Embracing Curiosity as a Part of Adoptee Identity
Many adoptees grow up carrying questions that don’t have easy answers—or any answers. Questions about origins. About resemblance. About temperament, health, culture, history, and the people who came before us. For some, those questions are loud and persistent. For others, they come and go quietly over time. And for many adoptees, the message—spoken or unspoken—has been that curiosity should be contained, postponed, or softened so it doesn’t disrupt the comfort of others, or even suppressed completely because it may never be resolved.
But curiosity is not disloyalty. It is not ingratitude. And it is not a problem to be solved. I recently read poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and this piece resonated deeply for me as an adoptee:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue… Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I am constantly sharing some version of this with my clients: Honor your curiosity. Ask your questions. Give permission to hold space for all of your “what if’s.” So much of adoption asks us to adapt quickly—to make meaning early, to settle uncertainty, to reassure others that we are “okay.” Curiosity, however, rarely follows a linear or tidy timeline. It unfolds in layers, across developmental stages, relationships, and life transitions. For many adoptees, curiosity takes the place of answers about our lives, so we must become comfortable with its presence.
Some questions cannot be answered yet—not because they are wrong, but because we are still growing into the capacity to live them.
Curiosity is part of adoptee identity. It reflects a natural human need to understand oneself internally and within a larger context. When adoptees are told to rush answers, suppress wondering, or frame curiosity as a threat, the message becomes: your inner world is inherently wrong.
Rilke reminds us of something different—that questions themselves can be companions. That they can be carried with patience, trust, and compassion. That not knowing does not mean being less than; it often brings deep awareness of privilege.
Honoring your curiosity might look like:
- Allowing curiosity to exist without demanding immediate clarity
- Revisiting the same question at different life stages and noticing how it changes
- Letting wondering be ebb and flow naturally
- Trusting that your questions arise from a genuine inner need
- Joining safe spaces to give voice to your “what if’s”
- Searching for information about your history
None of us are required to resolve everything to be whole, and we must give ourselves permission to live openly with the questions that stem from a curiosity as inherent as our need for oxygen. Embracing our curiosity is a way of saying, my inner experience matters—even when the answers are incomplete or unfindable. For adoptees especially, honoring our curiosity is often an act of self-love.