I am so tired of the trope that all adopted persons are damaged, other, not like us.
This rant follows an evening of Law & Order: SVU. I started the episode halfway through, after the revelation that the adopted child had orchestrated the murder of her younger sister, the biological child of her adoptive parents. The adoptee had been abused by her bio dad, and was taken away as a pre-teen and then adopted by this family. She was portrayed as a sociopath, describing herself as dead already.
I have no doubt that childhood abuse can break people, can create a blackness so deep that the real person never emerges. But adoption is often shorthand for damaged, rejected, defective. How messed up do you have to be for your parents to give you away?