When Kira Omans opens up about her life as a transracial adoptee, you can't help but be drawn into her world. Her narrative is not just a story of adoption but a profound testament to the search for identity and belonging. In today's conversation, we navigate Kira's childhood and growth into a confident Chinese American, actress, and advocate for the adoptee community. Her candid reflections on the complexities of fitting in and the evolving nature of her relationship with her own adoption narrative give voice to the struggles and victories that color the experiences of countless others like her.
Our conversation takes a turn towards the broader cultural conversation, examining how adoptees are portrayed in media and public perception. Kira's insights into these portrayals and the often misunderstood motives behind adoptees' searches for biological connections challenge the oversimplified narratives perpetuated by society. This discussion is an invitation to consider the depth behind each adoptee's story and to appreciate the nuanced representation that authentic voices like Kira's can provide.
Perhaps most impactful is the chapter in which Kira and I explore the often-overlooked issue of pre-verbal trauma and its deep-seated effects on adoptees. Our intimate dialogue on abandonment fears, anxiety, and the journey towards healing challenges listeners to acknowledge and validate the emotional complexities that lay hidden beneath the surface of many adoption stories. This episode not only aims to shed light on these intricate emotions and behaviors but also serves as a call to action for advocacy, education, and adoption reform.
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/kiraomans/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/kira.omans
Website: https://www.kiraomans.com/actor
When Kira Omans opens up about her life as a transracial adoptee, you can't help but be drawn into her world. Her narrative is not just a story of adoption but a profound testament to the search for identity and belonging. In today's conversation, we navigate Kira's childhood and growth into a confident Chinese American, actress, and advocate for the adoptee community. Her candid reflections on the complexities of fitting in and the evolving nature of her relationship with her own adoption narrative give voice to the struggles and victories that color the experiences of countless others like her.
Our conversation takes a turn towards the broader cultural conversation, examining how adoptees are portrayed in media and public perception. Kira's insights into these portrayals and the often misunderstood motives behind adoptees' searches for biological connections challenge the oversimplified narratives perpetuated by society. This discussion is an invitation to consider the depth behind each adoptee's story and to appreciate the nuanced representation that authentic voices like Kira's can provide.
Perhaps most impactful is the chapter in which Kira and I explore the often-overlooked issue of pre-verbal trauma and its deep-seated effects on adoptees. Our intimate dialogue on abandonment fears, anxiety, and the journey towards healing challenges listeners to acknowledge and validate the emotional complexities that lay hidden beneath the surface of many adoption stories. This episode not only aims to shed light on these intricate emotions and behaviors but also serves as a call to action for advocacy, education, and adoption reform.
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/kiraomans/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/kira.omans
Website: https://www.kiraomans.com/actor
People are. People in our community are raising their voices in a meaningful way and affecting change in the narrative and what people are hearing, especially in the generations to come. I think that I have a lot of hope for moving the needle forward, like you said.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Wandering Tree Podcast. I am your host, lisa Ann. We are an experienced based show focused on sharing the journey of the adoption life, identity search and reunion. Let's begin today's conversation with our guest of honor, kira. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an honor to have you. We always like to have space for our adoptee community and I like to just really kick it off with a little bit of an introduction from you about you. Would you mind sharing with us you know kind of who you are and give us as much detail as you want about your adoption journey?
Speaker 1:Sure. I was adopted from Zhongshan, china, when I was about 10 months old. I had been found by the side of a bridge when I was four months old and then brought to the welfare center, brought to the hospital and then brought to the orphanage where my parents would eventually meet me. I grew up in the DC area. I'm a transracial adoptee, so my parents are white and I have a younger brother adopted from Korea, and a younger sister who is my parents biological child. So, like I said, I grew up in the DC area and now I live in Los Angeles where I work as a full-time actor.
Speaker 2:Well, I love parts of your story, and parts of your story are also going to be heartbreaking, and I think that when I first met you, kira, after we hung up, was each of us have connection and we're going to, we're going to divulge. You and I are generations apart in age, and yet we still connected very strongly in our first meeting, and so I would like to ask you a few more questions about your adoption journey as you were growing up. What did that mean to you to be adopted in all the context that you just laid out for our listeners?
