I occasionally go to AA with friends who are working to stay sober, and while I am there, I have to tell you I think of stories I could make up of all the problems (zero) I have with alcohol. Unless not really liking to drink is a problem. And it sort of is, socially, so there’s that.

After I hugged my daughter goodbye this morning, I realized why I feel so at home in AA meetings.

I have an addiction to more. To not enough.

You know when you are eating a grape popsicle, and you think it’s supposed to taste really good—it looks so good, so purple, so grape-y, and yet your experience is that it is almost good? Your experience is that you are not sucking on it hard enough (Knock it off, you dirty-minded reader—I’m talking about a person and a popsicle. For Pete’s sake, like writing isn’t hard enough without you getting all weird on me.) to get the real flavor. So you start to eat it, biting and chewing big chunks of purple ice that dissolve to almost good in your mouth and you start thinking that maybe you should have a second popsicle—maybe that one will taste the way you want it to: satisfyingly delicious.

I don’t get that many opportunities to hug my daughter both good morning and good-bye (for now), and today was one of those rare chances. I was busy thinking as I hugged her: Am I squishing her? Am I holding on too long? What will I do for lunch today? I wonder if it is still raining. I smelled her neck, her hair, and I realized I was missing my chance to be with her, to love her in real time.

When I learned to do Reiki, I learned to think of Jesus’s hands on my back (Reiki was invented by a Japanese man who had tried to figure out how Jesus had been able to heal!). I learned to let the warm energy run through my heart, down my arms, and out my hands. There are symbols for me to think about that supposedly help direct the type of energy I send (power, mental/emotional, distance—but really I only use the mental/emotional symbol. To me it’s a one-size-fits-all things.) and so I either imagine the symbol or I focus on the energy that is happening in the space between my hands and the body I am touching.

Once a long-time massage client, a double PhD, asked me to do Reiki on him because he was curious to see what it felt like. I put my hands on his back and imagined the energy running. I could feel my hands heating up, and after a minute the man said, “Stop it.”

He didn’t like that his scientific brain couldn’t explain what was happening. We stuck to massage after that.

The older I get and the more I give myself over to the love of people and language, the more I feel I am losing control. I am just energy and I have no idea what is going to happen next. My brain is working in different ways than it used to. I remember so little of what is happening in my day-to-day life. People tell me things and two minutes later I have no idea what they said. I can’t remember the names of friends or songs or towns or common utensils. It takes me two hours to get out of bed in the morning. Instead of jumping up, slamming down some espresso, and going for an hours-long walk, I get a taste of coffee in the kitchen and bring a cup of matcha back to bed. I write, read, go to sleep. I feel like I am headed for love.

I think if I die without feeling I gave myself over to another human being who isn’t my daughter or Pam Cordano, I will feel I missed out. I will feel like I was a chicken.

I am so afraid of love in a you and I will live together forever kind of way. It’s easier to read about love, to write about it, to talk about it, than to actually do it. I can love anything when I sit at my computer and string together words in praise of something or someone.

But to live with love? It would be like living with spiders or mud or a mirror.

This morning my daughter was hugging me with what felt like generosity and purity of heart. I love you, Mama. More than anything I want to hug her with I love you, Sweetheart, and so, this morning, I did. I let myself breathe, relax, hold on. I told myself if she wanted to push me away, she could. I wasn’t in her space in a negative way. I was invited, needed.

I am so afraid she will push me away, disappear, leave. I am so afraid that I don’t even know I’m afraid. My brain is wily—it feeds me feelings at a lightning speed that go straight to emotions, leaving me sad or distressed for no reason I can think of. My smarter, slower brain knows she loves me. My smarter, slower brain is a rock, so stable, so dependable. So solid.

I think when a person is created by a body that does not want a baby, the baby is the knowledge that it is not wanted, and so the habit of leaving, of not committing, of not hugging with real mindfulness and whole-heartedness is just a product of a person who does not feel entirely loved, does not feel created of love.

Clearly you do not have to be relinquished or adopted to have this feeling. A parent looks at you with disgust even once and your brain can forever shift into I am garbage. Ten years from now when we discuss relationships and health, ACE scores will, I believe, be as common a part of our dialogue as age and gender.

What if when our first group of astronauts had landed on the moon, they realized they’d landed somewhere else? Can you imagine the terror?! All that preparation to have them land on this specific planet, all the planning to keep them protected, alive. And now there they are, god knows where. Would they be willing to step out of the door and into this new, nameless world? Would they want to?

What if Houston insisted this was, in fact, the moon? What if although everything in the astronauts’ bodies told them that this was not the moon, the rest of the world told them they were fine, to just go out there and dig in the dust?

