310 Mirella Stoyanova
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/310
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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 are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Mirella Stoyanova is our guest today. And I don't normally say this, but this was one of my favorite conversations in recent memory. Mirella is a therapist and writer, and her insights dazzled me. We talk about her experience being adopted at age five, and what coming to America from Bulgaria was like.
We discuss the what ifs of kinship adoption, living in the both and of grief and gratitude, and she shares an insight that stops me in my tracks. Do adoptees reflect an existential crisis [00:01:00] back to society? We mention violence and suicide at multiple points during this conversation, so please take care when deciding when to listen.
Before we get started, I wanted 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 are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Mirella Stoyanova. Hello, Mirella. So good to talk with you.
Mirella Stoyanova: Hi Haley. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for months.
Haley Radke: Me too. Okay. The first time I took note of you was at the Adoptee Literary Festival where you read a [00:02:00] piece in the sizzle reel and you were so captivating. I immediately went to my guest list and wrote your info down, so I'd love it if you would start by sharing your story with us.
Mirella Stoyanova: Oh my goodness. Where to begin? I am. I'm a writer. I'm a therapist. I always like to say I'm a recovering perfectionist, but I am.
Haley Radke: I say that too.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah. Do you?
Haley Radke: That's so funny. I've said that for years. Yes.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah. I'm also an international adoptee, and I worked in the field I was a crisis worker. For the five years after graduate school and then I became licensed as a clinical social worker. So I'm a practicing therapist in the Seattle area, and I have experience working with [00:03:00] individuals and families in pretty much every context you can think of.
From acute trauma to the outpatient mental health that I do now. And I'm also a mother of a 2-year-old son, and I live, as I said in, in the Seattle area with my husband and my son.
Haley Radke: So you have one of those unique circumstances because I talked to a lot of infant adoptees and hold on a second they're adults now, but were placed for adoption as an infant.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah.
Haley Radke: But in your circumstances, an intervention really was necessary. Do you care to share that part of your childhood?
Mirella Stoyanova: I was adopted at five years old. I was actually speaking with a friend this morning who was also an older adoptee and a fan of the show, and he was like, represent the older [00:04:00] adoptees. So here I am representing, you know who you are. I was adopted from Bulgaria to the United States at five years old. My parents had died a year and a half before in the very, very early nineties, and my grandmother, who was caring for me, happened to be dying of cancer, so she had to figure out what was going to become of my future and the country where I was born bulgaria was newly democratic. There was. An effort in the country to expatriate the Muslim minority who were Turkish and who from her perspective, my grandmother's perspective looked very much like me, and [00:05:00] Eastern Europe was a dangerous place for a newly orphaned child. So she found my adoptive parents about a year before I left, and while she entertained the idea of me being adopted by various families pretty early on, she decided that I would go with 'em.
And of course, the myth from the adoption side as the, the story goes that my parents had three boys, biological children, and they were trying for a girl. They were considering trying for a girl and they had friends of theirs who also had three boys and were trying for a girl, and instead of getting a girl, they got pregnant with twin boys.
And so the story is that was when my parents decided they wanted to adopt and they [00:06:00] had tried to adopt another little girl from Bulgaria before me. Who was actually in an orphanage, but her birth mother came to reclaim her because she had not consented to adoption. And this little girl was there because her mother couldn't afford to take care of her.
And in my case, I came to the United States with an entire history that I remembered pretty well. I came here with a lot of grief, unresolved grief and trauma, and a lot of questions that went on unanswered for many years. And I guess that's where the story ends, right? From the narrative, the non adoptee narrative. Anyway, it was happily ever after from there.
Haley Radke: Sure. I'm sure it was. What a gift. So in my research, I [00:07:00] think I understood correctly that your birth mother was also an adoptee herself.
Mirella Stoyanova: She was.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Mirella Stoyanova: My birth mother was adopted and I've never, I've always wanted, but have never been able to search for my, I've been discouraged from searching for my biological maternal grandparents because the system, the government, in Bulgaria is notoriously bureaucratic. Like they shut down over the summer just because it's summer kind of thing, and it takes a long time to get anything done. But recently a woman who's Bulgarian who had someone in her family was adopted, reached out to me and she shared that the Bulgarian court system recently has unsealed the records of adoptions in the country and [00:08:00] depending on, whether you can present them with the right information, they may be able to unseal the records. So I don't know that I can, as the daughter of my deceased birth mother, but I think that will certainly be, a question that I ask and explore in the coming years for sure.
