I was born into contradiction.
Actually, I was born as an adoptee, and that gave me the ability to hold two seemingly opposing truths at the same time. Dialectical thinking isn’t something I learned in a psychology textbook—it’s something I’ve lived. It’s in my DNA (and yet, paradoxically, it isn’t, because I was raised outside of my genetic family). It’s the air I’ve breathed since I was six weeks old, when I was placed into a new family and told, in different ways throughout my life, “You are special” and “You are different.” Both were true.
Being adopted meant I had to make sense of contradictions early. I belonged, but I didn’t. I was chosen, but I had also been let go. I was loved, but my existence carried loss. There was no single truth that fully explained my reality. Both/and was the only way I could make sense of it.
This ability to hold complexity, to sit with two truths without needing one to cancel out the other, is my superpower. And it’s one I use every single day in my work.
In fertility counseling, I help people who feel like they aren’t the “real” parent because they don’t share DNA with their child. But I also help donor-conceived people who struggle with the reality that the people who raised them are their parents and their genetic origins matter. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.
In relationships, I hold space for people who love someone deeply and feel hurt by them. Who want change and fear change. Who have hope and doubt in the same breath.
We live in a world that pushes us toward binaries. Right or wrong. Black or white. Good or bad. Republican or democrat. But life is rarely that simple. Most of our experiences, especially the ones that shape us the most, exist in the in-between space, where multiple truths can sit side by side, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes beautifully.
In 2016, after the first election of Donald Trump, I felt an urgency to get this message out into the world. I knew I needed to write a book about how we can all develop dialectical thinking and hold opposing truths. I wanted to help people move beyond rigid, divisive thinking into a place where nuance and understanding could exist. Now, years later, I feel that urgency again.
I didn’t choose to be adopted. I didn’t choose the contradictions that came with it. But I did choose how I made sense of them. And in that choice, I found my strength.
My superpower.
And maybe,, it can be yours too.