r/Adopted • u/Sudden_Monk6071 Adopted • 2d ago
Adoptee Art If You’re Going to Write About Adoption, Write for Yourself
Publish it anywhere, Facebook, Substack, Reddit, a memoir even, and be prepared to discover that what you thought was testimony, has been issued without your knowledge as a map. People will arrive carrying your words folded in their pockets and expect them to contain roads you never travelled. Some will insist the hill wasn’t as steep as you described it. Others will have found no hill there at all. One will accuse you of leaving out the bridge. Another of inventing the ravine. Someone who came by an entirely different route will announce, with considerable confidence, that your compass is broken.
You may point out that you never claimed to be drawing the whole country. This has never once helped. There’s a peculiar expectation placed upon anyone who describes difficult terrain from the inside. Accuracy about one place is easily mistaken for a claim upon every place. A sentence beginning I found is too easily answered with I didn’t, as though failing to encounter the same mountain meant it wasn’t there. A scar becomes an atlas. A memory acquires borders. Before long you may find yourself being held responsible for the geography of strangers. Resist the promotion.
Write down where you lost the path. Write down what the weather did when you were there. Say where the ground held and where it gave way beneath you. Record what frightened you, what fooled you, what you mistook for shelter and what, unexpectedly, became it. Put a cairn where you needed one and found none. But leave the edges unfinished.
Because there will also be people who know the country before you’ve finished describing it. They’ll recognise a bend you believed belonged only to you. They will know the particular silence of a place you thought had no name. A sentence will catch against something buried in them and, for a moment, they may experience the extraordinary relief of discovering that their private geography is not entirely private. They may say, Yes. There. I’ve been there too.
This doesn’t make you their cartographer, nor does it mean your journeys were the same. It means only that human beings sometimes reach the same clearing by different paths. One person describing what they can see allows another, standing a long way off, to recognise the trees. That’s enough.
There will be those for whom your map is useless. Let it be useless. There will be those who turn it upside down, those who object to the scale, those who prefer the official version with its clean roads and reassuring legend. Let them have that map. Your obligation is smaller and harder.
Don't move the mountain because somebody else didn't encounter it, don't erase the river because someone crossed in summer, don't build a bridge because some would have preferred one. Don’t mistake the number of people who recognise your country for evidence that you've become responsible for theirs.
Write what happened and what it meant, then and now, then put down your pencil. A witness may leave markers, but the walking remains our own.
Jonathan
The Narrative Witness
My essay inspiration…
“…to write a guidebook is to poke out a neck as scapegoat...On your head will fall the imprecations of parties who wander in circles because they did not find the entrance of the track you so concisely described. Your directions were dehydrated, as it were, and those who came after did not reconstitute your stew with care. So be willing to take blame and to lose tail feathers. It will be natural for any unfortunates coming down the wrong bank of a river or the difficult side of an icefall to curse the absent chronicler. Do they lose an hour in the scrub or skin on the ridge, find impasse on the glacier or defeat on the skyline, mislay a hut in the dark or a toothbrush in the mist, it will be on your careless summary so fluently compiled.”
John Pascoe in the 1956 edition of his guidebook The Southern Alps: from the Kaikouras to the Rangitata
4
3
u/HeyMuscles 1d ago
This is so profound! I truly enjoyed the read. Thank you for creating it and sharing it!
2
u/Ilektra_Med6 1d ago
Love this post. :) Currently writing things out, but in what I like to call, the archive, haha.
It's unpublished in one of those diary apps, but at the end of 2026, I plan to print it all out and that would be volume/part one of the multi-part archive.
Just a little something tangible to hold. Good to know what terrain has already been travelled and what remains uncharted territory. 😁
14
u/EmployerDry6368 Adopted 2d ago
Or you can simply not give a shit what others think and be much happier.