Speaker 1:Yes, so growing up, I think my parents did a good job of introducing my adoption story to me early in a very child-friendly way so that it was able to mature as I did, which I'm very grateful to them for. I think that they did the best that they had with the resources that were available to them at that time. I think that I had as healthy a relationship with my adoption story as I could have and still there were things that I felt could have been done better and I felt that there were things that were just lacking and things that I felt missing support that I felt was missing. Again, despite also having a trans-racially adopted brother as well to share that experience with.
Speaker 1:I think that growing up, I just so wanted to be like all the other kids and being adopted and being in a multiracial family made me different and I didn't want to be different in any way.
Speaker 1:I wanted to fit in, I wanted to make friends and all of those things were very difficult for me when I was struggling with things under the surface and when I was not in a school system that was very diverse.
Speaker 1:So I think that my relationship with my adoption story very much, like I mentioned before, involved with me and, looking back on it, there are so many things that I realized I struggled with, and still struggle with to this day, that I never would have been able to understand to the degree that I do now. So it's very much a complicated journey, and I think that that can be said for most adoptees, even those who, like myself, grew up in a more even just like a more economically privileged place. Everything on paper went right in my adoption story and there are still so many things that are really difficult and I still deal with a lot of trauma because of it. And again, I truly feel that everything went as well as it could have. So for adoptees who didn't have that experience, I can only imagine how difficult this journey can be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say compounding the issue and, in the context of what you and I are talking about as it relates to those struggles, what the theme that's coming to mind for me is the fitting in and your identity. So how do you tackle identity today versus even maybe 10 years ago, as it relates to this journey?
Speaker 1:That's such a good question. I feel very comfortable in my identity nowadays as a Chinese American adoptee actor, and so even 10 years ago, I was just beginning to explore what it meant to be an adoptee. I feel that in high school that was when I really started to explore what it meant to be Asian American and specifically Chinese American. And then it was in college that I truly started to integrate myself into the adoptee community and connect with other adoptees and just learn more about that side of myself. And obviously I'm always learning. There will always be so much to learn and I will always be on this journey, but right now I feel very comfortable in my identity and the different ways to explore it, the different ways that aspects of my identity overlap, all the discomfort that comes with that and all of those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. So well said and it just kind of brings home one of the points you just made around you're always going to be learning and maybe morphine and overlapping. That happens in life itself, aside from being part of an adoptee community and in this journey. So I really like the connection of that for how you view yourself and all of those various labels that you went through just a couple minutes ago. So well done and I think that people can resonate with that. It really resonates with me when I'm thinking equally of my identity and how that has changed in even a year. Very well said.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you mentioned a little bit about kind of getting connected to the adoptee community and how has that looked for you as part of this journey? Where did it start and how have you kind of grown into the community and started some of your advocation?
Speaker 1:When I was in college I entered the Pacific Miss Asian American pageant and that was in 2015. I was, I think, either 19 or 20 at the time and I wanted to enter that pageant under the platform of intercultural understanding, with an emphasis on my transracial adoption story. And I was the first adoptee to win the Pacific Miss Asian American pageant and because of that, felt that I was representing my community and truly wanted to immerse myself in the needs of my community and get to know people and just learn more about the kind of representation that we needed at the time. And so that was when I really started to expand outreach and just be interested in hearing as many people's stories as I could, speaking on as many podcasts and writing as many articles and just sharing my story and hearing others in return. And at that time it was very much a listening and learning and also expressing myself kind of time period. I wasn't really analyzing anything or critically thinking about a lot of these.
Speaker 2:It was very much a just jump in the pool kind of moment and all of that yeah it sounds like almost a feet first adventure and then I'm going to start determining can I swim, Do I need to doggie paddle Like I'm going for it? That's kind of what I've just heard come from you as it relates to making that step. I think that's common across the adoptee community and how we start elevating our voices and connecting. No different than you know your story. I just jumped into podcasting. I needed an outlet and then yet here I am and I feel like that it's the right thing for me for now and maybe it'll change in the future, but yeah, so keen to that kind of trajectory for us. Well, that tells me that you've been pretty dedicated to representation of all of your layers of identity and you are very tapped into the narrative. So I want to talk a little bit about your perspective in terms of the narrative and your profession and how you're blending those two together and what's important for you.
