You know that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’ character, the therapist, says to Matt Damon’s character over and over “It’s not your fault”?

I have learned that there is a poisonous seed of terror and self-hatred planted in many adopted people’s guts or hearts or brains or lungs or someplace dark and inaccessible that tells them they are trouble; they are wrong; the world would be better off without them; they would be better off without the world.

I have learned that adopted people see themselves as separate. As not belonging to the whole. As different.

All of this is old news to most of you.

I wrote a few paragraphs of duh in order to get to this point:

Ever since I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted, I have carried a belief I created in my head that many adopted people—me—are like goldfish in a bowl that has water which is a different temperature from the water out in the world. This means that when I try to enter the world by, say, going to a new college or starting a new job or hanging out with a new friend, I am entering a new bowl of water, and the change in water temperature is a stress to my system. If the change is too dramatic, if, for example, I become best friends with someone who doesn’t have a trauma background, someone who basically has their shit together, I may actually not be able to breathe if I stay in their water for too long.

The difference is too much for me, so I live in a bowl of my own. I have gotten used to my trauma bath. It is home.

I am separate from the world and this lets me stay alive.

What a bunch of horseshit.

I am terrified of change. I also desperately want it.

Also:

There is no bowl. There is no separation. When I was born and was separated from my mother, this situation became the lens through which I saw my life for decades and decades—five of them!, a lens that told me you are not one with the world: you are separate, and you may die at any minute.

This is what I have learned from listening to adopted people: we are wrong. Not wrong as in we are wrong but wrong as in we have misunderstood what it means to be a person on Earth.

We are not separate. Yes, we lost our mother, but that was one incident, and we survived. We are wave and particle just like everyone around us. We have a story that keeps us separate; we have a belief system that makes us feel we are different from everyone else, but the fact is, we are all, all of us people on this planet, humans trying to make it through the day without hurting others too much.

I was told I was special, and this is part of the poison. Special means different.

I thought if I was ordinary, if I was like everyone else, I would die. I would not be loved.

I am everyone else. Human beings are called a sea of humanity, after all! Not a sea of humanity and a bunch of adopted people!

What do I lose if I give up the story that I am special, that I am different, that I am alone in my trauma? I lose my connection to my birth mother who 1. wasn’t able to meet me and 2. is dead. I lose hope of being better than I am now. I lose feeling bad about myself that I am not better than I am now. I lose knowing who I am: I’m the girl who doesn’t belong. I’m the lost girl. I’m the feral one.

I’m not minimizing the pain of relinquishment. I am looking for a doorway to the kind of life of personal liberation and love that I crave.

So, then, I ask myself this question: And what do I gain?