10 Things That Made My Life as An Adopted Person about Thriving Instead of Surviving
I finally let myself feel the grief I had been carrying around for 50 years. I had no idea this burden had been grief. I thought I was just messed up. Letting myself feel ranged from lying on the kitchen floor in the fetal position to getting fired because I was crying and swearing. These intense waves of emotion lasted three years. And a bit.
I stopped being a serial dater. Jumping from relationship to relationship had been a way to not have both feet in the room. It had also been a way to dig the grooves of loss deeper into my brain: when I broke up with a man or was broken up with, I got to relive (I had no idea this was happening—I just knew I was barely functioning for a few days or weeks) the shock and trauma of being a child who has lost his/her mother. Now I am experiencing what it is like to be in a room alone with myself. It’s so strange that I used to avoid this. I love the quiet. I love my own company. I felt the things I had been running from—the sadness, the anger, the deep body confusion, and so I finally am not afraid I will overeat if I am alone on a Saturday night. I don’t read fashion magazines and feel bad about myself in comparison. I watch The Great British Baking Show and imagine what I could cook for Paul Hollywood or a read or I write or I do Feldenkrais or laundry or call friends and talk on the phone or I lie in bed and dream. I look for what inspires me to write or to teach writing. I watch movies. I listen to podcasts. I could happily spend 100 years on a desert island, learning. Me and Paul Hollywood on a desert island.
I let myself tell my story, and I felt invested in during the process. Kitty gave me her amazing NYC apartment for three months. HBL gave me daily emotional support. Various credit card companies gave me enough credit for me to not have to work during this time. It wasn’t just me writing my story: I had a team. I got it all out, published it, and then for three years felt both proud and as if I had slipped a furious note under the door to the world and had run away and hid. I had managed to both tell my story and run away from it. I still felt ashamed about having such a story and about telling it. These feelings faded as I continued to write this blog and over a thousand adoption-related memes. I just wrote and wrote and wrote and chased after my own tai;, chased after a new way to tell my story, one that made me feel good, strong, whole. I also wrote about the world, putting myself in direct experience as I looked closely at the things around me since if I am describing what I see in the physical world, if I am really seeing it, I can’t be in trauma brain at the same time.
I made friends with a few amazing adopted people who also happened to be therapists: I regularly met or spoke with Pam Cordano, Lesli Johnson, Amy Geller, Joyce Maguire Pavao, Janet Nordine, and Pam Greenstone, and the relief of being understood and being taught by proxy how to communicate has been invaluable. The Beyond Adoption: You retreats have changed me cellularly in that I get to spend so much time immersed in feeling good around other adopted people. I had learned from my mom that the way to express strong feelings was to either pack them in and smoke or yell them out and run from the room. Talking with women who had relational toolboxes the size of my car was better than college. I learned that it’s okay to really say how I feel. I learned that just because my parents couldn’t stay in the room when I wanted to talk about adoption and therefore myself, didn’t mean the rest of the world was the same. I learned that the most important person I could get to listen to me was me. I started to take my own self seriously. This is an amazing feeling. Taking yourself seriously can involve so much laughter!
I stopped eating lots of sugar (except for last month when I was on the Vineyard and I’m still having to clear up the mess in the yard of me after that cookie and muffin blow-out). My weight and mood stabilized. When you are adopted and when suicidal ideations were part of the adoption package, sugar lows are scary things.
I stopped drinking alcohol. See above.
I am mindful of my caffeine intake. This one I struggle with the most. I love the feeling of being high and slightly numb. I love feeling so high I’m not even on the planet. Speedy. The price of this drug is anxiety. My brain spins on caffeine and I am quicker to feel overwhelmed, quicker to cry. I try to remember that I can change my mental state, raise it, in more sustainable ways: I can listen to upbeat music. I can jump up and down. I can go for a walk. I can take photographs. Mostly it’s about exercise. I can move, get my body involved in the spin of the world, elevate my pulse and my thinking at the same time.
I monitor closely what I put into my world. I have cleaned out my bubble: television, people, activities, reading material: anything that is going to make me feel anxious or overwhelmed I cut out if possible. It’s easy to turn yourself into a seemingly empty vessel for other people to dump their shit into when you are trying not to have needs or a personality of your own, but boy does it feel lousy. So I’m working on stretching the tube of me and letting myself be a person. This is so weird. It’s like I’m two years old, starting all over. Baby needs food. Baby needs a nap. Baby needs some love.
I spend a lot of time in the company of other adopted people. The mirror I did not have when I was born is now shattered and walking around in pieces in all these other adopted people who are so much like me. My body has realized its not an alien and that this planet is also my planet. Pretty much. I’m still slightly alien. I am a working on being here 100%.
I trust myself to let myself write whatever I think. This is like being drunk all the time. It’s wild. I can’t believe I get to do this. It’s like cracking open the can of me and watching the bubbles spill over. In this process, I have finally found a strong sense of purpose: I want to help others to tell their story. This drive to be a cheerleader/force of nature/midwife for other people gives me so much hope and joy. It helps that I put on my oxygen mask first. I’m not serving others because i’m avoiding tending to my own needs. I attended to and attend to me, and now I can attend to the world. I can’t believe I get to do the work I do. You know why? It feels like play. It feels like breathing, like laughing, like. truth.
What it boils down to is that after a life time of trying to be myself but different: better, smarter, thinner, funnier, cleaner, nicer, prettier, more sociable, more willing to give myself away, I’m increasingly myself, and I still can’t believe it’s this easy. You mean all I have to do is roll out of bed and start my day? I don’t have to lug on that heavy mask? How did it take me 54 years to see it was okay just to be me walking down the street? It’s like I have been dragging a 5-ton costume department behind me, and I have recently lost it somewhere along the way. It’s so weird to feel both naked and accepted. How did I miss this lesson in second grade, that it’s okay to be you? It’s never going to get any better than this, I tell myself when I look in the mirror, and then, mostly, I smile and wonder what trouble I can stir up next.
But if I step back (I know I said this was going to be about ten things, but this list has taken over) and take the broad view, the two things that brought me into thrive are the fact that I let myself fall apart and get vulnerable (hahahaha—I mean that I fucking fell apart) and that I had friends and family there to catch me. The two things I had been running from all my life—deep connection to myself and others—were the things that saved me.