Speaker 1:That's such a recent development.
Speaker 1:I know I mentioned earlier about the intersection of identities and the discomfort that comes with that, and I feel like this past year is the most that my identities as an actor and as an adoptee have truly collided. In all of the recent media that's come out in the way that adoption and orphans are being portrayed in the media now and also in the past Some of the most beloved stories are orphan stories or at least orphan origin stories, and so I've truly delved into a lot of research this year and just try to explore how those things intersect for me and also what that means for my advocacy. So I think that this year, as certain movies have come out and I've related like, learned more about them and analyzed them very much as an actor, as a storyteller perspective, and then also through the lens of being an advocate and someone who never wants the adoptee community to be represented poorly or represented one dimensionally. It can be. Sometimes those things are contradictory, because sometimes what tells the best story is what is exploitative to the adoptee community.
Speaker 2:Right, it creates great conflict in the story, or it creates a hero, or it creates a villain, and somewhere in there the truth lies for all of us, but then also for from my perspective and I'm curious how you're going to respond to this the medium of entertainment has really blended the truth and the fictional to such an extent. I do believe there are many topics adoption included that people are incapable sometimes not all people, but there are a number of incapable of separating this might not be how it really is to the fictionalization of that for a storyline, they can't separate the two.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I speak about this in. I wrote a Ted talk and was a finalist in in speaking at Ted X Cornell this year and will not be doing that, but wrote a talk specifically for about this and about this phenomenon, and so one of the things that I mentioned in that research is you're absolutely right that this is a communication like a media psychology phenomenon. There is a theory called. There is a theory named after this, and this is the cultivation theory, which discusses how TV widely cultivates moral values and shared beliefs across society and how.
Speaker 1:Especially, the danger in this is that when a repeated portrayal is shown in media, that is what people internalize and what people believe about the world, despite individual differences across whatever group. This stereotype is being portrayed, and so it's true. Yeah, I mean it's a theory, but it is informing people's societal beliefs about adoption and about, like you said, whatever group the media is representing. And repeated portrayals reinforced stereotypes, and that dictates how people interact with adoptees in real life, what they believe we should think, how they believe we should act all of those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it complicates it. It complicates it for you and I who are living in the reality. It complicates it when we're in search and reunion, which I know for you as a very different topic than you know for for myself, and we'll talk, we'll touch on that in a minute but if I could relate what you've just said to even my own experience, one of the very first conversations I had with one of my biological maternal aunts was what do you want? And that comes from from. You know the concept that an adoptee who seeks out their biological family must want something that isn't pure, right, and so it just is a frustration on my part.
Speaker 2:I am aggravated when I hear an adoptee who's trying to connect to biology and information. I'm aggravated at the, the concept that their motives are less than pure and they want something above and beyond. Hi, I'm so and so and I am part of your family. It just unbelievably aggravates me. And so I want to circle back, though, because you do come from a storyline relative to this topic that does tug at hearts, and I think it's exploited in a in a couple of different ways. And so when you're in these types of conversations and you hear people such as myself, who has had that opportunity to connect biologically. How does that translate for you? What is the sensitivity of that, you know in this type of a forum bed. Then stretch that out to others who will place narrative on you such as oh, you're so lucky, or whatever it is that you've you've faced in your own experience.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It definitely varies depending on how I'm feeling about the idea of my birth parents and right now I'm in a fairly comfortable place when I referenced this a lot. But when I first saw the documentary One Child Nation, which was about the one child policy, and interviewed people who had relinquished their children, people who lived through the propaganda and the population issues that led to that policy and allowed it to be carried out, that was really really tough and I went through a lot of very tumultuous feelings about a potential reunion and that was the most I had ever contemplated. I don't know if I would ever want that. Obviously, my whole life I have not even known how possible things are. It's very expensive.
