Helping Adoptees Reclaim Agency Over Their Life Story
— Shannon Quist
I am an advocate for adoptees: not for adoption, but for adoptees.
When most people think of adoption, they think of a baby being rescued: swept up into the arms of a couple who desperately wanted a child but were unable to have one themselves. But what about the baby? How does that person eventually tell their story when a story has already been composed about them?
Adoptees experience a duality in their life. There’s the life they are living, and the life they could have been living and would still be living if they hadn’t been adopted. There’s the family they know, and the family that knew them. Before they’ve even begun to make any choices about their own life, they’re already onto an alternate life path. And while other children are asked “what do you want to be?”, adoptees are told what they are: you are lucky, you are special, you were rescued, even if they don’t feel lucky, special or rescued.
I certainly experienced this: I am an adoptee, too. And while, yes, I am, in some ways, lucky, that’s not all I am. Simplistic stories of adoptees as being rescued contradict how they’ve experienced the world. And sometimes these stories do help inform how they see themselves, but it’s not all of how they see themselves. Adoptee experiences often include grief, confusion, and loneliness. The stories they are told about themselves don’t always make room for those experiences.
Life stories describe how we experience ourselves and our place in the world. Whether it’s a story you tell yourself in your head or a story you write down for others to read, we all naturally see our lives through a story lens. And when someone experiences incoherence or duality in their own life, it can be therapeutic to write down their life story and address the incoherence or duality in the story to reveal ways to address incoherence or duality in their life.
So, for the last several years I have been spending my time learning and volunteering. I’m convinced that I can help other adoptees with their stories. I am currently a PhD student at Texas Woman’s University and a volunteer at Adoption Knowledge Affiliates, a nonprofit in Texas that supports the adoption constellation. I developed my own theory – Phantom World theory – which specifically defines a world created by a character in their mind, much like an adoptee’s imaginings of the life they would have lived.
Part of how I came to define my theory is with possible worlds theory which is basically the idea that there can be multiple “worlds” in one story. This is how adoptees often experience their life, and it’s natural to feel like you have to choose one: the “right” one. But possible worlds theory argues that stories can include multiple worlds in a single story which I felt could enable an adoptee to write their life story in a way that includes both worlds more accurately describing how they experience life.
This can be a very powerful and therapeutic experience for an adoptee. As the narrator of their own story – rather than their parents, or society – they can experience a sense of agency over their life that they might have lost or never experienced at all.
Narrative theory also provides a framework to identify where and how meaning is created in a text. For adoptees, every time someone asks them about their “real mom” or their “real family” it implies a valuing hierarchy that is often in conflict with the adoptee’s life experience. From a very young age, I was asked who my “real” mom was, which completely conflicted with how I experienced my relationship with my adoptive mother; my mom wasn’t not-real, so why did everyone describe my other mother as my “real” mother? This language usually doesn’t describe the adoptee’s experience, and doesn’t belong in the adoption community, so in 2026 I presented the paper “The Rhetorical Use of “Real” in Adoption Discourse” at The Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture. I argued that we need to examine the rhetorical implications of the language we use for ways that we might be furthering the dissonance an adoptee experiences between their lived experience and adoption stories we tell.
People often think of fiction as not as useful as nonfiction, but it’s through fiction that we can explore different life experiences and create theories that help us describe narrative phenomena — and hopefully better understand ourselves and each other.