Haley Radke: Interesting. So your grandmother was her adoptive mother? And she also adopted you once your parents had died.
Mirella Stoyanova: She did.
Haley Radke: So you're double.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah. Yes. I'm a second generation adoptee.
Haley Radke: And twice adopted.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yes. And twice adopted. Yes. And I'm half Iraqi, half Bulgarian. My, my parents died by murder, suicide. [00:09:00] My grandmother. She felt it would be unconscionable for me to be adopted by my paternal family. But my paternal family did seek out adoption. In fact, they put in the paperwork for adoption. But
Haley Radke: Were they also in Bulgaria?
Mirella Stoyanova: With the Bulgarian government? Yeah. And there was a real effort to prevent me from being raised by them. Because of, I think what were very natural and normal, but also from the perspective of my paternal family, like very hurtful reasoning, which was, that I could be re-traumatized because I witnessed the event of my parents' deaths. [00:10:00] And, the thought of me being raised by people who resembled my birth father didn't seem like a good idea.
And of course, the blind spot was, I also resemble my birth father. And so for many years, I had I realized this is being recorded, people won't see me, but I even wanted to bring you, just to show you, I have this, it's a photo album and it's got about 30 pictures in it, and for about 20 years, that's all I had, as far as my awareness and connection to anyone who looked like me.
Haley Radke: You have this other unique perspective of having worked in I'll call it child welfare for a period of time and uniquely your parents were unable to parent, your grandmother unable to [00:11:00] parent as she passed quite shortly after you were adopted. We have people ask us all the time is adoption even necessary? What would you do? And you have a very different vantage point than someone like me who's an infant adoptee who I think it was unnecessary. What are your thoughts on that?
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah, I think in my case it was maybe also unnecessary in some ways, although having been raised and benefited from certain advantages that I wouldn't have otherwise. I see the nuance of that perspective, and I'm glad for the life that I've had. I wouldn't say I'm entirely grateful. I think there's a lot of complexity in that, but Bulgarian law says that a child is only eligible for foreign adoption after they've been offered for adoption to three Bulgarian families.
And anyone in their biological [00:12:00] family, and that like regulation was not followed in my case. And okay, it might not have been entirely necessary for me. I, it was necessary for me to be adopted. Absolutely. I needed to be raised by someone. And the alternative of going to an orphanage was certainly not something that my, my grandmother wanted for me, but was it necessary for me to come to the United States?
Was it necessary for me to be adopted cross-culturally? I'm not sure. As a former child welfare worker. I actually, I went to graduate school. The reason why I went to graduate school originally was because I was going to use that as a foundation for going to get my legal degree [00:13:00] and doing global child welfare policy advocacy.
And so my personal opinion, which is informed by years of research and also on the ground experience, which was, initially how I became a social worker, is that we have to support families, first of all to stay together in whatever capacity they can when a child truly becomes adoptable.
Obviously the existence of adoption points to insufficiencies in our infrastructure, social infrastructure to support children and families, right? But then, if a child is adopted or placed in foster care, we have to work to make sure that [00:14:00] family is supported on a community level and that the infrastructure is there for that child to be raised within the context of a connected and loving and supportive environment where they have themselves as they are truly reflected back to them. And that's not the case for so many of us, regardless of what our stories are.
Haley Radke: So we're gonna live in the both and for a moment.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And if you had access to. Let's call it trauma informed care at the time, because, I haven't commented, I'm so sorry for, the horrific way that your parents died and the impact that's had, of course, on your life.
I'm very sorry. And so if you had that sort of [00:15:00] trauma-informed care, which I don't know, was that available, you're younger than me to go with your paternal family, do you think, like looking back are you like, I don't know, like it's so complex. Like I get it, I get why people made the choices they made and weren't sure about this, and that.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Do you wish that's the direction they would've gone?
Mirella Stoyanova: I see it both ways because I see the harm that it caused within that family. My paternal biological relatives who I reconnected with after that, after the end of my first year of graduate school. I see it both ways. There was a giant rupture in their, in the fabric of their family.
