I’ve been obsessed with fishing since I was a kid and my grandfather taught us to bait a hook and see what the lake by his house had to offer us. Little fish, nothing we could keep, but, oh! the thrill of the tug, the fight of wills between you can’t have me and you are coming to me, fish.

It’s not that I fished a lot, it’s more that the feeling lodged in my being and I looked for it in my life. I think really it’s the pull between spirit and me. Something I keep denying.

The hooked fish also lets me feel things I don’t have words for. Yesterday I met a man as I was writing at a coffee shop, and I watched him try to hook me. “Oh, you are writing about Sebastopol? You have to come to my house. My mother is a master gardener. You have to see her work.” “I have access to secret places. My friend knows how to get me to the Indian caves. Do you get poison oak? You can wash off afterwards.”

He held my eye, and because I also held his, he thought he had me hooked, and again and again he tried to reel me in while I was thinking “There is something broken in you. You could be a rapist. I’m going to hold eye contact because clearly you are a person in pain, but pretty soon I’m going to get the hell out of here.”

False hook.

Here’s a real hook: when I was 17 I saw a boy running around the high school track and I watched him, and it happened. Part of being hooked is that the sense of control disappears. Your sleep, your dreams, your choices, the direction your life takes are all affected by the hook’s sharp dig into the body. It has been almost 40 years and he still comes to mind; he is part of my mind. I left college for him. I almost did not get married because of him, and he was not even close to me at the time. The hook was in my brain. The hook was not about rational thought. It was about pull. It was about tug. It was about you belong to me. I belong to you.

Another hook: I was sitting at the kitchen table in my L.A. apartment. I was 21 years old and on the edge of dropping out of school for the third time. I was working as in intern at a publishing company, and I had a stack of unsolicited manuscripts in front of me that needed reader’s reports. As I was reading and giving the manuscripts the thumbs up or down (those poor writers had no idea a borderline college dropout was decided the fate of their baby!), I looked up and saw a spiderweb in the window. It was perfect. All of it. The web. The window. My body. My life. I was hooked.

Life can feel like a hook in a variety of ways. Like, I was born and then the universe took over and hooked me, pulled me away from one mother to have me land in the lap of another. What I learned from fishing was the rightness of the fight. The fish does not come into air limp, agreeing with the hook. The fish thrashes, tries to will its way back into the water, but the hook has it by the cheek, by the body. Sometimes the fish, in its eagerness to eat the bait, swallows the hook and is pulled up to the solid world by its guts.

All of this is to tell you that I think the grief and anger and confusion that many adoptees carry because one mother gave them to another, or because one mother lost them to another parent, is a hook in the soul, and it is dangerous. It pulls you not into the air but always back to the past. The hook of loss creates a fight in us that is a fight against the past and is therefore a useless burning of energy. The past is over. It’s gone. Except when you fight against it. Then it is a hardness, stuck energy, a refusal.

How can one dream of the future or live fully in the present moment of sweet air again the skin when the pain of the fight, the refusal of fully living, the refusal to taste fully the moment of now takes precedence over all else?

What I saw when I was older was how sexy fishing was. The person with the rod and hook wants the fish and there is the dance of these are the things I will do to get you into my hands. I also saw how much fishing was an act of faith. I would spend long days on a boat, line in water, and get not even a bite, and yet I was still eager to return the next day, and the day after that because even though the sea stretched out long and quiet in its own wild way, I believed there were fish below the surface, and I was willing to keep showing up until I felt the sudden pull of life, proof! The world is not as it looks! There is so much happening that I cannot see. Just wait. I’m going to get a bite. I’m going to hook a fish. I am going to feed myself, my family. I am going to eat ocean and swoon over each bite.

Feeling sad and grieving is its own kind of hook, pulling me away from the life that is happening right in front of me. “What are you thinking?” a boyfriend asked as we drove away from his house and I stared out the side window. He was always asking me that. I was always thinking, always looking for ways to not be there, looking for ways to remember my sadness so I could be connected to her and maybe, in that way, find a way in, a way home, permission to exist.

I used to think that one day I would find a way to pull out the hook, but now I’m starting to think that maybe, just as runners keep running when the wind is not in their favor and they have to dig deeper, lean against the wind that tries to blow them backwards, I am a person with a hook in my cheek and so I need to learn how to move into the future as one who is pierced by the past.

The more I accept that I am the fight against the hook, the more fun it becomes. It’s not a fight! It’s life!

I think that both living in the present, delighting in the present, feeling the present, while still feeling the past, feeling pulled by the past, is an example of Keats’ negative capability—I can hold two opposing ideas at the same time and live like that, not fighting to understand, just living it out.

I used to eat bits of raw hamburger with my aunt when I was a kid. It felt forbidden, wrong, delicious. I was eating an animal, raw. I was an animal! Part of me thought maybe the meat would kill me, and so there was the thrill of an adult telling me I could do this thing and survive. I was living on the edge!

Some years ago, I hooked a big fish. I thought the muscles were going to rip off my bones as I tried to reel it in. People stood around and cheered. The captain of the boat cheered. No one helped me because everyone knew this was my fish. I had to take breaks. I had to catch my breath, to remind myself of my decision that I wanted this fish. I wanted the fish more than I wanted the muscles to stay attached to the bones. I keep reeling this thing that was fighting with all its will against the pull.

I was afraid to claim the fish. The captain grabbed it for me when I finally got it out of the water and up to the boat. I was afraid of the body, the wet force. The first time in massage school that I worked on someone’s psoas, sunk down in the abdomen, I cried. The muscle felt like a fish, holy, deep. Someone had let me in.

Taking hold of a thrashing fish feels like you are trying to grab hold of the earth’s wildly beating heart and, gentle reader, I was afraid of so much life. I was afraid I would not be able to hold on. I was afraid of the strange feel of scales, of wet body, of the baleful eyes.

Next time I will do better. Next time I will catch the fish, wholly.

Living in comfort can be so dangerous for the soul. We were meant to be pierced.