261 Lanise Antoine Shelley
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/261
Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is actor, director, playwright, and podcaster, Lanise Antoine Shelley. Lanise shares about being adopted from a Haitian orphanage at age four by her single white adoptive mother, and how exploring the impact of adoption over the last three years has challenged her connections with her adoptive family.
Lanise also tells us about when she realized that her removal from Haiti left a huge hole for her entire biological family that was left behind, including her mother and father. I also want to mention that in today's episode, we discuss a suicide attempt. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Lanise Antoine Shelley. Welcome Lanise.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Thanks for having me, Haley.
Haley Radke: I love talking to a fellow podcaster. It's one of my favorite things, I got to admit, but I'd love it if you would start. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your story with us?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, in regards to my podcast, I started my podcast as a panel series in 2020, when the global racial unrest just erupted with George Floyd and a lot of us BIPOC adoptees didn't really have a support system when it came to our families because many of these families are white.
And so I launched a panel series that focused on identity, race, family and these kinds of conversations and how to have these kinds of very complex, challenging conversations with those that are in our inner circle and that just flew, it took off. We, I guess you could say we went viral because we had over 12, 000 views and people were engaging from all over the world.
But I knew that I couldn't sustain it, just corralling and wrangling a bunch of adoptees from around the world for a panel was just a lot. But I knew that I could have one on one conversations, so it evolved naturally to a podcast. That I've called when they were young, amplifying voices of adoptees, and that has been going strong for three years now.
And I've started off with conversations with adoptive parents and adoptees in season 1 and in season 2, going deeper into the mental health of adoptees and in season 3, really pulling apart what it feels like to engage with adoptees, our spouses, our families, and figuring out how we can move in a world that feels more healed and whole and grounded in these relationships.
So each season has a very strong theme, and we'll see what happens next, but that's the podcast in a nutshell.
Haley Radke: And your adoptee experience?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Yes, that little story. I was adopted from Port au Prince, Haiti when I was four. And I was actually one of, one of two little girls who were adopted, and we were the first to be adopted in that orphanage ever. And they had just started exploring what it would be like to have international adoptions happen. They'd been engaging in mission missionaries and for a long while. And so this was what they thought a natural evolution. And I left Haiti when I was four and grew up in Northern California with a single white female mother. And that's basically it.
Haley Radke: So one of your first podcast episodes very early on, you interview your mother and godmother and you talk about that experience with her and she shares her process of adopting. And while I was listening to that I got very activated and it's not my story. It's your story. I'm curious how you heard her share that story then, and what you think about when you think about that conversation today. Because I think that your views on adoption have evolved over the last few years, and you've shared about that in a few different solo episodes on your show. But I'd love to hear about, from your point of view that sort of evolution.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Oh, it's definitely been an evolution because when we recorded that, I thought that I was out of the fog and I thought I understood what that meant because I felt connected to my adoptive mother. I felt connected to my story, and I could recount my story easily without being activated. So I believed that in itself was being out of the fog, but that was not it.
I had no idea that over the next three years, I would have a deeper, more profound understanding of what the miasma of revelatory insights about my adoption would be. And at present, I have a very estranged relationship with my mother, and that's because of the work that I have been doing on anti racism, the work that I have been doing on myself for healing, the wounds that I didn't even know existed.
So many of us adoptees are playing catch up. And that's how I feel, because there were a lot of missteps that I didn't quite notice from my caregivers growing up. Because I thought it was normal. Because I didn't have a voice. Because I wasn't connected with a strong lexicon of emotions to draw from and so I thought it was okay to be treated a certain way and as I started to dig deeper and unpack, I realized that there were a lot of missteps that could have been avoided had my mom been more educated. Had she been just slightly more willing to be curious and ask more questions. As opposed to feel that everything was okay because she quote unquote loved me. And so I'm learning through this work that story of estrangement is actually quite prevalent in the adoption community, right?
When you come out of the fog and realizing that certain things that happened when you were younger were not okay. And coming to grips with that trauma, it's interesting because I had no idea that adoption was traumatic or had the capital T trauma labeled intrinsically inside of it until these past two, three years, because I was told that it was all good.
Everything about adoption was good. It was for the betterment of me. And that's not, that's not so. And as I speak to other adoptees, as I do my own work, I understand the underbelly, the darkness, the sordid history behind adoption. And in wanting those conversations, sometimes people aren't ready to have those conversations.