Speaker 1:That's another way in which portrayals in media have affected our lives.
Speaker 1:But birth searches and reunion are depicted as such an adventure, as such a something that will give you closure right away and once you're reunited the story ends.
Speaker 1:And that's not true and I'm sure you can speak to that that once you're reunited, that's only the beginning of something very new and different and complicated that never gets discussed and is uncharted territory. But I mean, at least for myself, I think that the sensitivity around it definitely depends on how I'm feeling about them and I think that that is going to be true for the rest of my life. And as far as expanding that and out to conversations outside of this safe adoptee space, I never usually want to delve too deeply into how I feel about reunion or my own birth parents or anything regarding my story in that way. That's pretty personal, I feel, and I feel like I'm usually very much an open book. But because my feelings towards that can be so tumultuous and vary at any given point in time, that's just something that I don't usually feel comfortable speaking with non-adopties about, because it's something that within the adoptee community, just something that other adoptees can inherently understand the difficulty in our feelings around that.
Speaker 2:I would agree. I would agree with that 100% and I truly believe, kira, that those are healthy boundaries for adoptees. And at the point in which we understand or we can identify that the non-adoptee and this is not criticism, this is just saying we identify the inability to actually really get there and understand, that is a pain. That's not a flippant conversation. It is a pain If you can see it in someone's face when you're talking to them and you know that there's their body language, how they're reacting to your words are not aligning with even a small dose of empathy. It's a boundary To me. The walls just need to go up because we're not going to have a conversation that I'm going to feel comfortable walking away from. I'm going to go and go sit somewhere and now I'm going to be torn apart with my emotions because of it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and to the people in my support systems credit.
Speaker 1:I truly believe that they empathize as much as they possibly can for people who have not lived that experience and I am always treated with so much compassion and I feel like I have some truly amazing people in my life.
Speaker 1:But, like you said, there are certain boundaries that are protective, and I mean not that all of my friends or my family are constantly bringing subjects like this up, but sometimes conversation can lead into a territory of oh well, I can't really relate to that because I'm adopted or I have a very different experience with this because I'm adopted. I mean, a scenario that comes to mind is sometimes people I know will just ask very specific, like party questions or something, and someone asked the question if you could go back and relive your entire life. But with the consciousness you have now, like as an adult, you get to experience your entire life over again. Would you do that? And I made the conversation very dramatic because I was like absolutely not, I do not need to experience my relinquishment in full 24k memory and I just like think about that scenario a lot and obviously I laugh and try to make it joking, but I'm like, oh my goodness, no, I wouldn't. And now I'm thinking about that. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you were going through that with me, I was going no, I mean, we others can't see our body language, but my whole body was like no, I'm not going to have that conversation. No, and I'm probably not going to have that conversation. And two, are you kidding me? I mean, what do you want me to say? I want something entirely different.
Speaker 2:Well, that's already happened for me and I don't mean to be flippant about the way I'm talking about it, but you know, let's put that card on the table you are talking about, and to someone whose life decision was made for them, number one, that that one little piece that was already done, that course was charted. I didn't have the same thing that you had, I didn't stay home with my parents, I wasn't attached to my biology. That ship is sailed in essence, and so, yeah, wow, I don't know how I would handle that in a party situation. So, you know, thumbs up to you for however you handled it and having the ice suspect, quite a bit of grace in answering those types of ice breaker conversation points in a more global setting.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I mean, I last thing I'll say about that is I think that is a little bit of a silly question, because even if you're not Adopted, I can't imagine most people have all good memories of their lives, and so I'm sure everyone has things that they would not wish to relive. So I, unless you had a really, really good life and all of the good outweighs the bad, so much so that you would want to relive that, I think that that's kind of a a trick question.
Speaker 2:I agree. Well, we just tackled something around challenges that Adoptes regardless of you know, our storylines and our experience all have in common, and so could you tell me what are a couple of the other more prominent challenges as Part of your journey that you feel you've either overcome or you're still working to overcome that we haven't talked about yet?
