There is one thing in this world that calms me down, and that’s making things. Thankfully, there’s lots of ways you can make things, so that one thing is, in fact, many.
When I first moved up to Newcastle and had a big breakdown, I leaned into this blog heavily. I hadn’t started — or even finished applying for — a PhD then, and so there was total freedom to splurge whatever I wanted to on here. I wrote a lot then. A lot. I know it worried people, as it probably seemed like some sort of manic episode from the outside, but it was the opposite. I was in a very deep depression, and sitting outside a cafe and writing all day was the one thing that was keeping me from the brink. I probably didn’t need to publish all of it… But making and upkeeping this blog is another one of those things that brings me a lot of joy. This blog will long remain the best thing I have made, and it’s wonderful that it won’t come to an end until I do. It is my constant companion.
I’ve found other outlets more recently too. Eighteen months ago, I wrote about picking up the guitar again, and I have continued to find that a really grounding activity — one that it increasingly just for me. But getting this blog back after five or six months away from it has solidified an awareness of the fact that this thing right here is the number one thing that brings me peace, and I imagine that the overzealous posting over the last few days — as I clear out a backlog of texts and photographs (with more posts scheduled to spread things out a bit) — has already made that obvious to anyone still interested in (trying to) keep up with it.
But the fact that I am currently a PhD student does put some kind of spanner in the works. Whereas previously I’ve never been that precious about posting rough drafts of things on here, alluding to bigger projects being worked on in the background, I’ve been a lot more anxious about sharing any updates about the PhD because there is always a risk of plagiarising oneself. It does not come naturally to me to work on things in such total isolation, only sharing the headaches and breakthroughs intermittently with a supervisory team. The para-academic life is the life for me.
But as the project is settling into something nearing its final form, with only one major section left to write, the difference between what is academic fodder and what is bloggable reflection is becoming clearer to me now.
Perhaps readers might assume that the difference between PhD and blog is easy to determine — they are obviously very different things — but the problem I have had is that my academic project is nonetheless a personal one. Indeed, this has been the overarching difficulty in writing it.
The project, as it currently stands, is a sort of interjection across a number of different discourses. The first part considers a politics of family abolition, which has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, and the infrequent references it makes to adoptees and orphans. Sophie Lewis, for example, in Full Surrogacy Now, notes how adoption rights activists often feel like obstructors to her political project. Adoptees’ personal experiences get in the way of a project like full surrogacy because they all too often make political arguments that idealise mother-child relationships, which are often out of step with broader feminist demands.
In my own experience, this is true. I still remember, with some horror, how I once had a debate with an old girlfriend at university about abortion. As an adoptee, I was, at that time, quite anti-abortion, thinking that my own mother may well have chosen that option when she was pregnant with me, meaning I wouldn’t be here. I was naive and stupid back then, and soon came to realise how this kind of myopic personalisation of social issues, and their impacts on the individual specifically, quickly gets in the way of their collective complications (a lesson that many need to learn, frankly, as identity politics too often leads to similarly reactionary thought processes in other contexts).
Suffice it to say that, today, I am adamant that there is no level of personal discomfort, even as an adoptee, that can be used to override another person’s bodily autonomy. My experiences have been complex, but the solutions to the pain I continue to feel are completely unrelated to abortion rights. But it is my desire to understand the various implications and causes of this pain in other contexts that has led me to this current project, considering the extent to which issues of separation trauma can be addressed alongside other issues as well.
Some of these are cultural. For instance, I wonder to what extent another, far more open form of sociality — like that argued for by Lewis — would make the world more easily navigable as an adoptee. Perhaps a large part of the pain I feel is not innate, but rather a consequence of how much we romanticise our biological families, leading those who’ve never experienced this kind of ‘normal’ relation high and dry and strangely outside of social norms. But it is hard to say if this is the case with any certainty. We soon fall into nature-nurture debates that have no satisfactory conclusions.
To be clear, I really like Full Surrogacy Now. It’s a book I have wrestled with over the course of many years, and I have reaped so many rewards from it, as it has expanded my worldview considerably. But there is nonetheless a sticking point that remains for me. When Lewis claims that “there is no evidence that a childhood spent out of proximity from the womb one originated from correlates with unhappiness”, I feel I must interject. There is, in fact, a great deal of evidence to the contrary, and the minor field of ‘critical adoption studies’ has only recently begun to collate a lot of this for those who are interested in it.
The evidence suggests that separation from primary caregivers is deeply unsettling and stressful for young children, and without citing any of it here — I’ll leave that for the PhD — I will say that a lot of studies into adoptees’ experiences have corroborated my personal experiences from childhood, which have highlighted how pervasive adoptees’ unhappiness is, how separation trauma runs deep, and how we still don’t really understand what to do about it or how to avoid it.
I was in quite an interesting position as an adopted child, in fact. The woman who adopted me as an infant was also a social worker for Hull City Council, and so I have many memories of spending time with other adoptees throughout my childhood, as I was taken on playdates with other kids that my mam had either met during her own adoption process or in the course of her day job.
