Finding Roots When the Tree Was Replanted by Nele | Blisss Healing

The world is built on heritage.
On history. On the quiet assumption that you know where you come from and that this knowing gives you something solid to stand on.
Family trees. Resemblances passed down through generations. Inherited traits spotted across a dinner table. The casual certainty of belonging somewhere by birthright. The way someone says “you have your grandmother’s eyes”, and an entire lineage lives in that sentence.
For us, this landscape can feel quietly alienating.
Not dramatically. Not always visibly. Not in a way that is easy to name or explain to someone who has never felt it.
Just slightly outside. Watching others hold something that was never handed to us. Something the world assumes everyone has and rarely thinks to question.
And then there is the other version.
The romanticised one.
“But you were chosen. How special.”
Said with warmth. Said with the best intentions. And not entirely wrong, there is something in our story that is remarkable. But remarkable and simple are not the same thing. And somewhere between chosen and special the full complexity of what we actually carry gets quietly edited out.
Our story becomes a fairytale. Charming. Heartwarming. Something people lean into at dinner parties with genuine curiosity and something that resembles wonder.
And we smile. Because we know the fuller picture. Because we have learned to hold both things at once, the beauty and the weight of it, in a way the fairytale version never quite captures.
We were adopted. And so, we adapted. We learned to move through that world with grace. To answer questions about our family without showing the pause that lives just before the answer. To celebrate other people’s heritage while quietly navigating our own complex relationship with the word belonging.
And perhaps most exhaustingly we learned to carry questions that have no clean answers.

Where do I come from? Who do I look like? What was passed down to me and what was lost? Who would I have been?
Not questions we ask every day. But questions that surface. In ordinary moments. In the middle of unremarkable Tuesdays. In the silence after someone casually mentions their family history as though it is the most natural thing in the world.
Because it is. For them.

What does it mean to root ourselves when the original roots were rerouted?
This is the question I have sat with for most of my life.
I know the adoptee experience not only professionally through two decades of working in psychiatric care and therapeutic practice but personally. Intimately. From the inside.
I know the specific exhaustion of building an identity without a complete map. The complexity of holding gratitude and grief in the same hands. The strange loneliness of not quite belonging anywhere completely even in rooms full of people who love us.
And I know something else too.
That the absence of original roots does not mean a life without grounding.
It means learning to root differently.

Creating our own foundation is not second best.
There is a story the world tells quietly, persistently, without meaning harm that heritage is something you receive. Something passed down. Something that exists before you arrive.
But some of us arrive without that inheritance. And in the absence of it we build something arguably more intentional. More conscious. More deeply chosen.
The family we create rather than inherit. The values we arrive at through living rather than receiving. The identity we construct carefully and honestly from everything life has handed us and everything we have chosen to become despite it.
This is not a consolation prize.
This is a different kind of roots. No less real. No less nourishing.

The beauty in the unconventional tree
There is genuine beauty in our story even when it is complicated. Even when it holds loss alongside love. Even when the questions remain unanswered.
We grew. Without the conventional foundation. In conditions that were sometimes uncertain, sometimes incomplete, sometimes painful.
And we are here. Rooted in ourselves even if the rooting took longer and looked different and required more conscious tending than it did for others.
That is not something to grieve entirely.
That is something to recognise.
The world is built on heritage and history yes. But it is also built by people who created something new from incomplete beginnings. Who planted themselves in unfamiliar ground and learned to grow towards the light anyway.
We are those people.

We are not alone in this.
If something in these words sounds familiar, the quiet outside feeling, the unanswered questions, the complexity of belonging, or simply the knowing smile when someone calls your story a fairytale.
I want us to sit with something together.
There are people who get it. Not theoretically. Not clinically.
From the inside.
That is why I built Blisss Healing. Not because I have all the answers. But because I know the questions from the inside out. Because I believe that what we often need most is not advice or strategies or someone nodding professionally from across a room.
It is someone who recognises the look. The pattern. The landscape of a life built on rerouted roots.
Someone who can sit with the complexity, the love and the loss, the gratitude and the grief, the belonging and the not belonging, without rushing towards resolution.
Because some things do not resolve. They integrate. Slowly. On their own timeline. With the right company.

If you are an adult adoptee navigating identity, belonging, or the quiet questions that surface in ordinary moments, I would love to connect.