A Letter to an Adoptee Who Wants to Die, Part 2
Dear Sweetheart,
I want you to know you are not alone.
I was a little kid the first time I thought about killing myself. I had stacks of overdue books and no money to pay the fines. It wasn’t something I could tell my parents about, I thought, because money was an issue in our house, lack of money, and the idea that I would add to my parents’ stress because of my own terrible inability to get books back to the library on time left me sunk in black shame.
I realized that if I could die, I could erase the problem. However, there was another problem. Even dead I would be a problem for my parents. They would have to deal with their grief and my cold body in the bed they had provided for me, the warm blankets, the soft pillow.
To want to disappear and to feel you can’t is like standing in the ocean and seeing a rogue wave headed your way and knowing there is no time to escape: you are about to go under. The pain of living when great trouble is headed your way is dehumanizing. The life force leaves your body. You feel weak, sick, incapacitated. You are not functioning—you are just waves of fear and sadness. And yet. You have homework to do. Housework to do. Friends to meet. Families members with whom you need to sit with and eat a meal.
Different subjects spark the thought I should die. The body feeling out of control. Money worries. Failure. Low blood sugar. Loneliness. Insatiable hunger. The feeling you did something wrong.
I have this idea in my head that my body should be like the bodies of women in magazines. This is common in our society. However, compound this comparison craziness with the belief that my parents have said from day one that I am special and chosen, and you get a person who believes she is supposed to be perfect. That they (I use they here instead of he/she) need to be perfect because that’s what their parents wanted and thought they got: a perfect person. If you have cellulite on your butt or fat thighs or arms that are weak and skinny, you can quickly translate this to I am garbage. I am not what they wanted. I am wrong. I should die.
The fear that I am going to cause other people trouble is an easy slide into the desire to die/disappear. If you believe you were brought to the planet to make other people’s lives better (namely your parents who adopted you and then by proxy everyone else), being what you perceive to be a burden can feel like driving 100 mph the wrong way down the highway. You are wrong, and you are about to cause a fucking disaster because you are a fucking disaster.
When adopted people are low on sleep or have low blood sugar after eating handfuls of M&M’s in the effort to self-soothe, it’s so easy to lose our grip on clear thinking and fall back into the moment we were relinquished and re-experience the awful stomach drop of oh no no no, she’s gone and I am going to die. This feeling, for me, is the worst of all my feelings because it is quickly followed by an incredibly frightening rush of chemicals that fill me with despair. This is the moment in the movie Gravity when Sandra Bullock’s character has become disconnected from the ship, and she is alone in space. It’s like she is back in the womb, only there is no mother, no safety, only the sickeningly frightening float of alone.
We are social beings. Alone to us means death. When we have thoughts that tell us we should die or disappear, we have also abandoned ourselves, become our own enemy, and that level of loneliness is nearly impossible to tolerate.
Sweetheart, I want to tell you that you can’t trust your brain or your guts when you think you should kill yourself. I want you to reach out to someone even though you think you have no arms. I want you to lean on the idea that things can get better even if you 100% don’t believe it. Just know that your brain can’t create positive thoughts right now but that in a day or a year or ten years it will. And if it doesn’t, if in ten years things still have not changed and you are completely miserable, know that suicide is always an option. No one can take that from you.
But here’s the thing: I have learned so much this past year from taking pictures of flowers. A flower is always beautiful because it is just being itself. I take pictures of them budded, in full bloom, withered and dry. No flower has ever, as far as know, committed suicide because they are too busy being themselves (well, yes, and also because they don’t have arms or guns or pills or razors, but work with me here because I like this point I am trying to make).
If my ass is all cellulite, I can kill myself because I don’t look the way I think the world wants me to look, or I can see myself as a flower and realize that I just am what I am, and that’s so factual there is not argument. Imagine the stress a flower would experience if every time a person walked by it, the flower felt judged. The flower is not here for us—it is here for itself.
Life is not about whether people like me or not or about whether people approve of me or not: it’s about my relationship to the buzz of energy that goes through my body, my relationship to my self. It’s like when I was born I was given a one-hundred dollar bill and my purpose was to spend it. It wasn’t about how well I would spend it or what I would spend it on, it was just what I was to do: spend the money. In the same way, we are born with life force, and our job is to spend it. Take away judgment, and you are left with the simple question of what are you going to spend your life force on next. Curiosity is so much better than judgment. So much more fun. Curiosity was Robin Williams, Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain while they were all still alive. I’m not talking about adopted people in that list of three glories the world had for a while, I’m talking about humans, for, when all is said and done, when you erase our stories and take away our clothes, we are skeletons with hearts and brains and skin who are here to love each other.
We wish you were still here.
We are here to live out our curiosity, not to please others.
If you are an orphan or adopted, you can say your mother rejected you and so you are garbage and want to kill yourself, but I want to present you with a thought: the flower is not just the seed from which it sprang. The seed had come from another flower that had come from a different seed that had come from a different flower and on and on. Your mother is important, it is true, but she is one in a long line of mothers, and even if you don’t know their names or their faces, all you have to do is look in the mirror. There she is.
I understand the importance of roots, but I also understand the beauty of the flower.
Sweetheart, the less personally you take life, the more fun you will have. Life is not yours to control, it’s yours to live.
Be a big mess. it’s okay. You are so lovable. So beautiful. And if anyone tells you otherwise, know an insane person is talking to you and walk away and find someone lovelier, smarter, more grounded in reality.
If I had gone downstairs and told my parents I thought I should kill myself because I had overdue library books, if I had done what felt like was impossible and if I had cried and showed them my fear, they could have let me see the situation from their perspective: I was just a little kid who’d made a mistake, and there were ways out of my problem: I could return the books. I could talk to the librarian, tell her I made a mistake. My parents could have loaned me the money and I could have done chores to pay them back. They could have let me know I was not the only kid who had trouble getting books to the library. They could have shown me it wasn’t that I was a mistake, but that rather I had just made a mistake.
What I am trying to say is that if you want to kill yourself, there is a good chance your brain has turned your life into a tight, dark box and you can’t see the bigger picture. The more you isolate, the more you see yourself as different, the more you push away the very thing that could save you: other people.
Someone messaged me today on Twitter and told me she had read my previous blog post on suicide and she was having dark thoughts. She was a stranger to me until that moment, and in her sharing, she became a friend, someone for whom I now have concern and awareness. We are here on the planet to help each other, to carry those lost in the dark to the light if they need a ride.
When an animal is dying, it crawls off to die alone because that is where it feels most safe.
Sweetheart, I promise you aren’t alone even though your brain is telling you that you are.
We are here.
