First Wound

By Christina Guizetti

They say you don't remember your birth. You don't remember the moment your lungs fill with air for the first time, the warmth of a body against yours, or the sound of a voice you instinctively know. But some memories live in the body, even when the mind can't recall them. They settle into your bones, into the spaces between your heartbeat and your breath. I don't remember the moment I was separated from the woman who carried me, but I feel it. That first wound -- the parting of two lives that had been one -- left no visible scar, yet its ache has followed me through every corner of my life. It's a silence that echoes. A question that hums in the background, even when the world is loud. From the very beginning, I was loved -- fiercely, completely. My adoptive parents, the people who raised me, poured their hearts into me. They gave me a home and a family, a place to belong. But even in the safety of their arms, there was an absence I couldn't name, a sense that some part of me had been left behind. Adoption is often painted in soft, bright colors -- a story of rescue, of gratitude, of lives coming together as they were meant to. And while love is at its core, so too is loss. Before there is a beginning, there is an ending. Before there is joy, there is grief. To be adopted is to live at the intersection of those truths: the duality of belonging and searching, of being rooted and adrift. This is a story about that intersection. It's about what it means to grow up as someone whose life began with a fracture, whose sense of self was shaped by both love and loss. It's about the complexity of identity when you're stitched together by two families, two histories, two sets of people who might never truly understand each other. At its heart, this is a story of love. Love that is imperfect and messy. Love that is fierce and unrelenting. Love that is both the wound and the balm. To be adopted is to live with questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What parts of me are written in my DNA, and what parts were shaped by the people who raised me? It's a journey of piecing together the fragments of a life and learning to hold space for both the joy and the pain, the certainty and the unknown. This book is my attempt to make sense of that journey. It is a story for those who were adopted, for those who adopted, and for those who gave someone away. It is not just my story, but a shared one -- because whether or not we say it out loud, the first wound connects us. It shapes us, even as we work to heal it. We may never fully mend that wound. But we can learn to live with it. To honor its mark on us. To find beauty in the wholeness we build, even with the cracks that remain. This is the story of my first wound. And, perhaps, it's yours too.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F5KLH9MV
• ISBN13: 9798280119826
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 151 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"