Sometimes they're not ready for accountability. Sometimes they're not ready to come to grips with the fact that they did not protect you. And I know I'm being vague right now. One of the things that, that I encourage adoptive parents to focus on that I've learned that is imperative, as opposed to focusing on "I'm going to love and save this child," I really want people to pivot from that way of thinking to "are you going to protect and guard this child"? Because love will be inherent in that.
But there is this sense of saviorism that is attached to love, the sense of indebtedness. I'm sure you've heard many adoptees talk about that. But I encourage adoptive parents and my adoptive mother- who did not protect me in a variety of ways and even as an adult, I have identified ways in which she fell short of that guardianship- and understanding that there are these invisible parameters that adoptees have to negotiate and navigate all the time. And I feel strongly that adoptive parents are the ones pulling the strings and understand the parameters and understand the rules more than we do.
And so when we ask the wrong question we get stonewalled. When we try to ask for a certain level of engagement or a certain level of emotional availability, we are again met with defensiveness. And I should probably speak more for myself. But that has been my experience and in listening to other adoptees throughout the years that has been their experience as well.
Haley Radke: I also am estranged from my adoptive parents and I absolutely agree. It's so common in our community. And it's like, the more healing work we do, the more learning we have to do about the atrocities committed in family separation, we're sort of moving forward. And if they are not willing to go there and learn those same lessons, the gap just widens into a chasm. You know, it just it's it seems insurmountable sometimes unless they're willing to start getting in there and doing the work
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I think I'd made some inferences based on some of the things that you had shared in your show, that I thought that may be the case. I don't want to like just go in at your adoptive mother. I'll just say, you know, there's so much of this.
I also grew up in an evangelical church, so there's so much of the colonial mindset when you're talking about missionary work in a foreign country. And wanting to save these orphans and you had a family. You had living parents. And so can you talk a little bit about your experiencing experience going back to Haiti when you were 13?
And when did you come to understand that maybe my family actually didn't realize the implications that adoption would have? Were they hoodwinked in some way? Like, what's the, what's the story there? If you would unpack that.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, I grew up Presbyterian.
Haley Radke: Okay. Okay.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Yeah. So I get it in a very conservative Presbyterian household. And you're right. My family was, to some extent, hoodwinked because...in these developing countires their idea, their understanding of adoption is different from ours. And a lot of these families who either relinquish their children -or their children are abducted because that happens to- believe that when they turn 18 that they'll come back. And I did not know that was my mom's expectation until I went back when I was 27.
And I had that face to face that every adoptee dreams of with my mother. And I was just keening, you know, on my knees, like, bawling, like, why? What led you to this, to relinquishing me? Because I have three biological siblings who grew up in Haiti, who grew up with my mother and with my family and in the orphanage. So that's a whole nother ballgame. A whole nother layer of complexity because I didn't realize the depth of my absence until three years ago.
When I was looking at my little sister's Facebook page, and there were all these photos of me, like it was a shrine. And I realized in that moment that I was being mourned. I had never conceived that was a possibility. Why would someone mourn me? Who am I? I can barely receive love as it is. You know?
And to surpass love to the point of grieving for me was something I had never considered. And so, when it comes to realizing the reason behind my adoption, that didn't happen until I was 27, and when it came to me understanding the depth of the impact of my absence, that wasn't until three years ago.
Haley Radke: Did your adoptive mother know you had siblings in the orphanage?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: She did. And my older brother at the time was in the orphanage with me, but she didn't feel equipped to raise a boy. Which I give her props for, because I kind of suck my teeth a little bit when I see a single white person raising a black man because that in this environment, it's very, it's complex. You know, and understanding the gravity of that is essential.
My mom ended up adopting another little girl who was in the orphanage, and she became my sister, and she and I grew up together as sisters in California, and she and I are not close. We have a very contentious relationship, and we always have had, and it came to a head in January.
And hearkening back to what you said about the evolution of my podcast where it starts out very optimistic and somewhat naive, and then it gets real. Towards the very end in some of my solo episodes, I talk about aloneness. And the gravity of that and the idea of belonging. Brene Brown talks about how the antithesis of belonging isn't fitting in.
