Where Love Didn’t Reach

I grew up loved. I say that first because people need to hear it. My parents loved me. They still do. But love didn’t stop me from feeling alone in ways I didn’t have words for yet.

I was a Black girl adopted into a white family, and for a long time, none of us knew what that really meant. My parents didn’t understand interracial dynamics when I was younger. Not because they didn’t care, but because they didn’t know. They believed love was enough. That raising me “just like them” would protect me. It didn’t.

Race followed me everywhere. Into classrooms. Into bathrooms where I stared at my reflection longer than other kids did. Into spaces where I was the only Black girl and no one knew how to talk about it—including me.

The cultural disconnect showed up early. My hair became a problem before it became an identity. No one knew how to care for it, so it was straightened, pulled, tamed. I learned quickly that neat meant closer to white. I didn’t grow up surrounded by Black music, Black traditions, or Black voices that could’ve told me who I was before the world tried to decide for me. That absence wasn’t intentional, but it was loud.

At home, I belonged. Outside, I was hypervisible.

I learned how to read rooms before I learned how to read myself. I learned how to code-switch without knowing the term. I learned how to make people comfortable at the expense of my own confusion. I learned not to ask certain questions because the answers weren’t coming—or because asking made everyone uncomfortable.

Being adopted already messes with your sense of identity. Being a Black adoptee in a white family adds another layer of displacement. I didn’t look like the people who raised me, and I didn’t grow up with the people who looked like me. I lived in the in-between. Too Black in some spaces. Not Black enough in others. Always explaining. Always adjusting.

My parents’ love didn’t prepare me for the world as a Black girl. Love didn’t explain why teachers treated me differently or why strangers touched my hair without asking. Love didn’t give me language for microaggressions or teach me how to protect my spirit when racism showed up quietly instead of loudly.

That education came later. And it came hard.

I don’t blame my parents. But I also don’t excuse the gaps. Two things can be true at once. They did the best they could with what they knew, and what they knew wasn’t enough. I carried the consequences of that into adulthood—into how I see myself, how I navigate spaces, how long it took me to feel comfortable in my own skin.

I’m still undoing the silence I was raised in. Still reclaiming pieces of culture I didn’t grow up with. Still learning that my Blackness doesn’t need permission, explanation, or proximity to whiteness to be valid.

Growing up Black in a white family taught me how to survive early. But now, I’m learning how to live fully. Not as someone split between worlds, but as someone who deserves to take up space in all of them.