Speaker 1:Sure, one of the main ones that I've only spoken about briefly before is the separation anxiety that is very much instilled in me, and it was, has been something I've struggled with my whole life and as an adult finally was like I don't think this is normal and I need to get a handle on this. I don't know where this comes from. I don't know how to deal with it in a healthy way Other than having panic attack. I mean this isn't healthy. But I would just have panic attacks come down from it and be like, oh okay, I guess I feel better now that that's over, just did not know how to handle them and so finally went to therapy for it and my therapist linked it back to my adoption and that was just something I had never even thought of before.
Speaker 1:I had never been educated on relinquishment trauma. I had no idea that that could have stemmed from Moments that weren't even in my conscious memory. It was just trauma that my body remembered that made me feel so much better to know where it came from. Obviously, just Having that knowledge didn't solve the problem, but that was something I had never even considered and just really blew my mind at the time, and Now I am still in therapy and still work through it.
Speaker 1:I'm in a much healthier place than I was before, but it was something that I don't think my parents would have ever thought of either, and when I told them about it, they were like how is that possible? I mean, just like I don't remember being abandoned by the side of a bridge, I don't have any conscious memory of my biological family how is it possible that something could have Lived inside of me for so long and affected my adult life and my relationships today, and so that's something that I've had to work through. That's something that they don't always understand and isn't always a comfortable conversation to have, and so I have to have boundaries around Conversations like that to protect my own piece and the work that I'm trying to do and the healing that I'm trying to do, and Trying not to reopen old wounds or to be invalidated in a way that isn't even malicious, but for the sake of comfort for other people, and so that's definitely something that I have been learning about and working through.
Speaker 2:In regards to my adoptee journey, yeah, you brought up a great topic, which is that pre-verbal trauma and understanding that, and I'm not sure there's enough scientific information, medical research information, psychological research, information on that. That boils up to the top through this entire concept of adoption worldwide. And so even for myself, I didn't really understand what pre-verbal trauma was until it was brought to my attention, similarly to what you're just talking about as well. And and what does that, or how does that manifest into the human and some of the things we experience? So anxiety is Absolutely one of the top markers for the manifestation of Pre-verbal trauma and it stems from that abandonment mentality.
Speaker 2:I talk about it in the context of a triangle. You know we always talk about the triad or the constellation and we use a lot of, you know, positive affirmation words. But in the last year, through my own study of who I am and identity and behaviors and those pieces of that puzzle, I've come to a triangle that's a little bit different. That says if my self-worth is at the top, how I view myself, how comfortable I am with myself. It's extremely hard to put that at the top of the of the triangle or the pyramid when the two opposing corners at the bottom are seated in. You are relinquished and chosen. They just don't matter, right, unless unless you're doing something really Interesting with that triangle. They really don't match up at the top to say self-worth.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I love that you brought that up, because I do think we should talk about pre-verbal trauma and some of the symptoms in our, our life journey that manifest, and I I can relate to the anxiety and the abandonment and I have said this before. I don't know if it Resonates at all with you, but there are many, many, many days in my life where I have woken in the morning and Wondered am I going to be loved today? Now, that doesn't mean people don't love me. I know I'm loved, that right. I know I'm loved, but that's how I wake up and start a day. That's on the backside of my feet, not on the front side of this Right. That's not the positive. That's like, oh goodness, what's gonna happen to me today? I'm already. I'm already self-deprecating in that. In that portion of a conversation I Absolutely.
Speaker 1:That really resonates with me and, at least for myself, that leads to thoughts of what's wrong with me, and when I would have panic attacks or when I would be deeply experiencing separation anxiety, I would just feel so isolated and so confused because, logically, I would know that there's like nothing to be anxious about or that I shouldn't be worried about this. There's no reason to feel this way, was the narrative that I would tell myself in an attempt to try to make myself feel better. And it's what I had been told growing up and really internalized that and didn't realize the harm that that was causing me. That to tell myself there's no reason to feel this way. Well, that led to thoughts of well then, what's wrong with me? Then something's wrong with me then.
