I’m writing this post in the upstairs office of my new house the weekend before my first set of PhD classes begin. With the deadlines of home-buying paperwork, a cross-state move, and early stages of wedding planning, a significant milestone passed without acknowledgement. Though I’m a couple of months late, I think that a full decade of writing this blog deserves celebration.

I started Red Thread Broken after a traumatic class in college awakened me to the injustices involved in adoption. Without a social network of local adoptees, I turned to this blog as a way to continue writing and processing what I was learning about adoption while I was home for the summer. I thought that I might interact with some people on the blogosphere, but I did not expect Red Thread Broken to reach a worldwide audience or for the initials RTB to become an integral part of my identity.

Within my first five months of writing Red Thread Broken, Daniel Drennon asked me to contribute to Transracial Eyes and Kevin Vollmers asked me to write for Gazillion Voices magazine. Nearly a year later, Amanda Woolston invited me to join the Lost Daughters, a collective of adult adopted women writers. Throughout the past decade, numerous speaking, writing, and community building opportunities have opened up to me through connections made on this blog. Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Mei Fong, interviewed me for her book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, and named a chapter after Red Thread Broken. A representative from Penguin Random House hired me to do a competency reading of a forthcoming book with adoptee characters. Jeff Yang and Phil Yu (Angry Asian Man) asked me to be a guest on their podcast, They Call Us Bruce.

Most importantly, I’ve heard from younger adoptees who stated that my blog saved their lives by knowing there was at least one other person out there who understood what they might be going through. I’ve also heard from adoptive parents who told me that my blog helped them acknowledge adoption loss or be more open to conversations around race and adoption in their homes. Red Thread Broken has been so life-giving to me, and if it has truly been life-saving to others, there is no higher compliment.

While my adoption remains the single most impactful event that has shaped my life, writing Red Thread Broken has been the most life altering thing I have done within my own power. Recently, I was moving some of my childhood personal belongings from my parents’ house, and I discovered a high school yearbook from my senior year in which one of my classmates wrote, “Grace – I hope you get LOUD in college! You have a lot of things to say that deserve to be heard.” When I think about everything that has happened through my blog, it is simply because I had a passion and shared my voice. I guess you could say I got loud.

The somewhat timid 19-year-old girl who started this blog repeatedly wished for a crystal ball to be able to see into the future and know what I would be doing, how things would turn out, and if I would figure it all out. That younger version of me wouldn’t believe it if she knew I was working on a research project with JaeRan Kim of Harlow’s Monkey, enrolled in my dream PhD program, engaged to be married, and still writing on this blog a decade later.

As I prepare to enter the classroom again (hello 19th grade), I am now confident in myself as a full person on my own, not a mini JaeRan Kim or Kimberly McKee, but Grace Newton. I am embracing who I am now and who I will become throughout this part of my academic training. I know there will be unforeseen challenges and that I will feel inadequate at times, but I hope that during those moments of imposter syndrome, I can remember my 19-year-old self and how proud she would be of how far I’ve come in the past decade. Let’s see what the next decade brings.