We, as adoptees are thought to need to fit in. Like, we need to be just like the person next to us. And in order to feel a sense of assimilation, a sense of belonging. But it's essential that fitting in is the opposite of belonging. It is when you contort yourself, when you change yourself essentially, and that's why I don't like the word transracial because trans meaning erase does not resonate with me.
I'm interracially, internationally adopted. There was nothing erased about me. It was, a lot of things have become dormant, that I had to awaken in my adulthood such as my Haitian identity, my culture, my fervor for certain foods and certain music and all of that. Those sort of things. But those existed inside of me.
And for a long time, I believed that my ancestors didn't come with me. Like I was alone, just floating in an abyss by myself. And it's so dire and dark and dreary, right? But that's how I felt, you know, and I feel that a lot of adoptees struggle with aloneness.
There is a positivity to solitude. I'm an introvert. I like solitude, but to feel perpetually alone is something different.
Haley Radke: As an actor, director, playwright, do you feel that your work has been impacted? In the last few years, as you're coming to unravel this adoptee identity, and as you say, coming out of the fog, some new lingo is coming into adoptee consciousness. How has that impacted your creative and professional work?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: I think that the work that I've been doing in my healing has definitely permeated in my artistry. I've written a play called Pretended, a take on Adopted, because for a long time I felt that, that adoption was just pretending. Like we're all just, you know, playing our roles here, right?
Like this is an assignment that was given to me. And every once in a while I'm reminded that we're acting. And we all have costumes and makeup, but this is my life. And so I wrote a play, and I am also curious about writing plays for young audiences, because I think it's imperative for us to start to educate and support young adoptees.
If I had a mentor when I was younger, I think I would have turned out slightly differently, but I didn't have a mentor. I didn't start to have mentors that would affect me in a very positive way until I went into dance. I was an African dancer, and the African dance community just swallowed me up. And that's when I started to love my skin.
And that's when I started to love Black culture and all of those things. When I was just immersed in a very Afrocentric community. And so, other than that, other than writing, it doesn't really show up in my work, but it is a constant kind of elective passion of mine that I do on the side when people ask me, oh, what are you up to?
I actually don't mention my adoption advocacy oddly enough because it just feels like my daily bread. Why would I mention that I wake up in the morning? Like, it just is.
Haley Radke: You're talking about mentoring younger adoptees, and I focus on adults, you know. I talk to adult adoptees, those are the people who I want to support. They're going through search or reunion or they don't want to talk about it, those are my people, those are my people.
And so, I see other adoptees doing some youth mentoring and those kind of things, and that's really exciting to me, too, because I think, oh what if I had that when I was young? And I'm curious about what your thoughts are, I don't know if there's a good answer for this, it's like, if the adoptive parents don't really get it, that they were complicit in some sort of, you know, family separate, whatever the circumstances, there's a part that, you know, I don't know. I'm all for, I am for family preservation. Lanise, that is my 100%.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: So am i. So am I. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Okay. So that's sort of where I'm coming from with this. So mentoring young adoptees to hopefully, you know, be more secure in their identity, be able to, Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you can fill in some of those gaps for me.
Like, what are some of the things that we would have needed when we were younger? How do you mesh that with like, but also keeping safe in your home where your adoptive parents still have the power and into young adulthood, you know, when some of us may still need some of the supports from them that can feel kind of dangerous.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Oh, absolutely. I know it can get precarious if the wrong person comes through. But I think that having someone that reflects your story is important. I felt that I was the only one and it was because I was. In a town, in a small town in Northern California, my sister and I just had each other, but she had her friends and I had my friends. So we really didn't bond in the way in which my mom thought we would.
And I came to find out that's actually quite true for a lot of adoptees who are adopted with other adoptees. Like the adoptive parent thinks that they're going to become besties and rarely does that happen. And so I think that finding someone that reflects their story, that supports their story, that believes their story and who can be empathetic to their point of view is a game changer.
Because I was silenced as a kid, not in the way of like verbal abuse or emotional abuse because I had a fairly serene childhood. But when things did come up, such as in middle school, I took a bunch of pills and I wanted to kill myself. That was never addressed. The why was never addressed. It was literally brushed under a rug and thought to have been, oh, just an errant teenager acting out.
As opposed to, this is an adoptee who has experienced trauma, who, my mom told me this three years ago, and I had no idea, I guess I had forgotten- there's a lot of my childhood that I blacked out.