And I don't know. I don't, I think, I don't think actually, because there's also a really complex conversation about [00:16:00] patriarchal violence, which is baked into to not only my story, but the story of adoption. And also there's like a cultural component of that I'm not sure could have been overcome.
I wanna believe that it could have, but I don't know. And I like to stay in that place of not knowing because it, it allows me to connect in ways that I think I wouldn't otherwise be able to. So I think that the answer to your question is probably not. When I was adopted, by the time I was adopted, I'd had a year and a half of being cared for by who could care for me.
I went to school at kind of an elite boarding school, preschool in [00:17:00] Sofia, and so I spent time going to the school and then when I wasn't at that school, if my grandmother was feeling well enough, she would take me, but oftentimes she wasn't. And so I spent time with others who were designated to make sure that I wasn't like falling through the cracks.
So I arrived with a year and a half's worth of grief work that I was behind on and trauma recovery that I was behind on. And I actually had the very good fortune of working with at the time, one of the top adoption, attachment and adoption therapist in the Seattle area. Deborah Gray, who's written the book, Attaching in Adoption.
But at that time, I still needed a lot and given the family that I [00:18:00] grew up in and their, I think sort of the lack of awareness of what it would entail to adopt someone at an older age with those sets of issues, it wasn't going to be enough, unless they were gonna be able to. Do their own work. Understand what's unsettling about having an adoptee who's in pain, who has a story like the story that I had.
Haley Radke: What was it like to come to the US? Here's your new white family with three big older brothers.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah,
Haley Radke: That I can't imagine, did they come to get you? Were you, did you go on the plane and they met you here? What happened?
Mirella Stoyanova: Without telling the story itself, what I will say is that it was an exercise in cognitive dissonance, [00:19:00] a 15 to 20 year exercise. And in some ways it still continues because on one hand there's the story that family creates about who you are as an adoptee joining their family.
And on the other hand, as a person who was adopted at age five, I had my own set of memories and feelings and thoughts about my experience. That were not always congruent with the narrative that my family wanted to tell about my belonging to them. And I experienced that at multiple levels. I experienced that at the level of, I used to always write [00:20:00] this in my journal.
I would say, I had a life before you knew me. I had a life before you knew me. Like I wanted them to know that. Which didn't totally get honored. There was a lot of pain that like they didn't have the capacity to recognize and a lot of just, not even pain, but like my identity, they didn't have the capacity to recognize.
But then there was also the issue of my ethnic and cultural difference. And I am racially ambiguous. People look at me and the first words out of their mouth are, what are you? Which is very, it becomes funny the more you are on the receiving end of it. But funny, not funny, right? And you look at me, I have curly hair and tan skin, and you know how I move through the world is [00:21:00] as someone who is ethnically different, and actually I've been mis race, so it's partially also racial difference. And then if you have a family who's reflecting back to you that they're just looking at you because you're beautiful, they're just, there's nothing wrong. They're not treating you any different. We don't treat you any different. It becomes really confusing and difficult to know. How to be in the world.
Haley Radke: I have a couple thoughts. One is for families who collect another person because of their gender. That's weird.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah.
Haley Radke: But common, and the other thing, as you were talking, you've, you referenced this in a few of your different pieces, but I'm just gonna read from your piece in Write or Die Lost Side Effects May Include you say, my new mother says she can't compete with an angel, but no matter how hard I try, I can't forget the mother who [00:22:00] died. So I do not invoke her memory in the presence of my new mother, who is also jealous that I have taken to my new father instead of her.
Are you comfortable talking about that a little bit or does that say it all?
Mirella Stoyanova: Let me think about this, my adoptive mother she died a year and a half ago. And it's so funny because even though people pass from our lives, those relationships continue and in so many ways ours has. But what I can say about her is that she had her own set of expectations about what having a daughter would mean that were created through her own unresolved childhood needs, unmet childhood needs, and when I didn't fill those needs, [00:23:00] and of course I couldn't because I came as a complete human being child. It was very disappointing and she had a lot of negative feelings about that, that she directed toward me in so many ways throughout my upbringing.
