Seven years ago, I began my therapeutic journey after being thrust into

one of the deepest valleys I’ve ever known and hope to see in my lifetime.

As a newborn, I survived the separation from my family of origin as well as from my second family in foster care.

At six months, my body fell into a global exploitative system, known as international adoption, in which I was purchased and placed into a white Midwestern family I had no previous connection to.

As a first generation adopted immigrant, I was expected to adapt to a new family, political landscape, and land with unfamiliar foods, language, culture, and kin.

In that family, I found connection and protection with my older brother, who too was a baby caught within that same system two years prior.

As a young person, I experienced innumerable accounts of racial discrimination without protection or tools to voice my experience and interrupt harm.

I remember having peers mock me by pulling the sides of their eyes, reducing my intelligence and qualities to stereotypes, pushing me constantly to the edges of social belonging, marking me as inferior, as ugly, as less than.

When I was 17, I was sued with assault for defending myself from a racist encounter on the fourth of July. Told to take off an American flag bandana because I wasn’t American, I fought back with my words and with my fist. I was slandered through media as a minor, hyper-sexualized and exotified.

Blamed for the discrimination I faced, my voice was reduced to that of a drunken flirt, pining for the attention of white boys who wanted nothing to do with me.

When I was 22, I met my family of origin for the first time.

That same year I too fell victim to the advances of a man twice my age. Was raped in my sleep and physically abused when I tried to end the relationship.

When I returned to Chicago,

I experienced feelings of insurmountable loneliness and low self worth. I had fragmented connections from the trauma I had experienced in high school.

And returned to a less than emotionally close relationship with my adoptive family.

For the first time in my life, I began engaging in self-harm. Repeatedly beating my legs and occasionally hitting my own face, seeking to validate the scope of my unwitnessed pain.

When I began seeing my first therapist, I like many other trauma survivors read The Body Keeps The Score. I remembering becoming obsessed with the idea that every seven years, our body’s cells regenerate.

I dreamt about who I’d be at 29, and how much further I’d be in recovery.

Seven years later, I approach 30. I feel closer to truth telling and finally feel strong enough to tell parts of my story I’ve long kept stored inside.

I too dream about who I will be in seven years. Giggle about my prior conceptions of time. Smile proudly about my sheer grit,

determination to live a more beautiful life.