Yesterday someone wrote to me that she didn’t feel confident enough to write her story. She didn’t think anyone would be interested. She didn’t think she had the right to tell a story that might hurt other people.

I can barely breathe as I write that. It’s like being told that the first words a baby said were, “I hate myself.”

One definition of story is a description of events that actually happened or that are invented. A story, the Cambridge Dictionary continues, can also be a lie or a level of a building.

If you don’t feel confident enough to write your story, to truth or lie yourself from beginning to end, I would argue you also don’t feel confident enough to live it. Sometimes it takes energy just to walk into the 7-11 and buy a Slurpee. You have to put on clothes, shoes, check that you don’t have food on your face or smeared make-up, check that a bird isn’t nesting in your hair. You have to arrange your face so that strangers don’t worry about you. Maybe you have to wipe away tears. You have to make sure you have money or a credit card, and then you have to walk there or get in your car and drive there, and both activities take focus and intention. Then you have to open the door, step inside, present yourself to the surveillance camera, and head for the Slurpee machine where there is probably someone taking his time wrestling the domed cap onto the enormous plastic cup.

You have to stay standing because if you give up at this point and fall to the floor you’ll end up in an ambulance with no Slurpee.

You need a spine to get what you want!!

When the nervous system is overwhelmed by experience, when, for example, an animal thinks it is about to be eaten by a lion, it goes into the last part of fight, flight, or freeze. It pretty much deads itself before it’s torn apart.

What I feel in my body is that when my mother surrendered me at birth, my body deaded. My spine went liquid and I lumped my way through the shock of separation. Remember, a baby doesn’t know it’s a separate being from its mother for about a year, so this means the impossible has happened. It’s sort of like if you woke up and someone had ripped your past from you. Wait a second! That past was yours! What are you supposed to do now? And the thing is, when you go to the doctor, there is no evidence of stroke; the medical community says you just plain old got separated from your past. No big deal. You’re fine. You’ve got a loving family. Everything will be okay. You didn’t need that past, anyway.

(If you’re nodding your head here, that’s a good sign you were adopted.)

A problem with separating mother and child is the lack of attention and care that is given to the brain-shaking damage that occurred. The result of this lack is children and mothers who, for the rest of their lives, battle with low self-esteem. Low as in LOW. As in, sometimes you need a shovel to find it.

If I am walking down the street with my young daughter and she falls and badly scrapes her knees and hands and face and cries out and, without turning around, I say, “Get up. You’re fine,” my daughter is probably going to feel a wash of disappointed terror. She is not fine. She is hurting, and I, her mother, refuse to even see the damage, to see her. If she has a tantrum and I still don’t turn around, eventually her call will fade because she got no helpful response, and something will have died in her; she will be less valuable to herself because apparently she is not valuable to me.

During an adoptee retreat with Pam Cordano, she taught me and the group about the term mentalization. Pam took a stuffed animal and cradled in in her arms like a baby. She looked at the shiny dark eyes of the (I forget what kind of animal it was! I only remember the eyes!) baby creature and explained that the baby knows it is a baby because it sees her, the mother, looking at it, and the mother knows she is the mother because she sees the baby looking at her. I could have watched Pam look at the stuffed animal all day long. Oh, the love in her eyes! It gives me chills right now just to think about it.

Later, I asked HBL if we could do something called eye-gazing that I’d read about years ago but had always been too afraid to do. You look into another person’s eyes for five minutes, silently, without touching. I’d been curious what this would be like, but it had seemed gross to me, like peeling off my own skin, something too intimate and close.

I had written my book, had faced myself in all sorts of new and shockingly painful and wonderful ways, and I felt ready to stay still within the gaze of another. I trusted HBL. Over the years he had proven to me again and again that he would show up when he said he would, and so I felt if I could risk losing myself in anyone’s eyes, it was his.

You know when you step into a bath that is the perfect temperature? You want to just keep stepping into it; you wish your body went on forever so you could keep immersing yourself in the sweet warmth. That’s what letting myself relax and look into HBL’s eyes was like! I could not look enough. I wanted in. It felt so good. I was safe! It was like I was a flower buried underground in warm earth and I was opening. It was like my body was gently turning itself inside out, like the best yawn ever. It was like I was back in the womb, floating, edgeless.

Those five minutes changed my life. I was no longer someone who had to compulsively leave every room and situation she found herself in. I went from a leaver to a stayer, or at least someone who had the ability to stay, in five minutes. I could bear feeling seen.

Part of telling your story is being able to tolerate being seen, by yourself and others. And to feel seen and to not want to run, you also need to feel loved.

When your mother hands you to another mother, and that second mother looks into your eyes, mothers you, something blows up in your brain. Maybe it’s like this: one day you looked into the mirror and saw someone else. WHAT??? Your brain has no idea how to process this information. All this time you thought you were you, but look! You are someone else. Maybe you are crazy. Maybe you were wrong all along. Maybe you never were who you thought you were. The problem is the infant has no language to process this disconnect, the confusion of this is not the body that created me and yet she is looking at me as if she were. My skin does not recognize her skin. There must be something terribly wrong with me because this is not right.

Without language, we rely on feelings. Wrong is a strong feeling—there goes the integrity of the spine, the clarity of the heart, the easy functioning of the liver.

The body is incredibly resilient and creative. Scar tissue, however, is strange and eventual wasteful business for the scar remains long after it is needed. The body creates a cross-link of collagen fibers in response to injury that remains after the wound heals, a part of the body which now does not have the same flexibility and strength of the collagen fibers in normal tissue.

Often people want to write their story to memorialize their life, as a prayer of thank you for this time I had here on this planet, and, at the same time, to bring to light a wound or scar, to untangle the dark confusion that keeps stirring up trouble deep in the guts of their personal narrative.

You need self-confidence to dedicate time and attention to your own story. Have you ever tried to drive through a long, unlit tunnel with your lights off. No! Of course you haven’t. How do I know this? Because you would be DEAD.

Writing your story it like that, and without self-confidence leading the way, you are likely to smash into a wall of self-disregard and quit. You are your own light as you make your way from the place of not having told your story to the place of having told it. You are your way.

And, as Annie Lamott said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories, if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

There is something beautiful, noble, about a scar. It’s a rough repair, and it is its own story. Write yours and light up the world.