Pamela A. Karanova is an Adult Adoptee, Freelance Writer, Author of Born In The Shadows, Living in The Light: My Adoptee Epiphanies, The Fight of My Life, Former President of Adoptees Connect, Inc, and the Founder of Adoptee Remembrance Day – October 30th. Pamela has been featured on Adoptees On, Religion News Service, and Overcoming Odds where she has spoken openly about adoptee lived experience, systemic issues within adoption, and the importance of truth centered dialogue. Former Co-founder of the Adoptees for Awareness Grant. Creator/Designer of True-to-Life Greeting Cards at The Real Adoptea Moxie Emporium. Her advocacy and writing have been recognized with the 2019 Angel in Adoption Award from the Indiana Adoptee Network and the 2025 Adoption Vanguard Award from Adoption Knowledge Affiliates.
Bold | Courageous | Fierce | Writer | Unruly Adoptee | Truth Seeker | Uncensored
Adoptea – Dishing out authentic, bonafide adoptee realitea one click, article, comment, and post at a time, adding uncensored and unfiltered rants and raves with an occasional impromptu cup of hot tea & virtual chat time with fellow adoptees & subscribers.
Moxie – Moxie describes someone with a fighting spirit. If you’ve got moxie, you’ve got confidence, grit, determination, and nerve. If you’ve got moxie, you have a growth mindset, which means you can’t be stopped by an emotional response to a challenging situation and, ultimately, not by anything. Moxie is a word that means: strength of character. It means courage and spunk.
For more than fifteen years, Pamela A. Karanova has been a bold and unwavering voice in the adoptee community. Through her website, www.pamelakaranova.com, she has curated hundreds of adoptee centered articles that confront the difficult, layered, and often silenced realities of adoption. Her writing has generated more than 303,063 views, reflecting a global readership seeking honesty, validation, and truth beyond the polished narratives often promoted by the adoption industry.
Pamela’s work centers the lived experiences of adoptees. She addresses the complexities of separation trauma, identity loss, secrecy, failed adoptions, estrangement as an adoptee, mental health struggles, abandonment, and the lifelong impact of being relinquished and reassigned. Her platform exists to elevate adoptee voices, not to soften them. She challenges systems that prioritize comfort over truth and calls attention to the long term consequences that adoptees are too often left to navigate alone.
In recognition of her advocacy, Pamela received the 2019 Angel in Adoption Award from the Indiana Adoptee Network and the 2025 Adoption Vanguard Award from Adoption Knowledge Affiliates. She has also been recognized for creating one of the leading adoptee centered websites, built entirely around amplifying adoptee perspectives and fostering community connection.
Beyond writing, Pamela has invested countless hours developing resources, organizing adoptee spaces, and cultivating lifelong relationships within the adoption constellation worldwide. She is the founder of Adoptee Remembrance Day, observed annually on October 30, honoring adoptees lost to suicide, addiction, deportation, abuse, neglect, and even murder. The day exists to acknowledge the devastating outcomes too often hidden from public view, including adoptees who were promised safety and instead experienced violence, abandonment, displacement from their birth countries, and in some cases, permanent separation through deportation. Adoptee Remembrance Day brings visibility to lives that mattered and insists that their stories not be erased or minimized.
In 2026, Pamela began serializing her memoir, Born in the Shadows, Living in the Light: My Adoptee Epiphanies, The Fight of My Life, on Substack through her publication, The Real Adoptea Moxie. Rather than pursuing a traditional publishing route, she chose to release her story chapter by chapter in real time. This decision reflects her commitment to transparency, accessibility, and community engagement. By sharing her memoir in serialized form, she invites readers into the unfolding truth of her life as an adoptee, creating space for dialogue, reflection, and collective reckoning.
Her memoir is not a curated redemption arc. It is an unfiltered examination of what it means to grow up adopted in a system that promises safety and belonging while often ignoring the emotional and psychological cost of separation. Through each chapter, Pamela dissects the myths surrounding adoption and explores the deeper question: what happens when the narrative of rescue does not match lived reality?
