My Story

Over the past several years, Vesna has been writing from her lived experience as a Cambodian American adoptee, exploring identity, faith, trauma, healing, relationships, culture, justice, and the political and social issues she finds herself wrestling with. She’s a wife and mom of three, and while motherhood is one of the biggest parts of her life, it’s also been one of the places where she’s grown the most—learning how to hold both the beauty and the weight of raising a family, navigating marriage, and making sense of the experiences that continue to shape who she is.

Faith, spirituality, and music remain important threads throughout her life. Over time, her spiritual journey has expanded beyond the walls of church and into a deeper curiosity about God, the universe, meaning, connection, and the things we can’t always explain. She’s less interested in pretending to have all the answers and more interested in staying open to mystery, growth, and the ways spirituality shows up in everyday life. Music has remained part of that journey too, whether through worship, recording songs, or simply using it as a way to process emotion, memory, and different seasons of life.

What began as a space to share music has grown into something much broader—a place to write about adoption, identity, grief, relationships, church, culture, politics, justice, and the things that rarely fit into neat categories. Her writing is rooted in lived experience, but also in a willingness to question, rethink, and sit with complicated things instead of forcing them into easy answers. More than anything, she hopes her writing makes people feel a little less alone in the things they’re trying to understand, while creating space for deeper conversations, honesty, and stories that are allowed to be complicated.

A Note About Adoption

One topic I return to often is adoption. As a Cambodian adoptee, it’s deeply personal to me. My writing holds both gratitude for my family and an honest acknowledgment of the loss, questions, identity struggles, and complexities that can come with being adopted.

I support ethical, child-centered adoption when it is truly in the best interest of the child. Through advocacy work with organizations that support both family preservation and adoption, I’ve had the privilege of walking alongside expectant parents as they explored their options with honesty, compassion, and care. Those experiences have only strengthened my belief that every child deserves the opportunity to grow up in a safe, loving, and stable family.

I also think adoptive parents are better equipped to support their children when they understand that adoption does not end at placement. Separation, trauma, identity, culture, grief, and belonging can continue to shape an adoptee throughout their life. Writing honestly about those realities is not meant to discourage adoption, but to encourage more informed, compassionate, and trauma-aware parenting.

Throughout this website, I write about adoption alongside faith, justice, family, resilience, identity, and the questions that have shaped my own life. Some of those conversations are uncomfortable, but I don’t believe discomfort is the same thing as division. My hope is that these essays make room for honesty, empathy, and a deeper understanding of experiences that are often more complicated than we allow them to be.

At the heart of it, I want children—whether they remain with their first family, reunify with family, or are welcomed through adoption—to know that they are deeply loved, supported, and given every opportunity to flourish. I want families to be strengthened, children to be valued, and adoptees to feel like their full stories are allowed to be heard.