And my mother also happened to be someone who had some mental health issues that meant she operated at two speeds. And so how those expectations got refracted into our relationship was very fraught. I was very afraid of saying and doing the wrong things constantly. Felt like I was disappointing her or that I could never live up to her expectations because also the other side of it is her longing never [00:24:00] could be stated. What is this saying that we can never get enough of what we don't need. She was looking for answers in the entirely wrong place she was putting that on a child. And now, I look at it with a little bit more complexity because I am a mother myself.
And I, I also recognize that what so much of what was scary to me about my mother was the life in her. Very early on the scope of what was possible and a life was made very apparent. I witnessed a murder suicide, so you know, I was very afraid of some of those natural and normal parts of what make life life, it was intense emotions, the uncertainty of relationships, and even just [00:25:00] engaging in life in a way that meant you were taking risks. I didn't wanna do that. And she, that was her all the way. That's who she was. She was, flying by the seat of her pants and scared me.
Haley Radke: So she passed just after you became a mother?
Mirella Stoyanova: She did.
Haley Radke: How's your perspective changed on that since having your son?
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah. One of the things is that, motherhood has completely shifted the way I experience myself as a, an adoptee. So my son is two now, and there were sort of other things going on at the time, but I was really thinking a lot about both through my writing work and my work as a therapist, what makes the experience of being an adoptee universal.
[00:26:00] And I don't know how it registered or when necessarily there was, but there was one sort of particular moment in the recent past where I was viewing my son, I was like. I don't know. My husband and I, we both work from home and each day we're, walking around the house, we come into the kitchen or places where my son is with the person who cares for him during the day and it's always so hard. It's always so hard to leave him. And there was a moment where I was reflecting on the pain of leaving him and how he cries out for me and how that pain is, it's reciprocal. Like he's crying out for me because we're separated and it's really uncomfortable for me to be separated from him or to hear him crying somewhere else.
And I think I stumbled onto this insight that [00:27:00] his pain of being separate is not unlike the pain that I experienced as a newly orphaned child who was taken from, who lost my mother and was taken from my community, my country, there's a pain of separation there. And shortly after realizing that I started looking around and thinking to myself, that is the pain that I feel with my son, but that's also the pain I feel, in other relationships and other facets of my life. That pain of separation, that pain of disconnect, and it was a revelation for me because what I thought made me so different as an adoptee and as someone who's experienced [00:28:00] multiple iterations of capital T, trauma in my life is actually the thing that binds me with all humans. And I might argue all living things, right? And so I've just been, I've really been reflecting on that. And I was preparing for this talk and I listened to the most recent of your conversations with Pam Carano in the healing series that you do. And you asked a question about like, why do you think people, maybe people who are like adoptive parents or non- adoptees or muggles, I think as she likes to call them. Aren't willing to look at, you were, I think you were talking about like the nothing place, right?
Haley Radke: Yes.
Mirella Stoyanova: And I, I truly think that as adoptees we're mirroring back the physical [00:29:00] reality of an existential problem that other people who are not adopted will do anything most of the time to get out of thinking about, we have entire industries, the wellness industry, the gosh, the dating industry, the anti-aging industry, that their whole thing is like to keep you from, or maybe to help help you feel more in control and to keep you from thinking about the reality that you know, you are born alone, you die alone. Sorry to be so uplifting here, but you are alone. You are alone. And no amount of things you can buy are going to, keep you from that reality. And as, as adoptees, as people who are, system involved. Children in the foster care [00:30:00] system who age out into adulthood who've had these really nuanced experiences, we're reflecting back a reality that is very uncomfortable for people to sit with. And so I think this narrative of like sad story with a happy ending, it's more palatable. Then you became a part of something, then you belonged again.
You were alone and now you're not. We're all alone. We're all alone. And it's okay. That's part of it. Because the other thing is like how beautiful that we keep reaching for connection. How beautiful that we are still reaching for each other and doing the work of iterating in what ways we can, that we are not alone.
Haley Radke: Mirella, I think you just connected something for me that I've thought about for years. You mentioned cognitive dissonance earlier. This is the [00:31:00] thing that pisses me off so much is that cognitive dissonance. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you were adopted. Oh my gosh. I love the reunion story.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And it's like I've always had that gap in I don't get it. Why don't people connect that for there to be the happy reunion then there is the separation, and I think you nailed it there. I think that's what it is. We have to cover up the fear middle of we can't be alone, we can't be with ourselves. We're,
Mirella Stoyanova: It's a deeply existential concern bordering on spiritual, and people don't wanna think about it because it's uncomfortable to be faced with the reality of that truth of our experience. And so that dominant narrative of adoption, that's what we wanna reach for, and I had the unique experience recently.
