My first encounter with Zara was on a talk show I was presenting. She was a guest, sitting there in the audience, making sense. It’s a rare talent and my God we could do with more of it in the world. We talked after and had a mutual check list that fellow adoptees play swapsies with. It’s a kind of inventory of feelings. ‘Got. Got. Got. You feel like that too?’

When you meet and talk to another adopted person you realise you are both, in one sense, lost children. We are always forever more amen in perpetuity adopted ‘children’. Our status and feelings are frozen in time and limited by our own insecurities and need to belong. This might not completely define us – I am defined as much by the wonderful adoption and amazing family that I have – but it is a key ingredient in the whole mess of who we are or who we think we are. The inextricable tangle of who we are.

When I met Zara I felt this. And this beautiful person, in the words of the song ‘took my letters and read them all out loud’. She articulates – no delete that, articulate sounds too stuffy and formal – she expresses beautifully what so many children like us feel.

My odyssey into the part of me I didn’t know but needed to understand – tracing and meeting my birth mother and then birth father – was driven first and foremost by just that. I needed to lay the demons to rest and get on with the rest of my life, free of the questions and doubts. I hope this isn’t self-pity, it’s self-knowledge.

Not that I’ve reached some state of Zen-like inner peace – that wouldn’t be at all good for the creative process  – but it’s a hell of a lot better than it was before. You don’t realise how much you need to do it for your own well-being until you do it.

Zara’s feelings will be recognised by every adopted person on the block. When you walk through that door though, you need full body armour before you come through. It’s a brand new past, a whole new future and boy does it takes guts, strength and support to get there; to handle it all. In retrospect, I needed much more of the latter but the more people talk and write as powerfully as this, the better for all us children. We just want to play in peace. We just want to play.

 

Nicky Campbell
January 2018