A Letter to a Young Adoptee Who Wants to Die

Dear Sweetheart,

Your brain is not like your friends’ brains, or like your parents’, or your teachers’. This means these people probably do not have any idea what is going in your mind when you and your best friend fight or when your mother gets angry at you because you swore at your brother or when you forget to do your homework and your teacher says he is disappointed.

These people probably have no idea that your brain, in these situations, says you should kill yourself.

And later, when you deal with the hormonal shit show that is called PMS, no one around you will know that along with the craziness that goes on in your brain, is that dark call to find a bunch of pills so you can end the pain of being alive and feeling so wrong. If you are a boy and are dealing with your own hormonal wash, the story is the same.

Even as an adult, when you are driving home from work, the strange thought that you could drive into a telephone pole will come into your brain, and you will wonder what is wrong with you. You will think your life must be worse than you thought it was, because you thought you were fine and yet here you are, contemplating suicide. This is terrifying! You are living an awful life and you didn’t even know it!

You have no idea what is wrong with you, why you have these thoughts. You have nice parents, nice friends, a new kitten at home. What craziness do you carry that makes you think daily about dying? And not just dying, but disappearing, relieving the world of the burden of you. Pencils come with erasers, why don’t you? Oh, the miracle it would be if you could just self-erase, oh! the relief!

But then you would lose your family, your friends, the trees behind your house that you love so dearly. What is wrong with you that your life is so full of love and fun and nice people that you want to die and leave them and hurt them in such a terrible way?

You are a bad person, your brain tells you. And so the loop of thinking I am alive but I should die gets more deeply grooved, more a part of who you are.

Sweetheart, I want to tell you a story. Sit by me. I want to put my arm around you. I want you to feel the warmth of my skin, my breath, my heart as you listen. I want your body to hear my body, so your brain can start to know that you really are safe, that you will not let yourself hurt yourself. Okay? Can you do that?

When you were born, you were part of this bigger world, the mother’s body, that had created you, but the world had to give you to another world because she could not take care of you. When humans travel from the Earth to the Moon, they have such special gear! They go through years and years and years of training so they do not die during this transition. When they land on the moon not one inch of their skin is exposed because we know how fragile skin is and how it must be protected.

Except the world forgets about the fragility of skin when it gives a baby from one mother to another, and so your skin gets damaged, and it tells your brain things are wrong, there is trouble, you are in crisis, and your brain tries to protect you, tries to take you off this new planet for which you have not been prepared. Your brain offers you an escape hatch: erase yourself. You can’t get back home, but at least you can leave the massive cellular confusion that is this new place, this place that you love but that for some reason hurts in a way you can’t even describe because it is deep, hidden, secret, inside the inside of your skin.

The problem is that the part of your brain that is offering you this solution isn’t the smartest part of your brain. It’s the old part, the lizard part, the part that thinks always you are in danger. This part is like Chicken Little and screams RUN when clouds come into view because it’s sure the sky is falling.

When your brain tells you to die, take a breath, Sweetheart, and know, for you as an adoptee, this is just part of life. Cross your arms and take another deep breath. It’s just a voice you have in your head, and it will pass. Look at something you love, take another deep breath and say to yourself or out loud, I belong here. This is my planet, too. You are making new grooves in your brain, the grooves of safety and belonging.

This is your job for the rest of your life, to shape your brain. It’s a good job because you get to tell your brain the things you want it to tell you, and your brain, if you train it like you would train a dog, will listen. It just takes a lot of focus and repetition. I am loved. I am safe. I am okay. It’s okay if I got a D on my paper, I’m human. It’s okay if my father is angry at me, this is part of being a child. It’s okay if I made a mistake. I’m a little kid.

Become a brain whisperer. You are the Michelangelo of grey matter. Use language to become what you consider most wonderful. It’s all there for you.

And when you find another adopted person, you can laugh about jumping off cliffs or eating pills because chances are good these wild thoughts are something you share. It’s such a relief to know you aren’t alone, that your brain is just like the brains of the others who lost their home planet when they were too young to know they could survive such a thing.

You are not alone.

Keep talking.

Stay.