Speaking to The Younger Me is a personal and reflective talk rooted in Schai Schairer's lived experience as a Black, Haitian, interracial, international adoptee who is also gay and masculine-presenting. In this presentation, Schai speaks to the younger version of herself while exploring identity, survival, belonging, and what it means to become yourself in systems that were not built to fully see you.

Through her professional work within the prison system, Schai began to recognize something that deeply shifted her understanding of both adoption and incarceration. She was not only surrounded by birth parents who had experienced separation from their children. She was also surrounded by adoptees whose own stories reflected loss, displacement, identity disruption, and survival. That realization opened a deeper conversation about the ways adoption and incarceration can intersect, especially when systems of family separation, institutional harm, and unresolved trauma collide.

Adoption is treated like a one-time event that happens in infancy, instead of what it actually is: the catalyst for a lifelong experience woven into the lives of birthparents, adoptive parents, and adopted people. This session teaches every member of the adoption constellation how to anticipate triggering experiences and milestones before they happen, giving them the tools necessary to improve outcomes for everyone in their own adoption triad while centering the needs of adopted people. The act of adoption is trauma, trauma doesn’t just go away on its own, and it cannot be healed by love alone, making it vitally important that everyone in the adoption constellation understand when, how, and why trauma may manifest in both birthparents and adopted people throughout their lives, in order to build a personal toolkit that supports healing.