It’s harder to trust people when you don’t feel they understand how to keep you safe.

I feel like the astronauts would not be willing to sign off on this adventure. That they might well retract into refusal. Maybe they do step out of the door, but they dissociate so they are both doing it and not doing it.

I think many children of trauma grown into adults who both do it and don’t do it: life, love, deep breathing.

I feel most myself when I am either starving or face deep in cake. Extreme experiences feel more familiar than walking down to the kitchen to see my partner reading the paper. Good morning, Love. (Yawn.) How are you feeling? What are you doing today? Is there enough coffee left for me? When someone isn’t professing their love to you, when there aren’t fireworks or flowers how do you know the connection is real, is good? How do you know you really are on the home planet?

My friend has a wildly energetic dog, and when I do Reiki on her, she freezes. She yawns. This usually lasts for about two minutes, but it’s a sweet blip of time where I can feel her energy, this energy that usually has her bouncing all over the house, barking at anything that moves or rustles, get still. Her body leans into my hands and sometimes this long hound collapses into me because she can’t get close enough to the warmth. It's like when you are eating that grape popsicle and you can’t get close enough to the sweet taste, and so you eat past it, thereby missing the full experience.

The trick, I think, is to stop.

I think I keep trying to get to the other side of things, past what it is happening to more. More feeling, more taste, more more more more. I buy a shirt and immediately I’m thinking of the next thing I’ll buy. I go to California and immediately I’m thinking of when I can go back. I eat a cookie and before it’s done I’m thinking about what I will eat next.

What does enough taste like, feel like?

The grief of the lost child feels bottomless, and getting high is an obvious answer to the fear of sinking to the muck. And there are so many ways to get high!! Grape popsicles! Flying to the moon! Having sex with the UPS guy! Getting close to what you need can feel almost worse than not having it at all.

It’s the deep shock and grief of the lottery winner who, two years later, bankrupt, realizes that money did not end the pain. It’s the newlywed who looks at his or her new spouse over the breakfast table and finds the spark has died and now there is just the ache of you do not complete me and a side of buttered toast. It’s the child who loves his or her parent more than anyone in the world and who has to deal with the horrified confusion of being slapped across the face with wicked force for tracking mud into the house.

Getting what I need feels so close to grief I am often brought to tears when things are really good. This is so confusing to both me and to those around me! Good things are happening! Why am I crying?!

Here’s why I am afraid of falling in love with a man: it won’t be enough. I’ll break him and I’ll break myself in the process. I have a pretty good track record of this kind of behavior.

If it’s true that we often pick our romantic partners in order to heal wounds left over from childhood, I need a partner against whose cradling arms and open heart I can fight. I need to go back to that early moment when I wail and wail against the body that is holding me and let out all my feelings of this wrong until, in the steadiness of the hold, wrong becomes right. 

Being a child and an adult at the same time is so ridiculous! I might get myself a t-shirt that says I’m sorry I’m so human. I’m adopted.

The truth is, the shirt could really read, I’m sorry I’m so human, and anyone I know could wear it. Being adopted is a convenient wall on which to pin the fault of feeling human. We all lose our mothers at birth, for once the cord is cut, there’s no going back. We are one body, one life.

Adoptees get to hang on the the grief song of I was not wanted. I was not loved. No one held me for all that time, and while these songs may well be true, what is also true is that we are part of a planet that is called Mother, and if we are willing to treat our pain like information instead of a life-sentence, our hearts have a better chance of blooming, of becoming real.

Yes, I am angry I didn’t get what I needed when I was a baby. Yes, I am more than angry. I am furious. Part of this fury is fueled by the fact I don’t even know what I did get when I was born, when I was a month old, two months old. Part of me hates that this world says it doesn’t matter whether I was held or loved when I was a newborn. Part of me wants to refuse to sign off on this life. I want to stay at the station and refuse the train, flip it the bird. Fuck you. If you don’t care about me, I don’t care about you.

But again, what can the world do? The past is done, and here I am, crying about not being held, pushing away anyone who tries to hold me, even the person dearest to my heart. I am sitting at the banquet table with my own fist in my mouth!

Is this how I want to live my life? The beautiful thing is that it’s a choice. I can keep myself at arm’s distance from life if I want! I am an adult! I can choose!!

We all can.

These are the notes that didn’t make it into the text. I got tired and headed out to meet friends for dinner:

Our grief is out of balance and this makes us non relatable.

The gravity of the situation. Focus upward. Save yourself in your attachment to the light. 

There are so many peak experiences! Acupuncure! Missing the feeling of belonging in my determination so stay with the not enough narrative.