I, I wrote [00:32:00] something very brief and it was in an attempt to connect with other adoptees, but it was posted on Facebook or something. And the reaction to this like brief snippet of my story was, there were some beautiful and kind comments and there were some really atrocious, but also predictable comments that reflected back something about the discomfort that stirred up in whoever it was that wrote what they did.
And a lot of it was like, so nothing positive happened, so you're not grateful. Some of it was go back to your own country, which was an interesting one for me 'cause I hold a United States passport, there's that, but I was really struck by what it reflected, which is like we as a society are not really set up.
There isn't an emotional [00:33:00] infrastructure for understanding and sitting with the discomfort of cognitive dissonance that both and, that two things can be true at once. That level of complexity and nuance. And it really creates a lot of pain for people in relationships. Personal pain. For me, I came into adulthood with a lot of relational disconnect.
In part because I had no idea who I was. It was so uncomfortable. It was, and this is a common like adoptee story is like we're trying to fit in, so we do everything we can, and then as a result, we don't know who we are. We have little self-acceptance, so we can't really understand who we are and in relation to other people.
And a lot of that is like learning to be okay with who I am. And if as an adoptee you're straddling all of these [00:34:00] lines, someone is telling you who you are and that doesn't fit with how you know yourself or what your experience is. It's gonna create a lot of relational disconnect.
Haley Radke: And I think, so you're a therapist, so you can tell me, and I wanna hear about how you came to, to choose that profession. But as you're talking through those things, I think, yeah, and ultimately, of course, adoptees are human, and the human experiences too have pain and suffering and all those things. And for us, like I really feel like the, quote unquote healing journey. This is gonna sound so cliche, just go with me. Is literally learning to love ourselves. And when we have that big black hole carved out and you say, love yourself, that's the fix. It's okay, but I, how do you love the black hole that's, it's a void. I can't see it. I can't, it, it feels impossible to overcome that. [00:35:00]
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah, I think if we were to like go deeper on that, which I don't think it's cliche, I think it just, it needs some conveyance of what is it that we're looking at. You can't love or accept yourself if you don't know who you are and whatever that means to you. Whether it's, I don't have the life experience to understand who the self is that is navigating this world, or I'm confused because somebody told me who I was or who I should be, and that doesn't match with how I move through the world.
But if we don't know who we are, we don't know where we end and where other people begin, we're not then able to form healthy [00:36:00] boundaries or relationships with other people because everything is a negotiation. And how many adoptees have you spoken with Haley, who you know have talked about being chameleons, right?
Some people say it's our superpower and it was certainly mine and sometimes I feel myself pulled to try to figure that out, and be that version of who, someone is expecting me to be. But I do think the healing work comes from uncovering who we are truly. And for so many adoptees, that question is complicated by not having access to information and whether you need that information or not to really know who you [00:37:00] are. It's like this whole other conversation that we could go into probably great depth about. But unless you can really do that work of articulating to yourself a version of who you are that you can accept.
It's gonna be really hard to see the difference between who it is I truly am and how I move through the world, and the stories that other people have about who I am and how I move through the world.
Haley Radke: What led you to becoming a therapist? And I think now after people hearing you with your insights here, they're gonna be lining up.
Mirella Stoyanova: I didn't know I wanted to become a therapist until I topped out in the child welfare work that I was doing and realized that no amount of advancing [00:38:00] through that goal that I'd had for so many years was going to be satisfying for me. It was like recognizing that, that I was in so many ways trying to be someone I was not, and I really more than anything wanted to be who I was. That was where I was in my own sort of healing journey at the time.
Haley Radke: Cause you also had the idea of going on to law, right? Yeah. And so that, that didn't pan out or I don't know.
Mirella Stoyanova: No, I actually just course corrected.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Mirella Stoyanova: And some of it was that I went through a health crisis in my twenties. I withdrew from topical steroids, used to treat childhood eczema for many years, and that was like a four and a half year long process that involved basically my body just like completely rebelling against what I was trying to do, which was like clear it from my [00:39:00] system. And it was at that time that I was like, what?
