I was born in Busan, South Korea around noon on October 8, 1984, and immediately surrendered at birth. Even though I was adopted by a close and loving family in West Michigan and grew up within a supportive extended family and community, it is still painful having my initial entry into the world be an unendurable sense of grief and loss: of a mother, a home, a country, and a culture, even of my original name, Jin Jung Mee.

For the first 32 years of my life, I felt fragmented, broken, abandoned, rejected, yearning for love and searching for it in emotionally, sexually, and somewhat physically abusive intimate relationships with older women who mirrored back the original trauma and wounding of my adoption experience. I thought art was found in the shattering of the self, taking it apart and looking at the pieces.

Even more significantly, I was completely disconnected from my grief and from my body, not only due to the trauma around my birth, but also uncovering early life sexual abuse during the first three months I spent in foster care in Korea.

As I mention in The Story of how Dialogical Persona came to be, I don’t know if it’s the peculiar way trauma shapes a quest for understanding, meaning and questioning, my own personality, or my innate love of learning, but I wasn’t content to live my life as I had been or to accept that change and transformation wasn’t possible.

Because I felt rootless for much of my life, it was difficult for me to feel tethered to the messiness in myself and in the world. To find grounding, I had to restore the connection to my heart, body, and natural environment that had been severed at birth. One of the greatest gifts I’ve received from expressive arts, a form of therapy that uses dance, movement, drawing, writing and performance-based ritual, has been the witnessing, mirroring, reflection and integration of my whole self.

As an adoptee, I was able to finally hold my wounds of abandonment and loss with strength, compassion and liberation. I encountered my heart and the stories of love and worthiness that were being held there, and through drawing and dancing them opened myself to love in new forms. I was able to confront my grief, give it shape and expression in my body, and hold it. I wasn’t just using my voice or my mind, but my whole body was engaged in the process.