Adoption, Colour and Career: from Survival to Belonging

When I was in primary school, my world was small and mostly very white. Besides my Colombian sister, there were only two other Indonesian and a Turkish girl with tinted skin. That was it. The rest of the classrooms, the playground, the parents waiting at the gates: all pale Dutch faces.

In secondary school, the diversity increased slightly, but not dramatically. There were more “coloured” classmates, but still not many. Yet I never really struggled with my skin colour. I was not bullied because of it. I did not consciously feel discriminated against. I adapted, as many adoptees do. I blended in. I spoke perfect Dutch. I knew the codes. I was one of them or at least I thought so.

The only time I noticed my body might be different was during winter. Every year, like clockwork, a heaviness would settle in. The dark mornings, the grey afternoons, the early sunsets, they drained me. I suffered from winter depression long before I knew that term existed. A lack of sunlight seemed to hit me harder than most of my classmates. While others complained about the cold, I felt as if my entire system was shutting down. Only later did I start to wonder whether my Indonesian roots, my early childhood in a tropical climate, were still living somewhere in my cells.

As I entered the workforce in the Netherlands, my colour again rarely became an explicit topic. On paper, I was Dutch. In practice, I functioned as Dutch. I worked in offices, joined meetings, managed projects, and supported leadership. I understood the directness, the efficiency, the structure that defines professional life here. Yet beneath that seamless integration, being an adoptee brings an invisible dimension to working life, one that is rarely acknowledged or spoken about.

Many adoptees grow up learning how to survive by adapting. We read rooms quickly. We sense tension before it is spoken. We work hard, sometimes too hard, to prove we belong. Not just in our families, but everywhere. At school. In friendships. At work. For me, work often became a place of safety. If I performed well, delivered, and was reliable, then I was secure. Achievement became a language I spoke fluently. It gave me structure when my inner world felt chaotic. In a country like the Netherlands, where independence and self-sufficiency are highly valued, this can appear as a strength. And it is a strength. But it can also mask exhaustion.

Because beneath that well-functioning exterior, many adoptees carry unanswered questions. Questions about identity. About belonging. About origin and loss. These do not disappear when you walk into an office at 9 a.m. They come with you. They linger quietly in the background during meetings. They resurface in performance reviews. They reveal themselves in the constant urge to do more, to be better, to never disappoint. And holding all of that, day after day, absorbs an enormous amount of energy, even when no one else can see it.

At the same time, being an adoptee in the Dutch workplace has also shaped me in powerful ways. It has made me resilient. It has taught me to navigate different cultures, even if I was raised in only one. It has given me empathy, the ability to sense what is not being said. It has made me independent at a young age.

The Netherlands is becoming more diverse than the classrooms of my childhood. More faces, more stories, more shades. But adoption is still often seen as a “happy ending,” not as a complex lifelong experience that continues into adulthood and into professional life. I sometimes wonder what it would have meant to see more people who looked like me when I was young. Or to hear openly that struggling in winter, feeling slightly different, or working twice as hard to belong are not personal failures but understandable responses to a layered identity.

Today, I no longer see my story as something that makes me weaker at work. It has made me sharper, more aware, more driven. But it has also taught me something important: belonging should not have to be earned through overperformance.

For adoptees working in the Netherlands and anywhere else, I hope we can gradually shift from merely surviving to genuinely belonging. I know how difficult that can be; I still often struggle to find that place myself. Not because we have mastered adaptation so well, but because we begin to give ourselves permission to exist fully, with every layer of our story, out in the open.