What is gonna make me happy? What is it like if nothing changes if I'm in this physical pain that I've been in for these many number of years, if nothing changes for the rest of my life, like how am I gonna be with myself? What is it that I need to live a satisfying and meaningful life? And at that point, I'd actually been pursuing my clinical licensure for three years without really having an intention of sitting for the exam.
And I was in my life outside of work, I was reading theoretical texts about psychology and healing and all these things. So that was the point at which I was like, yeah, no, I think I want to become a therapist. And about a year later I went and I worked at Seattle Children's in the inpatient psych unit and [00:40:00] studied under a really wonderful behavioralist who's done a lot of great work for adolescents on mood management type stuff. But then I also had this, really extensive background and interest in like existential and Buddhist psychology and that happened to lend really well to the work I do as a therapist. So I then opened my private practice in 2018 and I've been seeing clients ever since.
Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you for your service to the folks that need your guidance. I know you work with adoptees also in addition to muggles, I'll call them.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And you have an expertise in racial reclamation as well, and can speak to those things too. [00:41:00] Is there anything that we didn't really talk about yet that you want to make sure that you share with listeners?
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah, it's an expertise in racial reclamation or racial conscientization. There's also the trauma recovery piece that I do, and also working with folks like around perfectionism. I work with a lot of like high performers who struggle with feelings of, as it happens inadequacy. So you know, that's an area where I do a lot of sort of in-depth work. I have notes, but I haven't looked at them today. I feel like we touched on so much.
Haley Radke: We did. We touched on some really deep things that I didn't anticipate us talking about, but I think it was so impactful.
Mirella Stoyanova: I'm glad. I have, the two books that I was thinking [00:42:00] about, what I would wanna recommend to anyone on their own journey and some of the, foundational texts and how I approach healing in general, but also, that stemmed from my own sort of healing journey.
Haley Radke: Yeah. You go first, what are the books you wanna recommend to us?
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah, I've got, Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving Pete Walker's work on complex PTSD, which I feel would be really relevant for this audience, as well as a very beautiful book called Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, and it's written by Miriam Greenspan, who is the daughter of concentration camp survivors, and has a lot of really solid and [00:43:00] beautiful work around, how we can relate skillfully to difficult emotions.
Haley Radke: When you sent me the the complex PTSD book, I looked it up and I thought, oh my goodness, this would be so helpful for people to work through, especially if they feel that or have been diagnosed with PTSD or C-P-T-S-D. It's great. Thank you so much for recommending them. So your writing is really incredible, and I told you right at the start your reading on that sizzle reel is what just captivated me. And I've read all the pieces that you've got publicized on your website and we'll link to those in the show notes. But I just feel like your writing is it's reflective, it's evocative. You can hear how Mirella you shared with us today, and I feel like you, you write in that just such a thoughtful way so I know you have a memoir, you're querying [00:44:00] around, so you know, let's get this girl signed people.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah, I wrote a book about a crisis I faced when I got engaged in 2020. And I couldn't shake the feeling that I was living a double life or a life that was, written according to what somebody else wanted.
And I realized that I needed to reckon with my past or risk losing my relationship and pretty much everything, that by that point I had worked really hard to build, it was like over a decade of healing and self work. And I was in crisis thinking that, if I really looked at my relationship, I was going to blow it all to pieces and so that's what the memoir is about. And hopefully, right now I am. The thing about writing and pursuing traditional publication is you realize, you're, you write and then you rewrite, and then you rewrite again, and you think you're done. [00:45:00] But you're really reaching some kind of threshold of more nuanced understanding.
And I am going to be, I'm currently, I'm revising again. To take my book back out and re-query it in 2026.
Haley Radke: Okay. We're all cheering you on. Thank you. I'm gonna link to these pieces, but the one that really spoke to me was Loss, Side Effects May Include, and then you wrote in Business Insider, which I'll tell you, it scared me a little bit and I practiced earlier.
I was adopted as a child by an American family. They still can't pronounce my name correctly. Girl when you wrote Mirella, I was like, I grew up on Anne of Green Gables. Okay? And so then that stuck in my head and I was like, dear God, that I cannot say that today.