Speaker 1:Because if there's no reason to feel this way, why do I still feel it? And so I had to reparent myself and reframe that to actually there is a reason you feel this way and it's a very valid reason. It is something that, even though you can't viscerally remember it, your body remembers it, and to have that knowledge was so healing again, it was just such a first rudimentary step, but it really helped combat those thoughts of something's wrong with me and because of that I am unlovable, and just reigniting those fears and all of that spiraling Well, and then I'm sure if we could probably find a thread of connection here too.
Speaker 2:I know that if I look in retrospect into other relationships I've had, I'll go to my romantic ones. It was a very strong undercurrent of whether or not it was going to be a successful relationship, and I would put on the table for myself that, because that is how I've approached, or had approached, a good portion of my life. How can someone who's with a me that is constantly waking up and trying to justify that I exist in my mind, I'm abandoned, I'm worthy and am I going to be loved today? How does someone next to me, how do they handle that? Because they're paying in some respects of this conversation. They are paying for that pain and transference of how I'm viewing them, not how they're actually showing up.
Speaker 1:Wow, so well said Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Crazy, isn't it Crazy?
Speaker 1:Truly and I am glad that we can find these threads of connection because I think that moments like this or comparable moments are so true for so many adoptees and because those feelings are so isolating and those thoughts can be so overpowering and at a certain point I imagine for others, but definitely for me, that those thoughts are so overpowering that that's just what I would believe about myself and that was so harmful to the way that I interacted with the world and for my own mental health that I just hope that other adoptees who may be listening or who are exploring those or having those feelings for themselves don't feel so alone because, like you said, it is a thread of connection for adoptees and just like we very much understand that experience with each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree, I want to go back to the beginning of this conversation, where you were talking about some of your early injections into the adoptee community, and I think maybe this would be a good space to transition the conversation a little bit into. You know, what does that advocacy really look like for you, what's your why and what are you really looking for in terms of the advocacy as it relates to maybe change?
Speaker 1:That's such a good question.
Speaker 1:Right now, my advocacy is very much focused on adoption education and people understanding the adoptee experience and ensuring that our narrative is shared as much, if not more, than, adoptive parents narratives and not that those narratives aren't important, not that those stories aren't important but they are often deemed as so important to society that adoptees' voices are smothered and adoptee experiences that don't line up with the positivity of adopted parents are silenced for the sake of people's comfort, for the sake of toxic positivity and for the pure image people have of adoption as a purely positive thing, as a child without a family gaining a family and how isn't that such a happy ending and it is so much more complicated than that. I mean, I always say but the child that gained a family also lost a family, and I feel like that duality is just not explored in these conversations about adoption, and so my goal right now is very much to just educate people about the adoptee experience, open people's minds, help people think about things in a way that they might not have before and really focus on that education.
Speaker 2:Kara, I really like where you're going with that conversation relative to the elevation of our voices and helping bridge some gaps, and I have found in some of the conversations I'm having around this entire topic that you're right, there's such an element of narrative from the adoptee parent perspective that may have been overshadowing a grander experience.
Speaker 2:And so by us speaking up not necessarily just speaking out, but speaking up, which is very different to me than the out piece right, it helps us try to not only say, hey, I want you to hear my voice, but I want to connect to your voice as well, because even in that conversation with an adoptee parent or a birth parent, there are threads of connection equally. And so when we only approach it from our own conversation, I wonder if we then slight ourselves to some extent. And so, you know, I love the way that you talked about getting our voice out. There. I say we're just finally showing up, and now people are connecting more of those dots that say, well, it wasn't Rosie for that adopted parent. Now we're confirming it wasn't Rosie for that adoptee and we are also confirming it's not been Rosie for the biological parents that knew.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I love what you said about not just speaking up and out or I just you worded it so much more eloquently than I'm able to repeat, but I just, I really truly. That really resonates with me and I think that's so important. I think that something that in my work that I try to do is to meet people where they're at. If they're willing to learn, then to be able to share and hopefully expand their world view, not in a way that's comfortable for them, but in a way that's accessible for them.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times, most times, all times, change is uncomfortable, and reshaping your world view on something that is as deeply ingrained in our society as the narrative of adoption as a purely loving and positive experience, can be very jarring for people, and people are so committed to that ideology that even questioning that is perceived as a threat, and so that is the hurdle that I feel like I work to overcome, and right now my work is very centered on adoptees and entertainment.