We cried for two years when we came from Haiti. And that's huge. I had no idea. My mom now recognizes that was us grieving. But at the time, she didn't recognize it as grieving. Which is so odd to me, as it comes out of my mouth, I'm just like, why didn't she think of that?
But that's, that is the mindset of a lot of adoptive parents, right? They get so excited about this vision for their family. They extract this child from wherever, domestically or internationally, change the child's name. My name at birth was Lunise Antoine. My mom changed my name to Lanise with an A, Anne, A N E, Shelley. In high school, I reclaimed my old last name, Antoine. And that's what I go by, because I'm both. Again, hearkening back to nothing was erased.
It's something that adoptive parents do indirectly, right? They try to just, like, scrub the child's history clean off them to give them a brand new start. And that's not the truth of it. Every single child, whether it be from infancy or four years old, or nine years old, or a teenager coming with rich history.
I didn't even know English. To have somebody who spoke Creole, who could mentor me, who had somebody who could speak French, who could encourage me to keep my native language, would have been instrumental. But because we were plopped into a neighborhood where we were the token, where we were the singular oddity exoticized, we did not want to be ourselves. We wanted to fit in.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that part of your story. I see that connection as life saving to see that, to have someone that's like you. I also identify with a similar experience and it's just like we're in so much pain, but we don't know why like it's this. Yeah hidden thing because we're not talking about Oh, are you thinking about your mother?
Are you thinking about like those conversations were just not had in my experience. I I love the name for your play, Pretended. Like, my God, that's so brilliant. I love it. There, I think when I've talked to other adoptees who are also actors. I've heard a few sort of express this, like, I'm already an expert in acting.
Did you ever feel that way? Or have you looked back and thought, why was I drawn to that? Or, I don't know, do you have any ideas about your theatrical nature?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: That's funny that they say that. I was always artistically, you know, drawn. I had an affinity for dance, for visual art, for movement and expression. That was something. It meant a lot to me from an early age to express myself in that way. And then with acting, when you're doing it well, you're telling the truth. And so when you see something that's moving in a movie or a play, you cannot imagine that was written because it feels so anchored in truth, anchored in a naturalistic delivery.
And so for me, oddly enough, Ppretended feels like adoption is a game where I'm lying. I'm lying the whole time. I'm lying when I tell you I love you. I'm lying when I tell you I care. I do not care. But yet I'm assigned to care. I'm assigned to love you. And when I break down adoption, and it's just like really simple parts. When I was taken from Haiti, from my family, which you mentioned before, a lot of adoptees have families, orphans, bt definition, have lost one or more parent. The majority of adoptees have both.
And at the time of my adoption, I had both. So in this pretending in adoption that I have felt that I have been just playing into for so long, it felt that I was taken from an orphanage in Port au Prince, Haiti. I was stripped of my name. And then I was told you're not going to speak Creole anymore. You're going to love this person. You're going to call this person mom. You're going to call this person grandma and grandpa. You're going to like this food. You're going to like this environment. That's what it is.
And no one asks you if it's okay, how do you feel about it? Do you miss your mom that you remember? Because as a four year old, I was completely materialized. And when you meet any child, even if they're a kid, they have preferences. When little babies have their preferred binky, you know. But I was a four year old. So imagine my preferences, the list of that. So I just feel strongly that when it, in regards to my adoption, that a lot of it was pretending to be something, to be someone that I was not.
And when I started to have those hard conversations with my mom about what was true for me, that's when her and my relationship got sticky.
Haley Radke: In your podcast, you come across, at me, as Big Sister Energy. And so I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm in reunion with my father and three younger siblings.
And so I, in 12 years ago, I, boom, I'm an older sister, so I have these conversations with my younger sisters, especially, and it's like, oh my gosh, I'm a big sister. I gotta, you know, bring the big sister energy. I'm curious about that, if you're willing to talk a little bit about that part of your experience. And have you been able to feel like you're part of your original family, even though I know that's really complex and you're not in a great relationship with your first mother right now either.
I don't know. I don't want to speak for you. I would love to hear your thoughts on that, especially with the big sister energy. I know you said you had an older brother as well, but.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: That's funny that you caught that from my podcast because I like to take people underneath my wing. I like to mentor people, and I think that was to kind of address that I missed that energy as a kid.