Pamela shares her story not for sympathy, but for clarity. She writes to ensure that adoptees who feel confused, angry, disconnected, estranged, or unseen understand that their reactions are not defects. They are responses to a profound rupture. Her work continues to push conversations upstream, a philosophy grounded in her favorite quote by Desmond Tutu: “We need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” Pamela often adds that, for adoptees, sometimes we are not pulled out at all. Most of the time we are left to drown in the river, and if anyone is pulling us out, it is ourselves. This belief sits at the center of her advocacy. Rather than managing symptoms or offering surface level solutions, she calls for examining the root causes of adoptee overrepresentation in treatment facilities, addiction recovery, homelessness, incarceration, and other systems of crisis. She urges society to confront the systemic foundations of separation, secrecy, and commodification rather than simply responding after the damage is done.
At the heart of Pamela’s work is a commitment to truth telling, community building, and ensuring that adoptee voices are not an afterthought in conversations about adoption. Through her writing, advocacy, Adoptee Remembrance Day, and serialized memoir with over 3000 followers on her Substack, she continues to create spaces where adoptees can see themselves reflected honestly and without apology.
What Is The Real Adoptea Moxie? One Newsletter Drops Monthly.
The Real Adoptea Moxie is Pamela A. Karanova’s Substack publication dedicated to exploring the layered realities of the adoptee experience. Through this platform, she shares new and original writing focused on the full spectrum of adoption related themes, including being in the fog, coming out of the fog, search and reunion, grief, loss, trauma, anger, rage, healing, and the many emotional complexities that shape an adoptee’s life.
Over the last decade and a half, Pamela has navigated continuous stages within her own healing journey. The Real Adoptea Moxie serves as a space where she thoughtfully shares the insight, perspective, and lived knowledge she has gained along the way. Her goal is not to simplify the adoptee experience, but to examine it honestly and in depth.
One extended piece of writing is published each month for all subscribers. Every subscriber receives one thoughtfully curated newsletter that highlights one or two adoptee centered topics. Within these newsletters, Pamela explores questions such as: What adoptee healing tools have been the most valuable? How does one navigate grief and loss connected to adoption? What drives the desire to search for biological family? What happens during reunion? Is there regret after searching?
This streamlined monthly format allows for deeper exploration, richer storytelling, and consistent connection within the adoptee community. The publication is designed to foster reflection, dialogue, and shared understanding.
While the monthly newsletter is available to all subscribers, there is also a paid subscription option for those who wish to further support Pamela’s work. All paid subscribers will have full access to Pamela’s memoir. The paid plan is $5 per month or $55 annually at a discounted rate.
Whether someone joins as a subscriber or a paid supporter, The Real Adoptea Moxie exists as an evolving space committed to truth telling, healing exploration, and strengthening adoptee centered conversation.
Introducing the True to Life Greeting Card Line by Pamela A. Karanova at The Real Adoptea Moxie Emporium
Pamela A. Karanova created the True to Life Greeting Card Line out of a shared frustration many people know well: the struggle to find a greeting card that actually says what needs to be said. Human experiences are complex. Adoption related experiences are layered, paradoxical, and often difficult to articulate. Many adoptees and those connected to adoption know what it feels like to carry emotions that cannot easily be reduced to Hallmark language.
Each item designed at The Real Adoptea Moxie Emporium is meant to be a bold and unapologetic statement. Every true to life greeting card tells a story. These cards are not surface level sentiments. They are reflections of lived experience.
This is the first true to life greeting card collection created by an adoptee for adoptees, late discovery adoptees, DNA surprises, NPEs, MPEs, Search Angels, donor conceived individuals, and others navigating identity and origin stories. The collection was built to acknowledge the realities that are often overlooked, minimized, or misunderstood.
The designs are dynamic and vivid, intentionally created to stand out. These cards are unforgettable and are meant to spark dialogue and heartfelt conversations. They do not whisper. They say what many people have been thinking but could not find in print.
Understanding is love. Not every card will fit every journey, and that is intentional. One person’s truth may not be another’s, but that does not make it less valid. Humor is also woven into this project. Without humor, everything can feel unbearably heavy. There is no censoring here. Some cards are raw. Some may feel blunt or even rude. Those who are easily offended may find this collection is not for them.
This is only the beginning. The collection will continue to grow. Customized greeting cards are also available for those seeking something designed specifically for their unique situation. Inquiries, pricing, and submission guidelines are available through the contact page.
Subscribers can join the email list to stay updated on new releases, discounts, specials, and sales. All True to Life Greeting Cards are created and designed by Pamela A. Karanova. Readers are encouraged to follow her Substack to learn more about her writing and advocacy work.