Speaker 1:Like I mentioned, I had written that talk and I focused on that kind of research. But my hope for that and to speak to your question about how I see this advocacy in affecting change, my hope, by exploring the portrayal of orphans and adoptees in media is to gauge people's interest and or to pique people's interest and to address these stories that everyone has seen, everyone has experienced. They are so beloved, they are people's childhood. But to pique interest in how adoptees are portrayed and hopefully to introduce them to adoption reform and the ways in which that adoptees want to change the system, the ways in which that we believe our experiences could have been better growing up and better moving forward, but to hopefully get people interested and have that be an accessible step to people learning more about adoption reform and the changes that we need to make on a legislative level, on a social level, all of these different changes and how society perceives adoption.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I equate it to historical movements in, you know, even the North American society, not just the global. But we could, we can, pattern this type of conversation along the lines of several of those types of civil rights movements, basic human rights movements, very similar context, and I think it's fantastic when we're using the various platforms and what burns inside of us to help kind of move that along in any way that we can. I think for myself, I've gotten to the point of the conversation where I don't think there's going to be the type of reform I want in my lifetime. I'm okay with that, I'm actually okay with that. I wish it would go faster, but I'm also enough of a realist to know that it's it's not going to be, that you know, it's not going to be fully reformed. So maybe if we start with some basics and those are to your point, maybe two of all of those items one, the legal reform. Like, let's go ahead and make sure that there isn't this concept of closed adoption and I mean it in the in the light of changing legal documents that change my identity or hide who I am, from me when I'm older and I can, you know, take on that information and digest it and move forward.
Speaker 2:For myself, I would like to have seen less, I guess less importance placed on the birth mother's rights over my rights. I just nothing in my brain is ever going to let me get to a point where I think that was okay. I just right, I've tried, but it's, we're all humans, and so how did that person's human rights, you know, supersede mine, and so I think that's a good place to be. And then the other one is the narrative. And then you know it will grow and it will always have different facets to overcome through each of the you know stages of some type of reform. Sometimes it'll go fast and sometimes it'll go slow. I think right now we have some momentum and I don't want us to lose that. I don't know how you feel about that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I completely agree. I think that, with all of the conversations about adoption in pop culture and with Michael Oher's recent lawsuits surrounding the blind side, that this is a very relevant topic and I think that people are people in our community are raising their voices in a meaningful way and affecting change in the narrative and what people are hearing, especially in the generations to come. I think that I have a lot of hope for moving the needle forward. Like you said, I don't think it's moving fast enough for my taste, but these things rarely do, so I'm very hopeful that the work that you do, the work that I'm doing, that will push the needle forward to set a precedent for the change that we want to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. Well, as we're starting to close out our conversation today, I just want to put out there Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you really want to make sure hits this airwave?
Speaker 1:I appreciate you asking that I have so deeply enjoyed our conversation and speaking to you. You're so eloquent about just not only your feelings on adoption but your understanding of the community and understanding of what our community needs, and so I just really appreciate that and appreciate this conversation that we've been able to have.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you so much. Well, I know it's been a joy, and one of the things I want to close with is you are always welcome here. So the next time you have an item come up or you're going to get that TED Talk approved and I know we've talked previously you really are doing a lot of advocation. That is harder to see because it's in that entertainment world which creates a little bit of a separation from what I would say normal Lisa and normal Kira, right, and so I just want to praise you for that, and it has been a joy to have you on the show. You are welcome here anytime. It's been an honor.
Speaker 1:Thank you. That means the world to me and it's so wonderful to speak to you. I'm so glad we connected and I just hope we continue to have these conversations. I think that they're important and they're really fulfilling.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to today's episode of Wandering Tree Podcast. Please rate, review and share this out so we can experience the lived adoptee journey together. Want to be a guest on our show? Check us out at wanderingtreeadopteecom.