Identity and estrangement.

First, I should acknowledge that it's been almost 2 1/2 years since I last posted here. I guess part of me wasn't sure where I wanted to go with this blog, and decided to put it on the back burner until I figured it out. Well, I can't promise to have figured it out, but I am starting to have some more fully-formed thoughts that I want to talk about, so I thought I'd give it another go. We'll see what happens... I hate coming up with usernames. I never know what "thing" I want to pick to represent me online, and most of my ideas are boring or dumb. Somehow that got me started on how many different name identities I've had, or almost had, in my life. I was born "Baby Girl (lastname)"; then called "Hope" in my foster home (spoilers: my pseudonym when I was a kid was 'Hope (lastname)'); several years ago my birthdad told me that he would have named me Amanda, so I would have been Amanda (M). That lead me to another thought. I have always felt I have several fractured identities kind of bumping up against each other inside my head. There was no real rhyme or reason for my behavior, and there was no real collective-ness between each part. I was raised in a fairly tumultuous environment, and have since ceased contact with wide swaths of my adoptive family. I do feel strongly that being put up for adoption made my brain at higher risk for detaching these different selves and keeping them from becoming one, unified, sense of self. That, alone, I don't believe was enough. Eventually, I think my brain would have meshed them all together. However, my childhood was frought with traumatic estrangement, some violence, and a lot of emotional abuse and manipulation. Not an environment conducive to encouraging a stable sense of self. When I estranged from my parents (and, as a result, was estranged from by much of my extended family), I started trying to take a look at these fragments that were just kind of floating around. I discovered that a lot of the anguish and angst that may have kept me from a cohesive world experience, was this pervasive theme of estrangement and loss. I was estranged from my birthmother, whom I lived inside for 9 months, almost immediately after birth. I was estranged from my adoptive brother due to escalating violent behavior that my parents finally could no longer control. I don't remember much of my life before my brother was given back to the state, but I get this distinct impression that nothing was ever really the same again. The loss and impact was just too much in my family. Pictures were hidden away, and I was expressly forbidden (at the age of 5) to talk about ever having had a brother. It's just another kind of disruption of collectiveness in experiences. This horrible thing just happened, and I was taught by the adults in my life that we were to treat it as if it hadn't. My only real recourse was to shut off that part of me that knew it had happened, and pretend that part didn't exist. Close myself off from it. Since it was an affective coping mechanism that I had already started to develop, I continued to use it for most of the rest of my childhood. What it left me with is this kind of ocean of voices with no real rhyme or reason that I am now trying to wade through and gather back up again. I remember I grew up thinking that being adopted "wasn't really a big deal" for me. It was just something I was. I'm starting to realize that I had created defense mechanism around adoption, because I was too terrified to take a good look at how adoption, and subsequent abuse/neglect, has truly impacted my life. The brain is a funny thing, for sure.