Plus, the occasional waterfall or hiking photo — like this one of me basking in a waterfall!
This is Cummins Falls State Resort Park in Cookeville, Tennessee. The hike through the gorge is 2.4 miles in and out and runs into a 75 feet high waterfall you see in this photo.
Who Would Benefit from The Real Adoptea Moxie?
The Real Adoptea Moxie is designed for anyone who wants to learn more about adoption. Pamela A. Karanova explores a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals of living as an adult adoptee to deeply personal reflections on what it truly feels like to navigate the adoptee journey with healing in mind. The work centers adoptee lived experience, yet subscribers do not have to be adoptees. Anyone willing to listen, learn, and engage with openness is welcome.
Her vision is to cultivate a supportive, informed community for those within the adoption constellation as well as non adopted individuals who approach these conversations with curiosity and a willingness to grow. Through a five dollar per month subscription option, readers are able to support the work while gaining access to deeper engagement and expanded dialogue.
While social media can offer moments of connection, it often limits depth. The Real Adoptea Moxie is intentionally structured to move beyond surface level exchanges. It exists as a space rooted in validation, shared growth, and expanded understanding of adoptee experiences. It is a place for dishing the adoptTEA with bold honesty, truth seeking, truth telling, uncensored reflection, and fierce transparency about adoption from an adoptee’s perspective.
Pamela commits to spending time each week engaging in the comment sections of her published writings, encouraging subscribers to spark thoughtful conversations with one another. She also hosts occasional impromptu “Adoptea Time” virtual chat sessions for paid subscribers, creating live spaces for dialogue, reflection, and meaningful connection.
“Before I could release
the weight of my sadness
and pain; I first had
to honor its existence.”
― yung pueblo, Inward
No matter where someone finds themselves within the adoption experience, whether newly questioning, deep in search, navigating reunion, living with estrangement, or decades into personal healing work, The Real Adoptea Moxie offers a space for thoughtful exploration and honest reflection. Pamela A. Karanova is confident that this platform will continue to be engaging, educational, and at times challenging in all the right ways. It is designed to inform, to provoke meaningful thought, and to create room for conversations that are often avoided elsewhere.
In addition to her monthly newsletter, Pamela is currently serializing her memoir, Born in the Shadows, Living in the Light: My Adoptee Epiphanies, The Fight of My Life, on Substack. By releasing her story chapter by chapter, she invites readers into a living dialogue around adoption, identity, trauma, and truth telling. The memoir deepens the work she has been doing for over fifteen years, offering personal context alongside advocacy and analysis. Readers are not simply consuming a story. They are witnessing the unfolding of lived experience in real time.
Whether someone joins as a free subscriber or chooses to support the work through a paid subscription, each reader becomes part of The Real Adoptea Moxie community. Pamela values that support deeply and approaches this platform as an evolving space built on connection, transparency, and shared learning.
For those interested in reaching out directly, podcast interviews, conference appearances, teaching engagements, panel discussions, or small group conversations, Pamela is occasionally available. Inquiries can be submitted through her contact page at www.pamelakaranova.com/contact.
She looks forward to continuing to connect in meaningful ways through The Real Adoptea Moxie Substack platform and beyond.
The Adoptees for Awareness Grant:
Two Adoptees: A Passionate Collaboration Impacting Many.
When two adoptees gather together to collaborate and make changes for the advancement of the adoptee community, mountains will be moved, and miracles will happen.
We are introducing the Adoptees for Awareness Grant established in 2023. This grant is sponsored by Jeffrey Leventhal of S12F, who partnered with Pamela A. Karanova of Adoptees Connect, Inc.®, both adoptees. This collaboration has been developed to create an influential lifeline to help stimulate more resources and healing for the adoptee community that has otherwise been nonexistent.
About the Adoptees for Awareness Grant:
S12F and Adoptees Connect, Inc. have co-created a grant program to help adoptee-focused 501(c)(3) organizations. The purpose of this program is to help non-profit adoptee centric organizations, created by adoptees and exclusively designed to help adoptees. We will also consider family preservation organizations that keep mothers and babies together or raise awareness of the harm of adoption in general. Our grants are for United States-based 501(c)(3) organizations.