Mirella Stoyanova: You didn't.
Haley Radke: So I hope I did okay anyway.
Mirella Stoyanova: And I think I've, I think I've probably scared a lot of people, but honestly it was just a an honest expression [00:46:00] of exasperation I felt at having spent 18 years of my life trying to ask for my name to be pronounced correctly and with some individuals in my family it's been harder than with others, but names are so reflective of who we are. They're an expression of identity. And when somebody, even if someone isn't saying your name when they try, it's about conveying that you're seen and we all wanna be seen.
Haley Radke: Oh yeah, I totally agree. Okay. And so my assistant, actually anyone that's worked for me, that is one of the very first things we talk about is I'm like every guest's name is gonna be spelled correctly, and I'm not gonna see any name spelled incorrectly. And so I always make this point of making sure I say people's names correctly. But I know I don't always get [00:47:00] it quite right, but it's so important. I totally agree. And it to the degree where I have multiple friends who've changed their name as their identity reclamation project.
Mirella Stoyanova: Yeah, I have as well.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Mirella Stoyanova: Stoyanova was is my, it's my pre-adoptive middle name and the family name of my grandmother and my birth mother.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Mirella Stoyanova: So it's, of course it's complicated because there's like the whole eastern European like Bulgarian nomenclature. Thing. But I did, I ended up reclaiming that.
And I have my married name, but I write under my pre-adoptive name.
Haley Radke: I love that.
Mirella Stoyanova: It's very significant.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So please go and check out Mirella's writing Mirella's writing.
Mirella Stoyanova: There you go. That's okay. It's okay.
Haley Radke: You know it's not hard. I don't know why I'm struggling.
Mirella Stoyanova: It's not about saying it right. It's about the [00:48:00] intention.
Haley Radke: So we'll linked to those in the show things in the show notes, but where can we connect with you and cheer you on in your search for finding this publisher?
Mirella Stoyanova: I am on Instagram. I love connecting with folks there because it's a place that exists at the cross section of my personal and professional lives, but I also right now have a website for my writing work that will in the new year, also be a website for my therapy practice as well. And you right now, it has the link to my therapy practice, but it's just a writing focused page. And that's mirellastoyanova.com.
Haley Radke: Perfect. We'll link to those both in the show notes so you can click through easily and follow. Thank you so much. What an honor so much to speak to you today. I really enjoyed our time together.
Mirella Stoyanova: I'm so [00:49:00] honored to be here. I'm, I was so happy when you asked, and thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to be here.
Haley Radke: Okay. Chat did. Okay. First of all, did you know that's what the cool kids talk like these days, chat. Like they just call everybody chat. I do it and my kids, roll their eyes at me anyway. Okay. Chat. I want to know. What you think about Mirella's insight with us, reflecting back to culture, this idea that there's a fear of being alone and our existence and our complete disconnection from our biological origins shows them you too could be alone. I wanna know what you think about that. And come to [00:50:00] Instagram, put it in the comments for this episode. I'm fascinated by it. I have, I truly, I have thought about this nonstop since we had this conversation and I think she's onto something. So I think these ideas that keep coming out the nothing place this existential, crisis theory, these are really worth talking about because they help us understand ourselves better and they help us talk about adoption in a way that the general population can understand. 'Cause isn't that what we want? We want them to understand the truth of our experiences, the pain, the both and the trauma, all of those things.
Because if they understood us better, perhaps we could lessen the amount of [00:51:00] unnecessary adoptions. Perhaps we could halt them all together. Perhaps we could have more supports for adult adoptees for current growing up adoptees. Imagine what a world. Anyway, come to the comments and let us know.
And if you are listening to this around when it airs, I just wanna remind you. I'm gonna be in New York City to attend the Adoptee Film Fest. Also celebrating with Sullivan Summer, the launch of her chatbook into the world. And it sounds like that's the name of her chatbook. Performance Anxiety is the name of her Chatbook.
And so I'll be there celebrating with her and I would love to meet you. We would love to see you there. So we'll have links to those events in the show notes. That's happening in November, 2025. And of course, if you're listening in the future we missed you. Perhaps we'll see you next year. Okay.
[00:52:00] Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again very soon.