My prevailing memories of these kids all suggest that they had a much harder time dealing with their adopted status than I did — or, at the very least, they were able to express their distress (no matter how problematically) far more openly than I was. Even in my late teens, I remember being invited to make a film with a group of kids living in a children’s home in Hull (back when being a filmmaker was something I was actively pursuing and became well-known for, such that I was occasionally hired to work with troubled kids my own age to boost morale; something I did at children’s home and special schools for a couple of years). All of these kids had complicated relationships with their birth parents, or no relationship at all, and all of them had behavioural difficulties that meant they had already been maligned on the edges of society. I felt sorry for them, and for a long time, I also felt sorry for myself.
I’d like to think I’ve dealt with a lot of this trauma over the years since, but even as a thirty-three year old, I’m painfully aware of how deeply that early separation trauma still affects me. My aforementioned breakdown was triggered by a series of rejections, for example — first the end of a long-term relationship, followed by a disastrous attempt to start dating again too soon afterwards. This is not something I’ve ever really been able to acknowledge before, but it is an important thing for me to wrestle with. It has been a problem that has followed me throughout my life, where the breakdown of social relationships has often been a trigger for very serious mental health issues.
It is clear to me, in the midst of a currently enduring stability, that my responses to the general disasters of human contact, which make up the mundane drama of all our lives, have resulted in extreme overreactions on my part. This is deeply embarrassing to me: that something so central to the human experience has caused me such extreme difficulty. As I continue to try and make peace with myself, the only way I have been able to make tentative sense of it all is to trace it back to an experience that I do not even remember: my adoption. I take a strange kind of solace from the fact that I have met so many other adoptees who have struggled similarly.
What saddens me is that we think we know these children’s stories. We’ve seen Peter Pan or Oliver Twist or Juno or Star Wars or E.T. the Extraterrestrial, etc. etc. etc., and we think that orphan stories are a familiar part of our cultural landscape. In truth, these stories — and there are countless more — are seldom written by adoptees and orphans themselves. Our overfamiliarity with a monomyth has led us to generally ignore adoptees’ experiences in reality. To even begin to tentatively explore the emotional implications of this kind of experience with another person has always blown their mind, in my experience. People really have no idea just how strange it is to grow in a world that places so much emphasis on biological kinship; how strange it is to find the mundane experiences of most people to be totally alien. Lewis’s suggestion that there is no evidence, then, is double-edged. Admittedly, the evidence is relatively scant, but this is only an indication of a lack of research into this area of early life. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The second part of my PhD thesis considers how this absence of evidence also has implications for some of the prevailing intellectual currents of the twentieth century, specifically structuralism and psychoanalysis, which are similarly founded on the family as ideal and as metaphor. The contradiction above re-emerges here. Far from being niche experiences, references to childhood displacement are ubiquitous in these fields as well, to the point that they are deemed entirely mundane. Lest we forget that Oedipus was himself an adoptee, and Freud’s various case studies deal with variations on children’s difficulties coming to terms with alienation from family members. Lacan too talks about adoptees sometimes, but makes no special provisions for them, as if Freud’s Oedipus complex applies to adoptees all the more acutely than the general population.
Even in Lacan’s radical adaptations of the Oedipus complex, adoptees only experience an enlarged sense of separation that all children must nonetheless undergo, as adoptees’ experiences are folded into the ready-made traps of metaphor and metonymy, instrumentalising a cultural understanding of their experiences to explain universal processes undergone by all of us, once again ignoring the specificity of their poorly understood trauma.
Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the case of Dr Schreber — Freud’s archetypical schizophrenic — whose problems are reduced to familial estrangement, with a transgendered ‘psychosis’ being explained as a way for Schreber to become the mother never had. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons, as an adoptee who is also trans and has been doing DIY HRT for the last sixteen months. It has been observed by many clinicians that transgender individuals are overrepresented among adoptees (5-6% of them) compared to the general population (of which only 1-2% is trans). There are even burgeoning theories that suggest transgender adoptees have a very different relationship to their transness than other trans people who are otherwise the product of stable family homes — a fact that has occasionally led me to question the validity of my own transness on occasion and is probably to blame for me coming out so much later in life than my peers. (As Jeanette Winterson titled one of her adoption memoirs: “Why be happy when you can be normal?”) But I’ve come to hate this sort of phylogenetic psychologisation, and at this stage, I am more adamant than ever in rejecting a overly medicalised understanding of my own desires in this regard.
This has similarly led me to develop a growing animosity towards psychoanalysis. Paul Preciado’s infamous address to a room of analysts — published as Can the Monster Speak? — rings true to me. Lacanians, of course, hate that book. They insist that Preciado’s critiques of psychoanalysis are only common misreadings that betray a lack of understanding with regards to the late Lacan. But here I have found solace in a number of conversations with Maya B. Kronic, who has, on multiple occasions recently, helped clarify the real fissure between the thought of Lacan and Deleuze for me.
Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that we are only able to enjoy our symptoms on the basis that it is impossible for anyone to truly fulfill their desires. In this way, the sinthome becomes not so much a deficiency than a useful scaffolding for one’s ego, thus allowing us to enjoy our particular brands of madness; identification with the sinthome is a coping mechanism that can forestall its having any further impact.
Trans people are thus seen as run-of-the-mill psychotics in this regard. After all, sexuation is a semblance for all of us, not just trans people. We all construct our own fictions and call them inner truths. At worst, trans people are simply perverts — in the Lacanian nomenclature — because they mistakenly believe that desires can be acted on productively and enjoyment attained. For some Lacanians, however, the elaborate nature of this kind of fiction can lead to an unethical relationship to desire, which goes some way towards explaining why there are quite so many TERF Lacanians around these days.
Ultimately, I hate all of this, to be honest, and this is the rub where Lacanian and Deleuzo-Guattarian understandings of desire differ (as Maya has again helpfully clarified), and similarly where psychoanalytic understandings of transness collide with transness as a lived experience. I have found that my transness has radically opened up the world for me, lubricating a far more productive and playful and constructive relationship to the world and my relationships with others. Deleuze is a more interesting thinker, in this context, because he throws off any admonishing shade that lingers under Lacan’s master discourse.
Lacan is not left in the dust entirely here, however. My persistent anxieties around interpersonal rejection and separation, which have reemerged distressingly in the context of a new and loving relationship, suggest that transness is no fix for adoption trauma. On my particularly melancholic days, I am sometimes left wondering whether Lacan is right. His theory of foreclosure certainly becomes a neat explanation for why a lack of both biological parents has led to my own brand of psychosis. But what is all the more dispiriting about this is that Lacan’s thought offers no remedy or path outwards. His theories only further stress the importance of familial relationships, and before long we are back in the mud of nature-nurture discourses that elude any certainty. Indeed, as much as he might structuralise his various relationships to desire — such that hysteria, psychosis, etc., do not carry the same diagnostic or quasi-moralistic tone as they do in other discourses, since we all have bits of them — they nonetheless feel like problems that help explain the world we’re in but have no interest in describing a path out of it.
Deleuze and Guattari return here once more, with echoes of Sandor Ferenczi’s concept of “Orpha” — from Orpheus, but also orphans — to describe a vitalist kind of “life-organizing principle” that leads individuals to seek help and support, and not necessarily from parental figures. Deleuze and Guattari follow this line of flight persistently, and come to separate the orphan out from the Oedipus complex. As they write in Kafka, “the problem isn’t that of liberty but
of escape. The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.” (A statement that has multiple resonances, and which describes, for me, not just Kafka’s Letter to the Father but also Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to Lacan.)
But what is bugging me at the minute, as I sit in a now familiar place of frustration regarding how to move my thesis forward, is how the figure of the Orphan in their works relates to those who escaped ahead of time. Kafka, for instance, seeks an escape from his biological family, but this fantasy of escape nonetheless terrifies him, as he is painfully aware of how unforgiving society is to those who break free of Oedipal relations. The struggle for an adoptee is inverted, perhaps, whilst nonetheless producing the same anxiety. Indeed, this Kafkaesque anxiety is all-consuming. Adoptees are painfully aware of their own vulnerability, understanding just how contingent relationships can be, particularly those familial relationships that most of us take for granted, and which most of us are not confronted by until our parents die much later in life. The grief I have felt throughout my life is no different to this more socially recognised grief, except I experienced it so early as to have no way of dealing with it or even remembering it, only being left with what Nancy Newton Verrier calls a “primal wound”.
The K-function similarly constitutes a problem for me when the opportunity arises to unorphan myself. I am frustrated at the moment with how untrusting I can be in a relationship. Not outwardly, I must stress, but the body keeps the score, and I am aware of this frightened inner child who finds the experience of bonding with another person far more distressing than an adult self who is so ready to love everyone. There is, inside me, an exhausting battle ongoing, as I do my best to soothe this child, by writing or playing the guitar, trying to give it a voice or a lullaby. It is a strange frightened creature who is distinct from me, but nonetheless affects me deeply. More than anything, I’d like to go back to do more EMDR…
Over the next year, I hope I can put some of these feelings in order. It is the meeting point between Lacan and Deleuze that is currently making me feel so distinctly overwhelmed, and it is coupled with the knowledge that all of this intellectualisation ultimately counts for nought anyway. Academic philosophy is not an outlet that calms my nerves. But perhaps, in throwing the occasional jumbled reflection onto this blog again, I might find a middle ground between the formal and informal expressions of this problem I have been fated to.
Or maybe this is just my writer’s perversion. With a book on grief and a book on self-transformation already under my belt, following eight years of flailing around with a blogospheric autotheory, I’ve yet to find anything resembling a lasting respite. Perhaps I never will. But the perversion is that I believe I might one day, and I aim to keep writing until I do.