If you want to apply for the Adoptees for Awareness Grant, click the link below. Scroll to the bottom, and you will find the application. As of 2026, our grant partnership has concluded, but the love given during this project expanded around the world. Thank you, Jeffrey for an amazing partnership! I will be eternally grateful.
To see a list of Recipients of the Adoptees for Awareness Grant visit here.
Here are some of the writing pieces I’m the proudest of:
Adoption: Mislabeled, Medicated, & Diagnosed Adoptees Could Be Grieving Profoundly.
The Perplexity of Forced Bonding in Adoption – I share my thoughts on the bonding process in adoption.
100 Heartfelt Transracial Adoptee Quotes that Honor the Truth of Adoption – 100 Transracial Adoptees come together to share feelings on how adoption has impacted them.
Adoptees, Why Are You So Angry? – Adoptees share feelings on why they are angry.
Why Do Adoptees Search? An Adoptee Collaboration – Many adoptees experience why they choose to search for biological families.
100 Heartfelt Adoptee Quotes that Honor the Truth of Adoption – 100 Adoptees come together to share heartfelt feelings on how adoption has made them feel.
My Friend Has an Adopted Child, and They Don’t Have Any Issues with Being Adopted – Shining a light on the comment so many adoptees hear over and over.
Here are some of the articles I have been featured in:
These Adoptees Refuse to Be Christian Pro-Life Poster Kids by Kathryn Post of Religious News Service.
Toward Preventing Adoption- Related Suicide by Mirah Riben.
Before a month celebrating adoption, a day to recognize adoptees’ trauma by Religion News Service.
Bringing Adult Adoptee Issues to Light by Angela Burton of Next Avenue.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article and podcast are that of the author, Pamela A. Karanova. These articles are for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared on this platform is to be taken as psychological, medical or legal advice. Reproduction of the material contained in this publication may be made only with the written permission of Pamela A. Karanova. While it is Pamela’s hope that you find the information in her website useful and informative please note- the information contained in this website is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by Pamela A. Karanova with the goal of having the information up-to-date and correct; she makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the resources list on the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the resources listed on her website. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk. Through this website you are able to link to other websites which are not under the control of Pamela A. Karanova. She has no control over the nature, content and availability of those sites. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.
Recommendations
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Rating: 5 out of 5.
“Pamela A. Karanovas has been an absolute lifeline for me as an adopted adult. Her advocacy work and ability to provide personalized support have truly made a difference in my life. Through one-on-one Table Talk sessions, she has offered valuable tools and resources that have helped me navigate my unique journey of adoption. Her understanding of grief and loss in the adoptee journey has been incredibly insightful and comforting. I highly recommend connecting with her for anyone in need of validation and support.” – Jeanette M. Boston, MA. USA.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Rating: 5 out of 5.
“I cannot thank Pamela A. Karanovas enough for the support she has provided me as an adopted adult. Her personalized approach to advocacy and her ability to tailor resources to fit my specific needs has been invaluable. Through our one-on-one Table Talk sessions, she has offered validation and understanding that have truly made a difference in my healing process. Her expertise in grief and loss has been a guiding light for me, as well as attending my local Adoptees Connect group. I highly recommend reaching out to her for anyone in need of a compassionate lifeline.” – Wendy L. Davenport, IA. USA.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Rating: 5 out of 5.
“Pamela A. Karanovas is a true gem in the world of advocacy for adopted adults. She has spent so much time and energy in creating resources for adult adoptees. Her ability to provide personalized support and resources based on individual needs is unmatched. Through my one-on-one Table Talk sessions with her, I have found validation and understanding that have been crucial in my healing journey. Her expertise in grief and loss has provided me with a sense of comfort and guidance, and learning about The Grief Recovery Method as an adoptee has been life-changing. I highly recommend connecting with her for anyone in need of a supportive lifeline. She truly is a beacon of light in the adoption community.” – Michelle T. – Sydney, AU.
Disclaimer: If you or someone you know is experiencing a serious mental health event, such as suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please dial 911 and seek immediate help by contacting a licensed therapist or reaching out to the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or text #988 for assistance and support.
Please note that we are not licensed therapists or mental health professionals, and therefore, we are not liable for any actions taken based on the information provided on this platform. Your mental health and safety are of utmost importance, and we encourage you to seek professional help in times of crisis.
Pamela A. Karanova 