I finished editing the final chapter of my friend Pam Cordano’s book Christmas day. I have been high ever since. Dear Reader, I love this book so much. It is a gift, a response to Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Pam, an adoptee who was badly neglected for months after her birth, easily could have become an arsonist or a suicide, but instead she became a therapist and is one of the most creative, intuitive, wildly generous people I know.

This post is not about her book. I just wanted to explain that I am writing high, and I am high because I got to read the entirety of Pam’s book all last week.

This post is about Pam’s and my decision to change the retreats we do from all adopted people to half adopted people, half first moms. We had decided to not do the retreats at all any more. I wasn’t sure I could continue to heal and do them, and Pam needed time to work on her book. But people kept writing to us, asking when the next retreat was going to happen.

We brainstormed, asking how, if we were going to do some sort of retreat for adopted people, we could really amp it up? How could we really, really start bringing people out of story and into the present moment? How could we honor the wound and not stay stuck in it?

One thing I had learned from being Pam’s friend was that I would always be an adopted person, but that I was responsible for my mental state. I didn’t have to get dragged around by the nose and live in Traumaville my whole life if I was willing to confront my limiting beliefs and self-harming actions and actually commit myself to the question, as Viktor had done, of what was life asking of me.

The thing about being born into trauma is that trauma-state becomes home. A racing brain and a dysregulated nervous system offers its own kind of comfort when that is basically all you know, and so the decision I made in my 50s to change actually felt, feels, like death. I am no longer the person who is panicked about her finances, about her weight, about her love life. Giving these stress hormones up was, is—for this is a process I am living—like watching my home burn down. The loss is enormous.

So I am doing it in baby steps. The rewards are incredible: freedom, happiness, the ability to be generous with myself, my time, my heart.

When Pam first suggested we do a retreat with both adoptees and first moms, I started yelling. “That’s it! That’s the missing piece! I am so in!!”

It had taken me years and years of searching to find my first mom, and when I made the call, heart pounding, and when she answered the phone as if she’d been waiting for this call and told me I had the wrong person, told me it was not her, she was not my mother, I felt like I had run wildly, open-heartedly, into a closed door. I was shocked and had no language for how her rejection affected my mind and body.

I went to hate because that felt like a natural reaction to twice rejected. I badgered her to give me details of my life. I called her work. I harassed her in my desire to know more about myself. It is only recently that I have realized she was a person walking around the world with a wound that was unfathomable to me. It’s only recently that I’ve realized perhaps she could not deal with me, that having me in her life would have been like asking her to eat broken glass. Some people can handle more than others. I think she had handled all that she could. Just because I was willing to go to therapy and stare down my trauma doesn’t mean everyone is or wants to or believes they can.

It’s all so personal.

It’s hard being adopted and thinking someone gave you up—this can lead to the belief you are worthless or garbage, and I imagine the person who did the giving up, whether by choice or force, then has to live with the weight of action, of the thought, I did that thing.

I have done one thing in my life I think is deeply wrong and sinful, and I will never tell you what it is. I have to walk around knowing I did it, and when I am tired or low, it challenges my ability to believe I am a good person, a person of value, a person worth trusting. I think the unnatural action of a mother letting her own baby out of her arms could be cataclysmic to the brain’s future ability to focus well and to create a feeling of safety for the body.

One of the best moments of the adoptee retreats is when Pam asks everyone to raise their hands if they are adopted. The first time this happened, and every time after, I could feel the cells in my body rearranging themselves as I saw everyone’s arm go up. I was in a room that was vibrating the same way I was. My body started to soften, and I started to accept myself in new and surprising ways.

If adoptees and first moms are in a room together, I think it would be like the above experience, but even more intensely healing. I think it would be like a bunch of legos clicking together. We have wounds that fit together, adoptees and mothers of loss, and if we are in a space created by a skillful therapist (thank you, Pam!) there is potential for incredible healing.

Pam is so smart. She thinks so out of the box she practically walks around in a big circle. She came up with some amazing ideas for how to give adopted people and first moms the opportunity to learn to receive what we most need for each other. As a writer, I have my own ideas about what we can do to heal through creativity and self-expression.

I want to love both my moms with all my heart because if I don’t, I’ll be walking around with a heart that is partly closed. I’d rather walk through the fire of fear and anger and confusion and lost and come out the other side then to stand there at the edge of what I think is possible, partly shut down, partly not myself.

My belly button is a scar. It marks the end of a thing that used to rope two people together. I don’t know who cut the cord, but I do know that every person has this scar. The difference is, that when I touch my belly button, it may be the only time I ever get physically close to the body that was my mother’s body. That is my body. My body is the gateway to my mother’s body. If I hate her; if I don’t trust her; if I feel rejected and unloved by her, then I am also living in a place where I feel the same way about myself because, as my navel tells me, we are still connected. She is still here, in me.

I am alive today because people made sure I had food, shelter, and love. I can push away all that I was offered because I did not get all that I wanted, or I can settle into the party, put on a hat, and dance.

I can live with discomfort. I can live with the remains of a broken heart. It’s all just feeling. I can learn to tolerate both loving and hurting at the same time. Because I want to. Because I want to see just how much this heart of mine can stretch. Because I want to know what it feels like to walk, entirely, in love.