I am obsessive and understand myself better through writing and objects, I got this journal for Christmas, and just the other day wrote: I had thought originally that there was a dichotomy between the precious and the wild in me, but Mary Oliver didn’t write: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild or precious life?” She wrote: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” This month, I am learning that being wild brings out the preciousness in me.
Since receiving my dual Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry from St. Mary’s College of California, I’ve found it difficult to hold on to things in a meaningful way. I didn’t realize at the time I was doing so, but by grasping onto the people who came into my life with such force—and sometimes desperation—and making their world my own, I lost my voice again somewhere along the way, something I had thought would never happen after my experiences with racial and institutionalized trauma as an undergraduate student. It is kind of funny, for when I finally decided to focus on my writing for the first time in my life by choosing to apply to MFA programs instead of more traditional literature, philosophy, or cultural studies ones, I made that choice because I still felt betrayed and mistrustful of academia, and I also feared if I didn’t, my talent for writing would leave me, and I would be voiceless—in essence, annihilated—and that has been a pervading fear in my life. My nonfiction mentor, Marilyn Abildskov, once told me that my writing contains “an intense longing for ecstasy and annihilation,” and I agree; I exist in that beautiful, yet controlled, tension between extremes: the ecstasy and annihilation, questions and answers, the human and the divine, the wild and precious, and this, too, comes from being an adoptee. In Renaldo Maduro’s (1985) study “Abandonment and Deintegration of the Primary Self”, he says:
“During the process of deintegration (or ‘unpacking the self’) the baby mind:
— Would not depend on anyone else in a close way. This includes the perfectionist
need to do everything by herself without help from others.
— Would feel narcissistic depletion, emptiness inside with intense longing. This
state leads to severe distress, and to harmful interference with a basic loving
investment in one’s own body image and the development of object relations.
— Would substitute things for people, especially when they offered comfort, safety,
and reliability.”
In her dissertation, Remembering Loss: The Cultural Politics of Overseas Korean Adoption, Eleana Kim’s (2007) goal is “to draw attention to the deep ambivalence that characterizes many adoptee narratives. This is an ambivalence that allows one to say with confidence and without contradiction that one is happy to have been adopted, that one cannot imagine a different or more loving family, but also that these joys coexist with a sense of loss and sadness for people, places and experiences barely remembered or never known. . .adoptees live within the dialectic of loss and gain, and it is this dialectic. . .that produces the ambiguous figure of the transnational adoptee. Her split temporality and shape-shifting transnationality encompasses the complexities and contradictions of the global—at once privileged and subaltern.”
When I came to this program, I had thought that I was done with adoption psychology and creative writing, as I had thought I was done with philosophy and academia when I decided to get an MFA in Creative Writing, but I think I’m done with proclaiming myself “done” with anything now as I move into a fuller understanding of what it means to be a whole person.
The above journey in Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) was my half of a co-presentation entitled Adoptee Ways of Knowing: The Role of Scholarly Personal Narrative in Transformative Inquiry with my colleague, Jessica Spring Weappa, for the Transformative Studies Department at California Institute of Integral Studies Mini Conference for Transformative Studies Doctoral Students at Pacifica in January 2018.
Jessica and Kelsay are both adoptees and academics engaging Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) alongside arts based and embodiment practices in our work. Though our adoption stories are extraordinarily different, both of us have felt called to explore the labyrinths of identity for as long as we can remember. While many people seek self-understanding and belonging in the world, we identify and describe ways of knowing attributed to living with the loss of early life separation from the biological mother, a trauma that adoption psychologist, Nancy Verrier (1993), has called “the primal wound.” Verrier (1993) believes this primal wound or “abandoned baby lives inside each and every adoptee all his or her life.”
Maybe she does indeed still reside somewhere deep within us, but our life experiences show that we can be transformed through the arts and embodied ways of knowing. Adoption loss magnifies and places questions of the motherlines, identity, trauma, resilience, embodiment, and the creative self at the center of an adoptee’s consciousness. It is our belief that everyone can benefit from following their roots back to the mothers, getting in touch with the wisdom of their bodies, knowing themselves in a deeply transformative way, and sharing their stories in community for a more profound understanding of what it means to be alive in our present society. We are each offering our life experiences and our work here using Scholarly Personal Narrative, artistic imagery, and movement in the hopes that it will offer some inspiration for a more compassionate, connected, and embodied future.
