Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

Missing someone doesn’t have anything to do with how long it’s been since you last saw each other, or the number of hours that have passed since you last spoke. It’s about specific moments when you wish they were there by your side.

It’s not where you come from; it’s where you belong that matters. And it’s OK to feel like you belong in more than one place.

What I didn’t know then was that when you try to hold on to the past as hard as I was, you sometimes miss out on living in the present. I wish that someone had told me, Christina, live in the moment and dream of the future. That doesn’t mean you lose yourself. But stopping where you are now will cost you more than you can imagine.

as if you weren’t a human among other humans.

Love can’t be bought, manufactured, or elicited on request. It’s a gift that we choose to give and to receive. It’s unselfish and maybe it can’t move mountains, but it can do something even better: it can save a life.

This is the story of my childhood in Brazil, about the culture shock I experienced when I arrived in the forests of northern Sweden and about the loss of the

I was tough, and I could handle things on my own. I was too proud to ask for help, a weakness that has followed me for a large part of my life.

On some level, I began to understand that people, especially grown-ups, weren’t interested in the truth but rather in a truth that suited them. They only wanted to know about things that made stuff easier for them.

I've never felt the need to find out who I am, where I come from, or why I was abandoned. I know who I am, where I come from; most of all I know that I wasn't abandoned. Kidnapping might be too strong a word to use for how our adoption transpired, but sometimes that's what it felt like.

I believe that everything comes when we’re ready, and once we’ve opened a door, it can be hard to shut again.

The tears of the powerless are not tears of frustration. They’re not tears that gush or tears that burn. The tears of the powerless are silent and resigned.

She is literally an Amazon woman. She comes from the state of Amazonas in northwestern Brazil and is exactly the person I need now,

I don’t believe that life is about finding yourself. For me, life is about creating your own reality.

I can’t meditate. Over the years, I’ve tried various methods of finding the way to that peaceful silence within. How people manage to do that is a mystery to me.

Over the years, I’ve had people tell me that I should feel grateful for getting a chance at a better life, and it has really irritated me. We humans have a strong tendency to universalize our own opinions, thoughts, and feelings and assume they apply to other people. No one but me knows what I feel and what I’ve been through. And it’s really not up to anyone else to say what I should and shouldn’t feel.

We never know our strength until life tests us. But most of all, we don’t know what strength and power another person has until we follow them for a while on their journey.

Anyone who claims that blood is thicker than water, that the ties in a family who share the same genes are stronger, does not understand how love works.

We’re all alike and yet so different. If we’re subjected to the smallest extra amount of pain, pain that then joins forces with guilt, and then together they find their way home to loneliness, we will find ourselves putting up the strongest of walls. Walls that reason can never penetrate.

We humans have a strong tendency to universalize our own opinions, thoughts, and feelings and assume they apply to other people.

You can discuss whether they deserve the death penalty, but what I know most of all is that existence is not black and white.

Christiana, life is terrible and unfair sometimes, but never stop walking. Always keep walking,” she told me. I remember wondering why. “Because after everything that’s happened to us, our hearts want what’s good, and our hearts can’t be the only things that want that. You’re not alone, because there are people who see you and watch over you. Do you understand?

Sometimes you meet people you only get to be with for a short time. What’s difficult is accepting that and moving on. But sometimes that may be what you have to do. Accept that a relationship is only a loan, and when it’s not there anymore, you should rejoice at having had the honor of having it at all, of receiving so much without needing to give. Maybe it didn’t end the way you wanted or expected. Maybe it ended before it really had a chance to begin, or ended without your having a chance to say goodbye.

According to my Brazilian papers, I was born on April 30, 1983. That was also the thirty-seventh birthday of the king of Sweden, on the far side of the Atlantic from Diamantina, Brazil, where I took my first breaths. When I was little, Mamãe (the Portuguese word for mother) used to tell me that I was born in the woods, that my father was an Indian, so I was half-Indian. I don’t know whether this is true. I don’t know whether she embellished the story a bit, made it a little nicer than saying she didn’t know who my father was, or that he didn’t want anything to do with us. But I’ve always liked her version, and for many years I chose to believe it. A part of me still wants to believe it’s true. What I know and remember is that I spent my first years in the woods and caves outside of Diamantina with my mother

One strong memory I have from Diamantina is of the bus station. Every now and then, Mamãe and I spent the night there. It was around that time that I first started to understand that we were poor and what that really meant. People would look at us funny. Some spit on us as we sat there begging, and for all the world, I couldn’t understand what my mother or I had done wrong. We were nice people who hadn’t done anything to anybody. We were just trying to scrounge a little money so we wouldn’t starve to death. I didn’t really understand what money was or why it was distributed so unevenly among people. I knew we needed money to get food, but I didn’t really understand how people got money. Begging and selling flowers were clearly the worst ways to get money.

Seated cross-legged, I was leaning against the shack across from her, waiting for Camile, when a man opened the door behind the girl. He came out in just underpants and seemed drunk. He looked at the girl, grabbed her by the hair, pulled her up off the chair, and yanked her into the shack. She didn’t scream or cry. You could tell she was used to being treated that way. It was always awful to see someone in the slums who’d become a ghost, who was no longer responsive, who didn’t feel anything, who merely existed but didn’t really live

I was eight years old when I came to Sweden, and my brother was twenty-two months. We are half siblings. We have the same mother but different fathers. In the adoption papers, I can read who Patrick’s father is, but in mine, the line for father is empty. I wonder if that means I’ll never find out who my biological father is. It feels weird to say that Patrick and I are half siblings. Maybe that’s because I didn’t know my father or Patrick’s. Because our fathers were absent, I’ve always viewed Patrick as my full brother. Maybe being adopted and getting a new mother and father also strengthened the bond between us as brother and sister. We became a family, a family defined not by blood, but by circumstances, by chance and, who knows, maybe by something inexplicable.

And this isn’t the end of my story. It’s just the beginning. I carry my mother’s words with me: Always keep walking. Never stop walking.