My sister did not give that energy to me, and my sister's older than me. And so, I do find brothers and sisters and so many people like the majority of the people that come on to my podcast are now siblings, you know. We call each other sis and all of those things now. But I think it's important. In the beginning, when I first was unified, reunified with my family at the age of 13, I, I found that it was easy to talk to my siblings.
Even though I didn't know Creole and they didn't know English. I just felt that there was an ease because it wasn't as complicated of an emotional history as it was with my mom. And so I had hoped that I would become close to my siblings, my biological siblings, but we haven't. And I don't think that will happen in this lifetime just simply because of the cultural chasm between us.
I tried for a few years to get close to my older brother who has learned English, but again there is that cultural barrier between him and I, and not to mention the fact that he was left behind. Like, I am not going to understand the complexity of his healing process of being left in an orphanage and watching his little sister leave forever.
Like, that is trauma. I don't know if he's addressed that. I don't know if he knows that even exists within him. But I have to give him grace and give him space to process that however he deems fit. And so it, it's unfortunate that I don't have in real life true sibling energy. And that's why I seek it in other people.
Haley Radke: Oh, thanks for sharing that.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: I know it's also dark and dreary.
Haley Radke: But we relate to that. We relate to that. You know, we have a list of losses And there's some things that no matter what we do, we may feel like we can't fill that gap. And so I've, I think, God, I love that you know how you're filling that gap. You know, and you can model that for fellow adoptees who might feel that same loss that you have.
So I think that's empowering. You know, we can't go back in time. We can't get unadopted. We can't. Your mom can't have a change of heart and be like, actually, oh my gosh, what did I do? Like, I gotta bring her back to her family. Like, that didn't happen, you can't undo it. But now, what are we gonna do with it? As adults.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, thank you for that, because I do try to alchemize that pain that sorrow right into something that is empowering for others. That is encouraging, inspiring, motivating, because that's all we can do in this lifetime. So, that is what I try to do with the resources I have and the time that is allotted to me.
Haley Radke: Which we don't know what that, how much that is. Let's, how else can we make this morbid and just super dark?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: I know, I know. I'm in real life, like outside of this, even in my podcast, I feel like I'm a little bit more upbeat than I am today, but alas, like listening to my own tale, it's wow, this is, a downer.
Haley Radke: Yeah, you know, sometimes it's just when we're telling the truth that is just what can happen. I love listening to fellow adoptees share their stories. And I've heard so many, and I think no matter what our circumstances, just saying the things out loud can empower other people to have agency over their own stories and decide whether or not they want to share them publicly but yeah, I love that you do that.
For fellow adoptees as well on your podcast and I love that it's we're going to recommend resources now. I should have said that, okay I love that you have left up your process. I remember interviewing another adoptee years and years ago and she's like my first few blog posts are so cringy because they come off as so grateful and adoption is the best and walla and then, you know, she came out of the fog and started to write more and more critically about adoption and I think.
I love that you can follow your progress through your interviews, through the different kinds of conversations you have through the last few seasons. And I think it's really special because I think you're bringing your listeners along on that journey in, I was going to say in real time, but you know what I mean.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Thank you for that.
Haley Radke: Your podcast is called When They Were Young: Amplifying Voices of Adoptees. Can you tell us about why you chose the name when they were young?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, I wanted something catchy and I wanted something to reference to adults talking about their past. And so, When They Were Young: Amplifying Voices of Adoptees is the opportunity, the platform for adult adoptees to delve into, dissect and heal what they did not understand when they were young.
And so, that Is the premise that is the goal that is what I seek in each episode is to identify within myself because I am learning, you're right. You do kind of watch in real time, my evolution in the fog, out of the fog, through the fog, all of it. And I think it's essential. I think it's expansive for people because adoptees, again, do not get to witness a lot of that unfolding.
And a lot of those conversations, for fear of the reaction from their adoptive parents, for fear of being, being face to face with their shame that has become so ingrained that they didn't even know existed within them. And so I just wanted to create a platform where we can reclaim our voices, as I reclaimed my voice, reclaimed my name, my identity, and redefined what it is for me to exist as an interracial adoptee.
Haley Radke: I think it's... It's really powerful. I've already said, I think it's so important to have these conversations and elevate the adopted person's voice, which is what I'm doing as well. And I love your solo episodes. I really enjoyed your conversation with Patrick Armstrong in particular, again, fellow podcasters.
