Adopted - (NEW!) Intro

My name is Karyn. I am a 25 year old manager in a small business. It doesn’t’ really matter who I am now. I need to let go of some things that happened during my disaster of a childhood. I will be writing here a story that I need to let out of me. I need to write it to get rid of it, much like some people write down their memoirs. Some things happened in my childhood, and I need to get them off my chest once and for all.

Alright. Here I go.

You know how sometimes there are archetypes? Things that went a certain way for so long that they became common things. Like milk and cereals, like the hero against the villain, or the fact a man goes with a woman, or even some racial or religious conflicts. Archetypes. Pink for girls, blue for boys. Things like that. Well, on the other hand, very rarely, there are some archetype defying situations. Like the fight for gay rights, or black lives matter movement, or when someone eats their cereal with…coca cola.. Anyway. I am talking about things that are different than the norm. Some people actually choose to close their minds when confronted to such situations, they are… afraid maybe, I don’t know, they reject what is “different”. They don’t want their son to play with dolls, or don’t want their daughters to play with toy trucks. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism. Maybe it’s just plain old conservatism. Well, it’s that old mindset that says: “It’s always been like that, it shouldn’t change.” That brings me to write this story.

Why am I talking about this? Well, I am in an unusual archetype defying situation. See, I am a normal Caucasian girl, but I got dumped by my stupid parents when I was a baby. The orphanage wasn’t a great time of my life but I finally got out, only to be adopted by a rich Asian family living here since generations. See? Usually, it’s the other way around. But today we find all sort of people everywhere. Multiculturalism has been effective and I think it’s a good thing. The color of a skin, the mixing of ethnicities, it’s all perfectly good in my opinion. But it got me in trouble.

Just to put things in perspective, my adoptive dad was never there. He is an airline pilot. I lived my whole childhood with my Adoptive mom, Yumi, and her legitimate daughter Aiko. They adopted me after Aiko’s twin sister died horribly. Why they adopted me? I never asked. But part of me thinks it’s because they wanted another daughter as replacement. Yeah. Well, I’ve always felt like if the fact I was Caucasian, and blonde… made them like me less than their own daughter. They paid for my education. However for some reasons I always seemed to have more chores to do than Aiko. I was always busy cleaning something or my mom would be very angry while Aiko could spend hours on the computer gaming and chatting with her friends. I had friends too, but she had way more, and despite being both the same age, Aiko preferred us not to share friends, so she had her own friends, and I had mine. I didn’t see them often by the way. Either because my mom would keep me home to clean floors or do the laundry, or because my friends gradually abandoned me to be friends with my sister Aiko. It was all normal to me, and it only struck me as something childhood perturbating when I got older and started to go to therapy. Of course today I still live with some stigma from my childhood, but at least I have learned to live with them and I think, overall, I managed to become a good person regardless.

I cannot say I love my family. I like them, I respect them, and I owe them a lot. But I do not love them. They have been too hard on me. My mom used me as a servant, beat me, grounded me, almost enslaved me, and most importantly, she shrunk me very often. You see, while on one hand my family was giving me a life and paying for my education, my roof, my food, and everything, on the other hand, they used me and sometimes, yes I say it, they tortured me. Was it because I was a white, “normal” blond girl? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they felt like I owed them. But I think after years of therapy, that it’s all what drove them to be mean towards me. Difference.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. But today I am a completely autonomous person, living my own life with a somewhat cute and respectful boyfriend. However, I am tired to be haunted with images of my sister trying to stomp me while I am shrunk to 2 inches tall and running for my life. I am tired to have nightmares about being abandoned shrunk and naked, for hours on end, inside one of my mother’s shoe to clean them. Those were common things. They happened very often over the years, even during teenage years. But there were other more unpleasant moments. That’s why I am writing my story. Because I need to get these things out of my mind and by putting them on paper, I may end up being able to live my life without fear, without constant post traumatic stress.

There were 3 major key events that were particularly hard on me during my childhood. 3 moments that I truly feared for my life. All of those moments I was shrunk to very small sizes, and placed under inhuman dangerous and humiliating conditions. I could have died. I will detail these 3 key events in the next chapters, hopefully then, I will be able to be free.