The Day I Lost My Name: The Moment I Learned I Was Adopted

Velarion Light Journal Entry 8

Most people are told their adoption story gently — by their parents, in safe moments, with soft edges around the truth.

But I wasn’t told softly.

I wasn’t even told by the people raising me.

I was four years old.

I remember the bathroom light, bright and yellow. I remember standing on the little stool, covering my hair with those old plastic barrettes — every color, every shape, clipping them one after another because that was the kind of child I was: creative, focused, in my own world. A neighbour girl was with me. She stayed with us often because her dad worked away. She was older, and she knew things I didn’t.

And out of nowhere, she said:

“You know your parents aren’t your parents, right?”

Just like that.

No buildup.
No warning.
No softness.

I remember freezing.
My hands stopped moving.
My breath went sharp and thin.

I remember saying,
“No… you’re wrong.”

Not because I understood —
but because I needed it to be wrong.

And then came the feeling.

That chest-tightening, stomach-dropping, world-tilting panic that only a child can feel when their entire reality suddenly collapses. Like the floor disappeared. Like gravity disappeared. Like I disappeared.

I ran — barrettes still in my hair — down the hallway to the kitchen. And I can still see my adoptive mom sitting at the table, doing a crossword or something like it, calm, unaware that my whole world had just cracked open.

I said, breathless:
“She said you’re not my parents.”

She didn’t deny it.
She didn’t soften it.

She looked at me and said:

“No, we’re not. We’re taking care of you for your parents.
When you’re 18, you can go find them if you want to.”

And there it was.
The truth.
Delivered like a fact — a line in a crossword puzzle.

And in that moment, I lost my identity.

I remember thinking:

**
Who am I then?
If I’m not really their daughter, whose daughter am I?
Why did they give me away?
What’s wrong with me?
How do I fix myself so I can be loved?
**

I didn’t have the language for abandonment wounds or primal trauma or soul-severing moments.

But I felt it.

The split.
The fracture.
The sudden awareness that love could be conditional.
That belonging was not guaranteed.
That I had already been chosen against once.

And it shaped me.

It shaped my hyper-independence.
My caretaking.
My need to earn love.
My ability to carry enormous emotional weight without asking for help.
My internal belief that I had to be exceptional just to be kept.

It shaped the woman who nearly died trying to hold everything together.
It shaped the mother who pushed through because she thought she had to.
It shaped the spiritual seeker who kept asking,
“Why do I feel like I don’t belong here?”

And it shaped the awakening that would come decades later — the reclamation of identity, lineage, soul, and truth.

Now, all these years later, I can look at that little girl — hair full of plastic barrettes, heart cracked open on a kitchen floor — and I want to tell her:

You were never unwanted.
You were never broken.
You were never less.
Your soul chose a difficult entry — not because you were unlovable,
but because you were meant to remember who you are.
And remembering always begins with forgetting.

— Cassia