So if folks want to start, is there one or two episodes that you would point them to as like a good first touch point for them to get to know you a little better or the show? That's putting you on the spot, I know, because listen, all our episodes are our babies.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: I know. I'm like, what?
Haley Radke: Yeah, pick a favorite, Lanise. Let's go.
Lanise Antoine Shelley: What episode? Okay. I would say start with, any of the most recent five. Because there's such a wide array of adoption stories of resilience, stories of healing. And what I do on the podcast is not just talk about their stories, but I make sure that we frame their triumphs as well. Like a lot of the people, all of the people that come on to the podcast are writing books. They're launching podcasts. They're doing such excellent work in the world. And I want to make sure that we adoptees aren't just our stories. We're so much more, we're doing all of these amazing things. And that's why your podcast is so great too, because you highlight all of the triumphs of adoptees as well.
And that is essential because our stories, yes, there, they are sad. There's some sad elements to them. But we have survived them. We have survived that story. And that needs to be noted as well. So for listeners out there, start with the first five episodes. If you want just a little sip, try the solo episodes.
Those are just one on one, between you and myself. A lot of musings, a lot of books that I've read that have resonated with me that I want to share with the listeners. I'm constantly learning, constantly sharing what I learn and get, I get very excited to, to share what other adoptees are doing. So that's why I'm here.
Haley Radke: Amazing. We're kindred spirits and you didn't even know it. Lanise, what did you want to recommend to us today?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: I would recommend following Tony Nabors, T O N Y N A B O R S, at racial equity insights. He just has some really strong insights on what it means to be anti racist, what it means to be an ally. These are all kind of buzzwords right now floating around in the adoption community. Words that I've used, but he breaks them down in respect of what supremacy has done to adoption, what its doing to adoption, and how we can dismantle a lot of the supremist mindset behind adoption that's keeping it prevalent. That's keeping it boisterous. That's making sure the industry of adoption stays lucrative.
And as we mentioned before, we're about the preservation of families, and that is the cure for adoption is the preservation of families. So understanding the history behind adoption and also a documentary that people should watch is One Child Nation on Amazon Prime. That is amazing. It is about the one child mandate in, I believe, the 1980s or the 1970s in China. And that is what launched the influx of Chinese adoptees and the suburbanites here in America didn't know that the reason why all of these babies were available was because they were being abducted, essentially. So it's understanding the history behind these countries that have adoption as a resource, which many of them do, and understanding your part in keeping adoption alive.
And making sure that supporting adoptees, supporting the preservation of families should be the first and foremost mission.
Haley Radke: Definitely, and I listened to one of the guest spots you just had on Unraveling Adoption where you talk about how to be anti racist within adoptive families. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well which totally goes along with what you're telling us about Tony.
Thank you so much, Lanise. It has been a pleasure talking with you. Where can folks connect with you online and find your show, When They Were Young?
Lanise Antoine Shelley: Thank you so much, Haley. They can find When They Were Young on just about every platform, Spotify, Pandora, iTunes. And if they rate and review, that would be amazing.
But you can also go to my website and engage with me on Instagram at YoungAdoptee or Lantoines. And I will get back to you as soon as possible.
Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you.
I can't express how valuable I think these conversations are for us to hear when other adoptees are just going through it and we can just know we are not alone. That is one of the main reasons that this show continues to exist is because I just want you to know that you're not alone. I have really loved getting to know so many of the people I've had on the show and it's a real privilege to be able to bring them to you.
And if you're looking for adoptee friendships and community, we have some really great spaces that you can hang together with Fellow adoptees for Patreon supporters, AdopteesOn.com/community, and if you're looking for a support group in your area, you can always go to Adoptees Connect and just Google Adoptees Connect.
There are so many groups around North America, and I know that they're expanding beyond as well. So if you want to get your in person connections I think it's just so valuable. So I'd love to have you join us at one of our upcoming events in October 2023 if you're listening when this episode is released, we have an Ask An Adoptee Therapist Live zoom call with Marta Sierra.
And we also have a book club event with Nicole Chung, and we would love to have you join us so you can find out about both of those at Adopteeson.com/community. There are links to Patreon and all the events we have going on on the website. And I invite you to join us and help support the show to keep going and help having these conversations available in the world.
Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
